Local Guidebooks, abridged: A brief history of a native intelligence on Rizo-Nor
To the people of Rizo, the death of the planet’s angular momentum, the stop to its spin, was a great relief and the end to life as any of them knew it. A planet does not become tidal locked overnight; if it did, buildings would collapse as their roofs continued moving after their basements stopped. It’s important to remember that you’re living on a planet that’s spinning and that you are always moving.
The Rizans, your typical sort of intelligent slug, had no buildings, or at least no permanent ones, until Rizo stopped spinning entirely. They had evolved on a planet which spun slowly enough for the side facing the parent star, Nor, to become daily-scorched, while the dark side froze over. Specifically, they evolved within the western side of the band of habitable twilight between the two unique hells. Early in their evolution toward intelligence, they were able to pick out freshly thawed morsels coming from the frozen side, eventually learning to preserve and make stashes which they could return to the following day (note that “day” refers to a planet’s specific rotational period, which is long on Rizo).
Rizans were nomadic, always moving towards the dark side, away from the light. From foraging and stashing, they evolved group coordination, tool use, and culture, spending thousands of years as an intelligent species living and thriving in a never-ending, but always moving, twilight. As the planet spun more slowly, Rizan astrologers developed their science and were able to discover that the planet was gradually spinning more slowly. Out of this discovery came an explosion of religious ideologies, each with their own name for the promised land, the time and place where they would be when the planet stopped and their trekking would end.
Unlike most prophecies, the Never-Coming Dawn was based in observable fact. It would not fade into obscurity or be subsumed by another movement; it was something which would happen, and could be measured. However, in a thousand years of waiting, fringe religions would set up permanent structures and live in them as if the planet had stopped, dotting Rizo with hundreds of ghost cities, seared and frozen a hundred times over.
As astrologers became astronomers and faith became science, Rizans were able to calculate when the spin would stop. Their society had slowed down over time, in terms of physical speed, only needing to move every year, every other year, as the rotational period approached the revolutionary period, which, coincidentally, was met with a different type of revolutionary period. When nomadism was no longer necessity, all the trappings of wayfaring fell into the past, and the Devil-Sun no longer pursued them.
