Seasons on Torikarn
Nothing ever changes here, just an endless cycle looping on itself. I am the only one to see it, the only one to enjoy it. A perfect retreat for someone like me.
Torikarn is an odd planet by all accounts. It is small and so far from its star Losdea it barely sees it. An orbit so wide and elongated it takes 648.7 Earth years to complete its revolution, while being in the habitable zone for only 130 of them. Thus, seasonal changes happens only twice in a millennia, always cause to great turmoil in the scattered life forms living under the planet's surface.
Winter
For most of the time, exactly 517.1 Earth years, Torikarn is outside the habitable zone of its star. A thick layer of ice then form over the crust of the telluric planet, trapping everything in an ice coffin and the atmosphere dissipate during its century long trip in outer space.
During this time, the native inhabiting species, including the sophont civilization, take refuge in the deep galleries dug into the mantle, ever closer to the heating core.
I call them Surtri. Survival takes most of their thoughts, they cannot afford to dedicate time to art or innovation while underground. Their society does have some infighting, but I have never seen conflicts evolve into real battles, even between two powerful leaders. They are all too conscious of the frailty of their existence. The few times I have revealed myself, they always take me for a god. I don't have a good grasp on their pantheon, but godhood doesn't suit me, so I seldom make contact with them nowadays.
Summer
When the Torikarn heeds closer to the star, its surface warms up, melting the ice coating and liberate trapped gases that make up the atmosphere of the planet. This whole process takes around a decade, at which point the star is clearly visible in the sky and a regular day/night cycle is in effect.
Plant life has had extraordinary pressure to evolve toward gel-resistant plants able to survive frozen for centuries and bloom at the first sign of heat. Thus, it takes no more than twelve days for the world to be evergreen like a lush planet. At this point, the dark-dwelling species come above, enjoying a lifetime of abundance and seemingly unlimited supplies.
Whenever the Surtri come to the surface, in a few years they have all forgotten about the hardships of their caves. They are elated to discover their own ruins of previous cycles, in a language they understand. For a lifetime and a half, they live in bliss, rebuilding their civilization, building upon what was left for them by their ancestors. They try their best to invent, to find a way to avoid the prophetized end of the summer, to no avail of course. And then, when the weather gets colder, they return to the caves, in their beautiful gowns that will soon become rags, and they forget once again, too preoccupied with their own survival to carry out a duty to memory. For them, it is a radical transformation of their lifestyles, both for winter and summer. On the scale of their civilization, very little change each time. A few more buildings, that's it. A century is too short to make any significant progress for a primitive society. That's what Iove here.
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