Estemmenosuchus

Estemmenosuchus wore its strangeness like a crown. Bony growths erupted from

its skull in shapes that served no obvious function — not weapons, not armor,

not display crests that any known mating ritual could explain. They were

simply there, as if the creature had decided that the most important thing

in the world was to look like nothing else. It lumbered through the

undergrowth of the Eldergrowth with the slow confidence of something that

had never been taught to be afraid. Not because it was dangerous — though its

size made it formidable — but because it existed in an age when the rules

of predator and prey were still being written, and Estemmenosuchus had not

read them. Its legacy is not in its lineage, which ended, or its hunting

prowess, which was modest. Its legacy is in the simple, stubborn fact that

it existed at all — proof that life does not always optimize, and sometimes

builds something purely because it can.