Wraiths are an animal kingdom, radiating cold, and living off of the inverse of the solar energy other animals live off of. I do have blue cottony moon-trees, technically, so that might be an option. They radiate cold, like a corpse, and pretty much look and feel dead. I imagine these would dwell deep in caverns and caves, like you typically think of drow and dwarves and such, but I'm striving for uniqueness, so not exactly like that, and mostly, if not entirely, unintelligent organisms. What, theoretically, might be this group's power source? I'm considering moonlight, but that doesn't seem dark and evil enough, especially since that's basically just filtered sunlight.
How would a creature adverse to solar energy (ie, a wraith) get energy and what would it do with it?
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2$\begingroup$ Going by the title alone .. the same way we do, by consuming stuff, and the same thing we do with it, fuel it's existence .. next question? $\endgroup$– PelinoreCommented Aug 11 at 14:27
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4 Answers
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Heat.
You didn't use word "magic" once, so I will not go there.
Cold can't be radiated. Energy goes from hotter matter to colder one, the second law of thermodynamics.
Body can absorb energy from the outside. Imagine an organism that can convert this heat into some other form of energy - some substitute for our sugars, fat, etc. It can extract heat from ice and make it colder if necessary. It thrives in conditions too cold for normal life. Sunlight is too intense for it, either deadly or just irritating. It doesn't need much food - as soon as an organism matured heat is all it needs to live.
Alternative evolution chain, artificial creatures or alien organism, whatever fits the story better. Alternative evolution is not very plausible though, evolution likely would always prefer normal life in Earth condition.
Your creature basically has a completely different, much more efficient metabolism than normal life. It consumes energy directly from environment without any waste. It is just not adapted to much higher levels of energy of normal organisms. Wraith's normal body temperature is well below zero.
If you want to make them dangerous - wraiths are annoyed by the warm organisms invading their environment, it irritate their eyes or something. But they like the residual warmth of corpses as they decay. Or they want iron extracted from hemoglobin of blood.
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2$\begingroup$ You're dead on. In the absence of magic, energy is necessary for life forms of any type. Any animal that doesn't generate its own body heat will be a good candidate. The wraith can also have looong hibernation periods during cold cycles that make it seem immortal. $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 11 at 0:17
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$\begingroup$ Heat is transfered by 3 mechanisms, one being radition - but that is actually ths ame thing as solar, just different frequencies. So you would be reduced to using the heat transfer mechanisms of conduction or convection. $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 11 at 11:22
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$\begingroup$ No, why? Nothing is wrong with radiation. It's just that cold can't be radiated. Mechanism doesn't exist in nature. $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 12 at 2:22
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$\begingroup$ I've figured out that potentially, light energy might be somehow converted to a negative, inside-out, for want of a better word, version of itself, through tinted reflection. I'm writing low fantasy, of course, so it doesn't matter that it doesn't really work this way, and I think the converter will be moonglass, and there will be moon-blooming plants, that hide from the sun. The animals in this alternate system don't have to be nocturnal, but will probably choose to be. $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 12 at 12:15
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$\begingroup$ @MikeWise Conduction and convection from a physical standpoint are the same process: heat conducts into the air, the air moves around a bit, and then the air conducts the heat into another object. And if you want to get really technical, there is only one way to transfer heat and that is by the transfer of energy - either directly through one of the aforementioned processes or by the transfer of another form of energy that then gets converted into heat energy. $\endgroup$– Abion47Commented Aug 12 at 15:54
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Food
They eat. If this isn't enough, they might be powered by the kill. Bigger creatures are better, and because of their lack of intelligence they are patient and barely active until food is detected. This makes them able to survive for long periods on nothing or a few smaller organisms until something bigger comes along.
There is little better to fuel evil than sacrifice, and eating flesh is a close second.
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- shadows / darkness
Because you said they would dwell in caves, which I imagine as being eternally in darkness.
- fear
Maybe they feed not from the dead but from the horror they suffer in the second before they die. So wraiths are specialized in maximizing this horror in order to feed from it. Maybe one such poor soul feeds one wraith or a group of them even for hundreds of years.
- revenge
Most commonly a wraith is a special kind of ghost or "bound soul". One that has a really deep urge of having revenge for what was done to it. It cannot lie to rest because it is driven by an immense amount of anger and fury. But as mentioned, this would be the "classical" use of the "wraith" concept. You said you wanted something unique.
- cursorial hunting / cannibalism
You mentioned your kind of wraiths are something like "anti-animal" beings. So maybe they live from their equivalent "normal" predatory animals live of. Meaning a kind of "meat". They need to hunt. Either the equivalent of "herbivory" wraiths, or they hunt each other even.
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$\begingroup$ Yes, anti-animals, but in a way such as that their very existence is an act of evil, or something, because, say, the first ones were animals flipped inside-out somehow or something, if you get what I mean. That was the idea I was going for. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 6 at 19:21
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This is a great idea! Cold beings. You can almost think of it as a being that has a stored lack of entropy. Kind of like we do with arranging ourselves into fancy proteins, but for your cold ones it would be on a kinetic level.
Realistically, they would use the same fuel as any of us to do this. Or any energy source you can think of. But we create order from chaos using energy. We make ordered proteins by ingesting chemicals with energy and we radiate waste heat energy. We humans radiate a lot of heat energy away from us to make that order inside us. You need energy to move energy from one place to another.
In our case we take random energy out of a system and make proteins that have special purposes, and throw away heat to do it. In this case, your coldies would use regular energy and create something that would not hold that much heat, and put the heat somewhere else. Maybe you have a special protein that you use as cold energy, like ATP and ADP. Maybe something with an endothermic reaction that you can just cycle back and forth to make something that is cold.
The problem is it would be bombarded with heat all the time, even ambient temperatures. So you would have to take that heat and do something with it. Maybe that's it, maybe there's some chemical process that would allow you to take the molecular kinetic energy that is hot relative to you, store it as a new molecule, (because a difference in heat is exploitable energy) and then you would move the heat away from yourself...somehow. Maybe you could sweat TNT. Maybe you would have to radiate it.
You know what that means though. Your frosty ones would emit a lot of heat in order to stay cold. Come to think of it, I don't know if that works. Maybe someone who's more thermodynamically savvy than me can answer. You can use heat to maintain some cold, you just have to be careful about how you move/transform the heat energy around. But then is there a point to being cold?
I guess what I'm coming around to is that it's the difference in heat between two places where you can extract usable energy. You can store energy as coldness if you have something warm around. You could store it as chemical energy or something else too. But, I guess it would work, it would just take an awful lot of energy and I don't know if anyone would know your papa-cicles would be cold. Because I guess they have to "actively reflect" as much of the heat they're receiving plus the heat they're using to store cold, plus all the waste heat. They would be hot beings to be around.
If anything I think your cold people would emit a lot more heat than a normal person. No one would know they were cold inside!
But one good thing to take into consideration is the other posts that have it right that things don't radiate cold. Only heat is radiated. If your ice-Bryce was not actively staying cold because of his biology and chemistry, and instead just existing, like maybe after it was dead, it would be different. Because most things emit heat back to us. Most things are room temprature-ish. Anything that does not emit heat back to us, and instead absorbs heat (like a cold thing, like your coldy-bois) we would feel as a "coldness in that direction" kind of sense. So that would kinda work. But only if he was dead :(
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1$\begingroup$ The radiating heat idea is really cool. Because wraith is really just comparative, and a sudden raise in temperature would be close enough. Pretty much the same idea. $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 15 at 1:41