To see how this race came about, take a look at the game
Competition by Eotyrannus. This is part two of the evolution of the Nightmace, sightless tentacled scourge of the sky. Our Nightmace stands thus:
Generation 0:
Sophont nightmace
A mottled dark purple bird-like animal that hunts on the mountain meadows. They use their fanged tentacles to attack and kill their prey. They mostly fly. They grow up to 40 centimetres long, and their offspring are called tentaclets. They use two claws on their back to snatch prey from the ground or air.
SOCIAL: They live in groups of about 25, alongside one or two eagle-squid.
SENSES: It has a sense of touch that lets it figure out if it's touching food, and an extremely good sense of smell/taste. A keen electrical sense lets it find creatures that are close to it, and it can feel vibrations from moving creatures. Its hearing is extraordinary, and it can echolocate. However, this is still inferior to the eagle-eyed vision of other slicers, although the eagle-squid partially makes up for that.
REPRODUCTION: It 'kisses' a mate it approves of, passing male cells to it, and growths grow inside of the womb. Tentaclets follow their mother and are fed by them. They eat regurgitated food from the mother's guts, and when they are old enough, they leave.
MOVEMENT: They fly by using their front wings to glide and their back wings as engines. They have two legs on their underside, which can break through wood and dig through dirt. They can use their wings and legs to gallop across the ground.
EATING: It impales small animals and digests them by drawing them into the guts. They are able to prey on most animals smaller than them, and they use venom. Most of their food is from grazing worms and the dense vegetation. Other prey include land-dwelling spearfaced worms (slitherers) and other flappers, as well as leggedgrinders. We can use a precise jet of neurotoxin, laced with silica shards (to pierce the skin), to kill prey. We can also blind soft-eyed animals with a thick gloopy venom. We scavenge from the kills of our host when we are not hunting.
PREDATION: We have few predators, now we are protected by our shells, our sightmace, our spears and our hosts.
SYMBIOSIS: The greater eagle-squid, a large predator with a 3-metre wingspan and powerful vision and claws.
COMPETITION: Our intelligence, domestication and symbiosis has managed to drive away most threats.
INTELLIGENCE: We have complex language, full sapiece, basic herding, domestication of sightmace, art and good manipulators.
ENVIRONMENT: A cold meadow with loose trees and quite a few balloons above it.
Before we can be introduced to the species and its rise to power, however, we must narrow our focus a bit. The Sophont Nightmace is spreading throughout the temperate to subpolar climates, driven by the power of its superior tool use. Where did your chosen band choose to settle?