Polyhymnia » Hibernal Den » Kaasni

Kaasni

(#37103526)

Level 1 Pearlcatcher

Familiar

Creeping Tendril

Energy: 50/50

Personal Style

Apparel

Skin

Scene

Physical Attributes

Battle Stats

Measurements

Length

3.65 m

Wingspan

3.6 m

Weight

480.49 kg

Genetics

Spruce
Jaguar

Overcast
Alloy

Mint
Runes

Hatchday

Nov 04, 2017
(6 years)

Breed

Adult
Pearlcatcher

Eye Type

Shadow
Common

Level 1 Pearlcatcher

EXP: 0 / 245

STR

AGI

DEF

QCK

INT

VIT

MND

Lineage

Parents

Offspring

Biography

to be formatted:

For most of Kaasni’s early life, there was but one constant: the Darkness. Even from inside her egg, she had heard clanmates speak of it with a shiver of awe and of fear in their voices. On her hatchday, caretakers peeled away her shell while she rubbed her eyes, thinking that something was wrong. But her eyes didn’t adjust — they didn’t need to. The darkness inside her egg had been a precursor to the darkness waiting outside.

“Kaasni.” A clan elder intoned her name. He shook a bouquet of fungus over her, and glowing spores adhered to her skin. The old drake prayed, “Oh Darkness, shield this young one from the malevolent gaze of the Sun.”

“The Sun,” groaned the other dragons, covering their heads as if expecting a cave-in — or worse. Minutes later, when the ceremony was ending, Kaasni rubbed at the spores. She watched as the glow became muted. When finally it died away, she felt a peculiar sense of loss, even though the dragons around her continued whispering in praise of the Darkness.

~ ~ ~
Kaasni was an inquisitive child. The clan regarded this with mixed feelings; most of them tried to put a positive spin on it: “We need more dragons like you: explorers who are courageous, who are willing to blaze new trails for us. We need gatherers who will brave the caverns in search of sustenance for our clan.”

All children were taught from a young age to work hard, to find their way in darkness. While on gathering excursions, Kaasni listened to the lectures, watched as the adults pointed out things that were safe (or not) to eat. “A cave gecko,” one of the hunters said one day. He lifted up a dull gray lizard, and as the class watched in wonder, white blotches lit up along its back. Suddenly the muddy little beast had turned into a living lantern, pulsing like a...Kaasni couldn’t think of the word. There was no word. There was only darkness....

The hunter dropped the gecko. Students squealed and scrambled out of the way as it darted among their feet, its back flashing madly. “As you can see,” the Skydancer said, almost sighing, “it looks spectacular, but those bright blotches give it away.” His paw smacked down, and he seized the gecko again, for good this time.

“Light is perilous to those who dwell in darkness — as I’m sure you’ve already been taught. Small creatures like this show us that it’s true. Their light betrays them, and so we can harvest them. But the Darkness allows us to move unseen.”

“The Darkness shields us from the Sun,” the other students intoned obediently. Kaasni said it, too, but her obedience was a sham. Even as an adolescent, she knew something was wrong with this impermeable darkness. Her belief in it had started to crack the day she and Aerglou had found the Stranger.

~ ~ ~
Aerglou was Kaasni’s oldest friend: a Pearlcatcher like herself, and a very curious one, too. He and his family lived on the edges of the lair, ostensibly shunned by the other dragons. They called Aerglou’s parents “upstarts”, saying that they questioned the Darkness too often.

As a child, Kaasni hadn’t cared about that. In fact, she probably wouldn’t have befriended Aerglou if his family wasn’t being shunned. Inquisitive hatchling that she was, she had wanted to know more about this strange “upstart” family. It had almost been disappointing when she’d met Aerglou for the first time. Why, he was an ordinary hatchling just like herself! Not even a different breed, but a Pearlcatcher with the same dark colors, the same violet eyes. Disappointment had quickly given way to excitement when he’d opened his mouth and started talking. She couldn’t remember what he’d said, but she recalled how it’d made her feel: Finally, here was another child who shared her sense of adventure.

Aerglou’s parents might’ve been upstarts at some point, but that was all gone by the time their son befriended Kaasni. They knew they wouldn’t survive without a clan, so for the sake of their son, they now made efforts to fit in.

Aerglou was allowed to attend classes together with Kaasni and all the other hatchlings. They learned about their dark world, about the luminous things that were food or prey. They learned which regions to avoid and where to locate the well-trodden paths. In between these practical lessons, there were constant reminders from the Clan Leader and his representatives: “We are shadows,” groaned the old drake, at the start of each and every lecture. Kaasni’s first memory of him was also the most haunting: He had been gaunt even then, heavily swaddled in all-concealing drapes of cloth. It didn’t look as though he’d ever changed them, for many of them now hung in tattered folds. They swayed mesmerizingly as he rocked from side to side. Eeriest of all were his eyes: Kaasni had no idea what dragon he was; so thickly draped in cloaks was he. But from deep inside his hood shone his eyes: pale and luminous, as feebly lit as fungus-light glancing off a glass shard.

“We are shadows, and so we belong to the Darkness. It embraces us, provides us with everything we need. It shields us from the Sun!”

“The Sun!” howled the old leader’s attendants. Their words thundered like the crack of doom.

“If not for the roof of the Darkness, the greedy Sun would find and devour us. Its fire would shrivel the flesh from our bones, reduce all we love to ash!” The clan leader seemed about to lurch forward as he gestured. His claws twitched spasmodically. Then slowly, they became still, and when he spoke again, his voice was almost a croon: “Let us remain beneath the cool mantle of the Darkness. Here, we are safe from the dreadful Sun.”

That was the picture the clan painted for Kaasni: shadows huddled in fear beneath a great roof of darkness, always hiding from the Sun. It was a great beast roaming freely across the planet. Its claws of light ferreted hapless dragons from their hiding places, and they were then devoured by great jaws of fire.

Kaasni believed this for a long time. She was not even particularly afraid of it, for the idea of a great, mysterious beast stalking everywhere was irresistible to an adventurous child. It was only years later that the picture was irrevocably destroyed by the Stranger.

~ ~ ~
“Let’s take a shortcut home,” Aerglou said. After a hard day of hunting lessons, Kaasni readily agreed. She followed her friend along the outskirts of the city, off the beaten paths. They bustled through fields of lichen bushes and groves where great trees of fungi grew. These trees were watered by a stream that was always icy-cold, and Kaasni and Aerglou tried to avoid it if they could.

And there they saw him: the Stranger. A dim shape sprawled on the stream bank, his limbs twitching feebly.

“Somebody’s there,” Kaasni gasped. At this, the Stranger managed to lift his head. His eyes were large and luminous...pale green eyes. Kaasni and Aerglou were momentarily dumbstruck, for they’d never seen eyes like that before. All who dwelled beneath the darkness had eyes like shadows, purple and deep.

“Please...help...” the Spiral whispered, and then his head sank down again. Kaasni and Aerglou then realized that his clothes were so dark because they were smeared with his blood. He was badly injured.

They ran to Aerglou’s home. Aerglou’s father returned to the stream with them; he lifted the Spiral and bore the injured dragon back to his den. There, they treated his wounds and put him to bed. His eyes were closed now, though he was shivering badly.

“A stranger, a stranger! Papa, did you see his eyes?” While Aerglou chattered to his parents, Kaasni examined the Spiral’s belongings. His bloody clothes were now piled on the floor beside a large, heavy bag. “What’s inside?” Kaasni wondered aloud.

The satchel was filled with books: tomes of plants and animals, meticulously drawn and described — and like nothing Kaasni and Aerglou had ever seen. “An alien...” Aerglou sucked in a breath. “He’s from another world!”

“No, he’s not.” Kaasni shook her head. She had opened one book, and she was looking down at it dumbfoundedly. It was an illustration of many dragons in a town square, a gathering such as she might see in her own clan. Except the dome that stretched above them was brilliant blue, lit by a soft yellow orb. The Sun.

~ ~ ~
“In the distant past, we lived under the sky, in the open air,” some clan elders sighed. “The world was filled with music and color. It was beautiful — and so the Sun took umbrage. ‘No one and nothing else shall be as brilliant as I!’ it proclaimed, and it sent its dreadful fire to scorch all color from existence. And so everything that fire touches turns to ash, dull and black, and thus it will be for us if we are struck by the light of the Sun....”

Even as a child, Kaasni had sensed that something was wrong. Hadn’t the Clan Leader said that the sun was a great beast that devoured shadows? Why did this tale call it a splendid being that envied the colors of the world?

To the Stranger, it was neither. When he regained consciousness, Aerglou held a book in front of him. “Mister, tell me about this place! Is this bright thing the Sun?”

“The sun...yes. It’s dark....Why is it so dark?” the Spiral whispered. His luminous eyes were feverish, unable to focus. His mind was flying away.

“My friend and I found you in the stream. Where did you come from? Did you get swept away?”

“Swept away...” The Spiral gasped. His eyes went wide, which Aerglou hadn’t thought was possible; they were huge enough already.

“I fell,” the Stranger choked out. “I’m a biologist....That means I study living things. Animals. Plants. I was working in the mountains. It was...It was raining.”

Aerglou sat down. He blinked curiously. “Raining?”

“It’s water that falls from the sky.”

“Oh. You were under a waterfall?”

“No, I wasn’t!” It came out as a shout. Aerglou flinched back, but the Spiral didn’t notice; his eyes were glazed again.

“Cold, so cold...It washed me away.” He was shivering, waves of memory coursing through his body. “Pulled me under. I whispered the Windsinger’s spell. I prayed to my god.”

Aerglou stared at him. What was a god? There was only the Darkness....Wasn’t there?

“So I could breathe...and I came here. But where is here?” The Stranger seemed to notice the room for the first time. “Why is it so dark? Days and days and days going past....I can see out your window. Why is it so dark?!”

He was getting hysterical. Aerglou scrambled away, the book clutched to his chest. “Papa...Papa!”

The Stranger did not recover. He had probably struck his head several times during his nightmarish journey through the darkness, and as the days passed, he deteriorated further. Screaming about wanting to go home, struggling through water in search of a sky. “It’s too dark!” he wailed. Aerglou and his parents attempted to shush him, but his screams rang through the cavern, and other dragons heard. “I want to go back....Let me go back! The sun, I need to see it — please, it’s too dark!”

When he finally succumbed to his injuries, the clan guards were waiting by the door. They entered Aerglou’s home and roughly searched the place, confiscating the Stranger’s clothing, satchel, and books. As for the Stranger himself, they put him in a bag, tightly zipped so that no one would see his bright green eyes. And then they took him away.

Aerglou and his family were forbidden to speak about the Stranger. The clan was encouraged to forget that they had ever heard someone crying out to a different god, pleading to see the Sun again. But Aerglou didn’t forget, and neither did Kaasni.

For on the day that the Stranger had erupted into hysterics, he’d tried to grab the book from Aerglou. His parents had wrestled the patient back into bed, but Aerglou, still fearful, had run to Kaasni’s home. “Keep this,” he’d panted, his eyes wide with anxiety as he shoved the book at her. “He’s after it. He goes crazy whenever he sees it!”

And so Kaasni had kept the book, even after the Stranger had gone. She hid it, and from time to time she opened it, wondering at those illustrations of a colorful, bright-lit world. She often lingered on the page with the town square, staring at that small yellow sun.

~ ~ ~
Life in the Darkness was hard. Dragons grew weak, languishing despite the abundance of food. When pestilence came, many of them were ill-prepared, and the clan lost several of its members. Aerglou’s parents were among them.

By then, he and Kaasni were grown. But the death of one’s parents is a great tragedy, and so for some weeks after, Kaasni visited him, ensuring that he was eating right and not getting sick. As the days slogged past, he slowly began to perk up again. Kaasni knew he would be all right the day he was able to talk about his parents without weeping.

Kaasni had lost her own parents long ago and didn’t often speak of them. Aerglou was the opposite: Reminiscing about his family made them come alive again, and he and his friend exchanged stories of their childhood days, of meals in the kitchen and pranks played at school.

One day, Kaasni asked him, “Do you remember...the Stranger?”

Aerglou’s smile faded. Slowly, he nodded to her. “I never forgot the Stranger,” he answered. He spoke quietly, as if afraid someone else would hear. Just like that long-ago time, when the guards had arrived to bear the Spiral’s corpse away.

Kaasni leaned forward. “Aerglou, the Stranger...He wouldn’t have spoken so fervently if none of that stuff was real.”

“The guards told us he was mad,” Aerglou protested — but he didn’t sound so sure.

“I think they’re wrong,” Kaasni told him. Suddenly it was like a dam had burst inside her; she couldn’t seem to stop talking. So many conflicting accounts from their childhood: The Sun was a beast, a pestilence, a god wreaking havoc upon the world. But had anyone ever seen it? No! They cowered before the words of an old drake none of them really knew. Had the Stranger been mad? How could they be sure their own leader wasn’t mad? The Stranger had been young and fit before his accident, and a dragon of learning besides. Their clan leader had an obviously feeble body; wasn’t it possible that his mind was feeble as well? He was probably more senile than the concussed Stranger had ever been.

“I feel the same way,” Aerglou said at last. His voice was very soft, but the words spoke to the doubt brewing inside Kaasni, and so she heard him loud and clear. He continued, “Mama and Papa also questioned the clan leader. It was why the clan called us ‘upstarts’, made us move to the edges of the lair. My parents knew better than to talk about it in public after that — but sometimes, they whispered to me...”

“Did they ever want to leave?”

Aerglou smiled wanly. “Eventually, they probably decided it was just a fairy tale.”

“I don’t think it is,” Kaasni told him. She opened her bag, produced a well-worn tome, and opened it to a familiar page. Dragons gathered in a town square, their hides blazing with color, their eyes shining like a hundred rainbow gemstones. And hovering benevolently over it all: the Sun. Not a beast that devoured everything, but a light that pushed the darkness away — not to swallow it whole, but to reveal the beauty, the color, that had lain concealed for so long.

~ ~ ~
They planned their escape carefully. Kaasni claimed that Aerglou was still weak, that she needed to help him hunt and forage. In reality, they were scouting farther and farther afield, looking for ways back to the Stranger’s land. Back to where the sun was.

The stream had dragged him down. So it was reasonable to assume that if they found a trail — any trail — that went up, they would find that other world....

After long months of exploration, they decided they had enough information and supplies. One night, as the whole clan slept, Kaasni and Aerglou left the lair they’d been born in. They followed their rudimentary maps and the sketches from the Stranger’s tome. And they disappeared into the darkness.

It was not as total as they’d been taught. Beyond the lair, luminous plants flourished, and small, shining creatures darted around their feet. Kaasni gasped in delight as she recognized them from the Stranger’s book: glow mushrooms, subterranean clover, and duskrats, among others. If the Stranger had been familiar with them, then perhaps they were a lot closer to his land than they’d thought....

Finally, after some days of cold and weary slogging, as they climbed a steep, nearly-vertical trail, Kaasni felt something: a breeze. She called a warning down to Aerglou, and then she lifted the mattock she’d been using as a walking stick. And she began to dig.

Earth showered down. Then a large chunk of it fell, admitting something...a ray of light. In spite of herself, Kaasni let out a small scream.

“What is it? Is it burning you?!” Aerglou asked frantically. Kaasni took a deep breath. She looked at her arm, where the light was shining....

“No,” she gasped. “It isn’t burning....” She dug again, with more vigor than before.

When she and Aerglou broke through the soil, it was all they could do to keep from crying out in terror. Instead of the roof of the Darkness, overhead was a vast, empty blue void.

And the Sun! It was no gentle yellow spot, but a fiercely bright orb that sent spots and stripes dancing through their eyes. Aerglou looked at it and howled, clapping his paws over his face. “It hurts! Kaasni, my eyes!”

“Don’t look directly at it, dummy!” she scolded him. “It’s just like the lanterns back home. That’s all it is!”

“Really?” He let her peel his forepaws off his face. “Some lantern.”

Kaasni stared at him for a long moment. He started to smile, and she grinned back. Soon the two of them were laughing — in relief, exhilaration, and most of all in wonder.

The colors! So much vibrancy everywhere; the plants around them were such a rich, deep green! And they had flowers, fruits...None of them glowed, but they didn’t need to; the Sun revealed everything with its pure light. And it was so warm, and then...A cool breeze pressed against them. Kaasni stood up straighter, closed her eyes. Her elders’ voices creaked within her mind: “In the distant past, we lived under the sky, in the open air. The world was filled with music and color....”

“Kaasni.” Aerglou was tugging on her arm, pointing down into a nearby valley. Kaasni caught her breath again as she turned around.

The greenery that surrounded them paled against the splendid mountains. Great spires and crags of crystal blazing against the sky...They were festooned with trees, but these were luminous, shining with a light of their own. “Like stars,” Kaasni realized, and she couldn’t say how she knew. It was almost as if the sky itself was whispering the word to her. It felt right.

And most exciting of all: bright-colored shapes moving among the trees, crisscrossing the heavens. Dragons with colorful apparel and gemstone-like eyes.

“There are others here. What should we do?” Aerglou looked anxiously at her.

“We go and meet them.”

“What? Just like that?” He blinked. “And then...?”

“We make friends with them. It’s a whole new world, Aerglou.” Kaasni inhaled, smelled the fresh air, the sweet scent of grass and trees. The wind carried a new sound: the distant music of the valley-dwellers. The sang to each other as they worked, and Kaasni’s heart felt lighter. She knew she had made the right choice.

“No more secrets, Aerglou.”

“No more hiding,” he agreed, and now he looked as determined as she did. The two of them started down the hillside towards the nearest road. A passing dragon looked up; he was clearly confused about where they had come from, but still he waved in greeting.

Kaasni and Aerglou waved back. With that simple gesture, they said hello to the new world. And from that day onward, it was theirs to explore.

~written by Disillusionist (254672)
all edits by other users

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