CALLIDA
(#43024758)
Level 1 Skydancer
Familiar
Masked Phantom
Click or tap to view this dragon in Predict Morphology.
Energy: 50/50
This dragon’s natural inborn element is Ice.
Female Skydancer
This dragon is hibernating.
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Personal Style
Apparel
Skin
Scene
Measurements
Length
3.64 m
Wingspan
6.8 m
Weight
391.79 kg
Genetics
Obsidian
Wasp
Wasp
Obsidian
Bee
Bee
Fuchsia
Basic
Basic
Hatchday
Breed
Eye Type
Level 1 Skydancer
EXP: 0 / 245
STR
4
AGI
5
DEF
4
QCK
9
INT
9
VIT
4
MND
9
Biography
THE ONE IS ALL AND THE ALL ARE ONE
THE ONE IS ALL AND THE ALL ARE ONE
THE ONE IS ALL AND THE ALL ARE ONE
THE ONE IS ALL AND THE ALL ARE ONE
THE ONE IS ALL AND THE ALL ARE ONE
THE ONE IS ALL AND THE ALL ARE ONE
THE ONE IS ALL AND THE ALL ARE ONE
THE ONE IS ALL AND THE ALL ARE ONE
THE ONE IS ALL AND THE ALL ARE ONE
THE ONE IS ALL AND THE ALL ARE ONE
THE ONE IS ALL AND THE ALL ARE ONE
THE ONE IS ALL AND THE ALL ARE ONE
THE ONE IS ALL AND THE ALL ARE ONE
STATUS: ALIVE
ROLE: H204.CONSCIOUSNESS.0
OTHER NOTES: CONSCIOUSNESS
NON-EXPENDABLE
[~Hello, little drone...~]
[~You're a long way from your hive...~]
[~Are you lost, little drone?~]
[~Or have you come to play with me?~]
The clan had their reasons for exalting the Skydancer.
The clan had MANY reasons for exalting the Skydancer.
She was dangerous. She was a threat to their hatchlings. She experimented with forbidden magic and witchcraft. She could raise the dead, and defeat a fully grown Imperial in combat. Her feats of forbidden power awed all who saw or heard of them, but did nothing to win her favor in the faceted eyes of the local clan leader. He saw her power as a threat to his station. So he made sure she was eliminated.
The hunters had been unable to bring back as much food as usual, and the winter was extremely harsh, even for those accustomed to the hard life of the Southern Icefield. Hivemind dragons were proving to be an increasing threat, with a Hive of them having recently located themselves in the clan’s territory. All attempts to eradicate the Hive dragons had failed, and members of the clan were in constant danger of being picked off and assimilated. The clan was large, yet they lived in fear. As the leader found, it was easy to turn their fear into hatred. And it was easier to find someone to blame.
The Skydancer, with her necromancy and witchcraft, dabbling in forbidden magics. She had angered the Icewarden with her violations of common practice, and he had unleashed his wrath upon their clan in response. The leader played the fears of the members of the clan, shaping the outcry against the Skydancer. The only way they could survive these terrible odds, the curse of the Icewarden, was to sacrifice the Skydancer and pray for forgiveness. The Skydancer was to be exalted.
In the Skydancer’s home, an icy cave lit with torches, and beautifully carved icicles and stalagmites arcing from the ceiling and floor, three hatchlings played, wrestling on the floor, while the Skydancer watched over them fondly. Two brothers and a sister, two sons and a daughter. The youngest son was the smartest, yet the weakest, as he hatched a runt. The eldest brother was the strongest, yet a bit of a bully. However, the middle child, the sister, wouldn’t let her older brother get away with harassing her or her younger sibling. She was the fastest and perhaps the quickest thinking, always playing some sort of game. The Skydancer, isolated from most social pursuits because of her odd practices, had grown lonely and made arrangements with a male dragon from the clan. She hadn’t wanted his company, only the eggs. Hatchlings, children, to hold and help and teach, to love and call her own. The Skydancer would do anything for these little ones, her children. She would suffer any pain to see them kept safe from harm.
Perhaps that is why, when the leader of the clan tore down the door of her home with a dozen enormous guards right behind him, she stood her ground and let them bind her with the magic-nullifying chains, on the promise that if she went willingly, her hatchlings would come to no harm.
The clan leader knew how dangerous she could be, so he agreed. His dark purple eyes, with their blank gaze and many facets, stared coldly at the Skydancer as the guards wrapped the chains around her wings and jaws, and cuffed her talons together. Then, they threw her over the back of the largest guard, carelessly, almost as if they hoped she might be hurt.
The leader was never good at keeping his word.
As soon as the Skydancer was restrained, he signaled to his guards and they seized the hatchlings who had been cowering behind the stalagmites. The youngest son, being the weakest, was caught first, and a heavy collar was chained around his neck. His brother was fast, but not fast enough. He, too, was captured quickly and bound in the same way. The sister lasted the longest, her hatchling wings giving her a bit of lift as he lept from one hiding place to the next, the guards shattering the elegant, carved creations of ice and stone in pursuit. But eventually they cornered her as well, and she was collared alongside her brothers.
The Skydancer saw that the leader had no intention of keeping his promise, and she struggled against her chains. But they were too strong, and they drained her magic so that she had no chance of escape. Still, she continued to struggle, until a guard began to strike her with an extra length of chain. She endured well at first, but eventually, the pain overwhelmed her, and she fell limp once more, her blood oozing down the side of the guard that carried her.
The guards dragged them up towards the peaks of the Cloudscrape Crags. The wind bit at their wings and talons, and the cold threatened to steal the warmth from their lungs, but the guards persevered on, determined to rid their clan of the menace. At long last, they reached a shallow overhang. The guards threw the Skydancer against the wall and attached her chains to iron spikes that protruded from the ice and rock. The Skydancer, barely conscious, lay limply in place.
Each of the hatchlings was chained nearby, by their collars. The brothers were bound on either side of the Skydancer, and they strained to reach their mother’s side, but their chains were just too short. The sister was chained to the center of the floor, where she cowered away from the guards. They struck at her, and called her ‘witch’s spawn,’ ‘cursed hatchling,’ and ‘harbinger of death.’ Unsupervised by their leader, their fear turned to hate and rage, which they took out on the daughter. They took turns striking her with the chain, hurling her against the cliff face, and throwing rocks and ice at her until she lay limp bleeding on the ground. The shouted and jeered at her, jabbing at her to force her back onto her feet, and screeched insults into the wind.
“GET UP, GET UP AND DANCE! GET UP AND RUN! A STUPID, UGLY HATCHLING, CAN’T EVEN FLY! GET UP, WE’RE TALKING TO YOU! COME ON, DON’T YOU WANT TO PLAY? HATCHLINGS LOVE TO PLAY! WE WANT TO PLAY A GAME WITH YOU, WHY ARE YOU BEING SO UNGRATEFUL? INGRATEFUL WITCH’S SPAWN! YOU’LL BRING A CURSE UPON THIS LAND! HURRY UP AND DIE ALREADY!”
They might have killed her then if the winds hadn’t picked up, if the storm hadn't gotten worse. Cowed by the weather, the guards turned tail to reach home before sunset. The sister lay, exposed to the elements, chained to the ground, bleeding, weak, and cold. Yet she didn’t die yet, she didn’t want to die. The words of the guards echoed in her head and blurred with the sound of the howling wind. The pain seemed to meld with her memories, corrupting them. Changing them. Their words filled her with a new emotion, something akin to hatred. She wouldn’t die as they told her to.
But the sun had set, and the night got colder. Her brothers tried to huddle behind chunks of stone and ice, and she was trapped in the openness of the center, with nowhere to hide from the wind. The Skydancer, her mother, grew weaker and weaker as the storm raged on. The hatchlings heard as her breaths grew ragged then faltered, then finally ceased altogether. They whimpered and cried, but no one came to help them. Slowly, they too began to grow weaker.
The youngest brother was the next to fall. He had always been the weakest, always lost any of their play fighting games. The oldest brother had picked on him before, to assert dominance. Now, the oldest brother called out to him again and again in vain, unable to hear his breathing, unable to hear his heart. He didn’t want to let go.
The eldest brother lost it then, hurling himself again and again against the chain collar, desperately trying to reach his mother or his brother, or what remained of them. The collar bruised his neck, then made it bleed, but he continued his struggle, crying out in despair with every leap. All at once, he lost his footing on the ice and collapsed to the ground, smacking his head hard. He let out a last whimper, then lay still, exposed in the cold. Soon, he too was lost to the fury of the storm.
Now, only the sister remained. The wind tore at her, and the cold crept up her limbs. There was nowhere sheltered in reach of her chain where she could hide, so she lay exposed to the harsh storm. Her wounds froze, and she began to lose feeling, at first in her talons, then in her legs, then her whole body. Yet she didn’t die; perhaps she did carry a bit of her mother’s strange magic, for instead of weaker, she began to feel stronger. Different. Her eyes froze shut, then froze through, yet she opened them again and could see just as before. Her blood felt cold, but it was her blood still. Her memories felt garbled, but she couldn’t remember what they were supposed to feel like. All she could remember was the guards, hurting her mother, hurting her brothers, hurting her over and over again. Their words, coaxing her to play, throwing her against the wall and beating her with the chain. Dragons doing harm. Dragons hurting her. Dragons with their games. She knew how to play.
And the storm raged on. It raged for six whole days. And when it finally cleared, the orphaned hatchling rose shakily to her feet, breaking effortlessly through the layers of ice that had built up around her. She opened her eyes, and they seemed to be made of ice. A few snowflakes lazily drifted from them. She cautiously examined the chain and collar around her neck, before placing a single claw on it. It seemed to radiate cold, growing colder and colder the longer she touched it. No, she was radiating the cold. The chain began to vibrate under the sheer pressure of cold, then at once, it snapped. The collar followed shortly after it, and the little hatchling stood free, alone in the cold morning.
She looked around her. The bodies of the only family she had known surrounded her, half frozen. They were the only good she had ever known, and they were dead. Anyone else in the world was evil, as the guards. She hated the guards, but not in the same way a dragon hates. She wanted to see them suffer, she wanted to see them afraid for their lives. Seeing that, that would make her happy. That would be… a game. Fun.
With the storm safely cleared, the leader of the clan sent the guards to make sure that the Skydancer and her offspring were dead. The news of their deaths would put the clan at ease, and reassure the leader that his position was no longer in danger. So the guards climbed upwards through the Cloudscrape Crags once more, in good spirits, certain that the curse that had plagued their clan would be lifted. When they reached the overhang, however, they stopped in their tracks. The collar that had held the hatchling who they had tormented was broken and empty, with the hatchling nowhere to be seen.
Uneasily, they investigated the other three dragons who they had left to die, alone in the cold. The Skydancer and the two sons were dead, their bodies frozen in place by the gale force winds of the storm. But the daughter was nowhere to be found. It seemed that she had simply disappeared, without a trace. The guards reluctantly turned to head homeward, afraid of what this might mean for their clan and the curse.
But as they started their descent, they heard a laugh from up the mountain. A form, neither dragon nor hatchling, circled above them in shaky flight. She laughed, and as she did, the ice beneath their feet began to warp and move, closing around the talons of the guards and snaking up their legs. The shouted in fear, struggling to break free, but the ice held fast. The daughter landed in front of them, still laughing, and the guards begged her to stop, begged her not to kill them. But even the guards must have seen that their cause was hopeless: she was no longer entirely a dragon. She was the ruthlessness of the storm, the chaos of the hatchling, and the spite of the survivor. She was one with the cold, and she was not afraid to hurt the guards every bit as much as they had hurt her.
One by one, she killed every single guard. Each died as she had lived, in pain, in fear. Never once did her smile falter; in fact, it only seemed to grow as she watched the icicles she created shred wings, sever limbs, and spear hearts. She laughed as each guard desperately fought for their life, only to fall, freeze, or strangle to death as part of her game. The game that she created for revenge, to feel something again. When the last guard was dead, she turned, still grinning, and soared towards the dens of the clan, down at the base of the mountain below.
She paced slowly and deliberately among the dens, calling out to the dragons that fled in terror, in the voice of the hatchling that she used to be. It was unnerving and uncanny, sending even the largest dragons shaking, if not fleeing.
“Come out, come out, don’t hide from me, come dance and sing and play! I know a game we can play, who don’t you come out? There is no use in hiding. I will find you eventually. I can make you come out, but neither of us will like that very much…”
The leader of the clan was frantic. He ordered a squadron of guards to bring down this… thing, to kill it, to save the clan from its murderous rampage. These guards were trained for open combat, trained to kill even the most skilled opponents with their sheer brute force. The circled around the Skydancer’s daughter, but she just smiled, lifted her head, and began to sing.
Upon hearing the eerie notes, every single one of the guard dragons came to an abrupt stop mid-flight. Each hovered uncertainty, shaking and tossing their heads almost as if trying to dislodge the song from their ears. Then, one by one, their eyes grew dull, then glowing, and their wingbeats fell in time with her song. She sang them into submission, stole away their willpower with her strange music. When she had them all frozen, under her command, she changed the noted of the song ever so slightly and sent the guards against one another. They tore each other apart, wings flashing out, talons striking blindly, blood falling like rain, while the daughter of the Skydancer simply continued on her way, smiling, and humming her tune.
But the leader wasn’t ready to give up. He ran, ran to the local Hive and begged the Consciousness for mercy and assistance. His faceted eyes were wide with fear, and his voice shook as he made a show to arouse pity from the merciless form, whose black carapace seemed to merge with the shadows themselves. He pleaded, offered to leave the Hive in peace and offer them a regular tribute if they saved his clan from destruction, brought down this terrible ghost of a dragon whose eyes were made of ice and whose song was as haunting as the winds of a storm. The Consciousness, believing that this creature would surely prove to be easily assimilated, agreed.
They set the trap for the Skydancer’s daughter, planning out the weather, the lighting, the smallest of details. They created backup plans, in case their first plan failed, and backups for the backups as well. The Consciousness wanted this powerful creature as a weapon for their hive, and the leader wanted his position in power secured. Neither wanted to fail, so neither wanted to take even the smallest of risks.
When the Skydancer’s daughter came to a narrow pass, with walls of solid rock on either side, a lone dragon launched themselves from a small ledge and flew haphazardly away. They were not a guard. They were not even fully grown. But among the dragons of the clan, they alone were deemed the perfect bait for a monster of a creature, a killing machine. The killing machine laughed still, and soared upwards in pursuit, ice seeming to crackle in the air around her.
The bait swooped down, towards a place in the stone where the pass narrowed into a tunnel. It was short, yet it concealed the Hivemind dragons who lay hidden on the other side. As the Skydancer’s daughter followed through, the dragons of the Hive swooped downwards, descending onto her all at once. She gave a cry of rage and shot sharp spears of ice through the air at her attackers, but their carapaces deflected the worst of the damage and their numbers quickly overwhelmed her. Within seconds, she was unconscious and bound with building fluid, to be taken back to the Hive for assimilation. The leader and the Consciousness had won, or so it seemed.
Yet within the depths of the Hive, trapped in the dark, the assimilation fluid only changed the storm, instead of destroying it. The clever storm would not be broken. Her body became flawlessly covered in a sheen of black carapace, but her mind, already damaged by the wind and snow, only grew worse. She saw the guards, hurting her, and tasted victory as she remembered killing them. She smiled when she thought of the game she had created, hurting the dragons who had wanted her dead. She felt joy, happiness, as she remembered the fear that they had felt when they saw her eyes, her cold, icy, eyes. And the clan leader’s eyes, faceted and staring hatefully at her.
The storm was stronger than ever. She spread her wings and ripped through the walls of the Hive. Ice ricocheted in every direction, the Hive dragons fleeing in fear and instinct more than on any command they were given. The Consciousness, exposed as the storm shredded through the depths of the Hive, screeched a cry of fury. The Skydancer’s daughter turned to the sound and silenced it by fixing an icicle through the heart of its speaker.
She flew towards the clan, killing whatever she came across in her wake. Broken ice lay scattered across the ground, sharp enough to pierce a dragon’s hide. The half Hivemind, half storm made creature thrust herself through the wall of the clan leader’s home. She pinned him to the ground, a combination of ice and building fluid holding him in place as he struggled and offered desperate compromises, his faceted eyes wide. She didn’t listen to his pleas but simply continued to smile as she unleashed the wrath of the storm on him, tearing through every limb in his body with searing cold and daggers of ice.
When at last his screams fell silent, his mind overcome by the pain, she ceased her torture and simply stood still, in place. The Hivemind dragons, deprived of their previous Consciousness and attracted to her signal of sentience like moths to a flame, peered out of the shadows and through the hole in the wall. She felt their code telling them what they should do, yet they waited for her command. She felt the same code inside her and the power it possessed. The storm and the Hive, combined in a single, dangerous, creature. A creature who, deprived of her childhood, still longed for a game to play. A creature who thrived on the control of others, and on the taste of fear. A creature, who only seemed to be capable of a smile.
She stepped away from the former leader of the clan, and the Hivemind dragons swooped in, dragging him back towards the depths of the Hive, or what remained of it. She followed them, leaving the devastation behind her for the day. But she would be back. She wasn’t done with dragonkind.
She still had games that she wanted to play with them.
APPEARANCE BEFORE ASSIMILATION:
NOTES FROM RESEARCHER MATVEI:
[~Perhaps "Matvei" will come and play later?~]
[~Perhaps he will...~]
[~Perhaps...~]
[~Hehe...~]
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Exalting CALLIDA to the service of the Windsinger will remove them from your lair forever. They will leave behind a small sum of riches that they have accumulated. This action is irreversible.
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