Disillusionist » Lair » Keilim

Keilim

(#43645416)

Level 1 Ridgeback

Familiar

Black Iron Creeper

Energy: 48/50

Personal Style

Apparel

Skin

Scene

Physical Attributes

Battle Stats

Measurements

Length

19.37 m

Wingspan

13 m

Weight

9356.13 kg

Genetics

Oilslick
Skink

Lemon
Bee

Lemon
Runes

Hatchday

Jul 22, 2018
(5 years)

Breed

Adult
Ridgeback

Eye Type

Lightning
Common

Level 1 Ridgeback

EXP: 0 / 245

STR

AGI

DEF

QCK

INT

VIT

MND

Lineage

Parents

Offspring

Biography

NOT FOR SALE, TRADE, OR LENDING

Heavy Transport
K E I L I M

Nickname: Kei
x. Hebrew: vessel of light

♦ The Cyan Hatchery

song title
by (artist)

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

STATS

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
RELATIONSHIPS

RADIANCE
Friend
Often lets Keilim rest in the chapel during her downtime, and is happy to answer any questions she might have.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

INVENTORY

~ lore ~
written by Disillusionist

The Ridgeback had never really cared about gods. As far as she'd been concerned, she did her own business and the gods did theirs. It was not an unusual attitude for a Lightning dragon to take. "Businesslike" was the best way to describe their relationship with their god, and it suited her just fine.

Still, she thought that like all good employers, even gods had obligations to protect their subordinates. After all, if an employer could handle that, certainly a god could do more. Couldn't they?

This was the thought that raced through her mind when she was struck by lightning. It happened over the Sunbeam Ruins: She was returning to the Shifting Expanse after completing an errand, and though a thunderstorm was brewing, she had no fear -- doubly so because she was a Lightning dragon. Her kind was largely resistant to electrical shocks; in the rare cases lightning did strike, the damage was almost always minor. Almost always.

She took a direct hit between the shoulder blades. Lightning arced through her body, freezing her forelimbs, her wings. She still recalled the sick way her stomach twisted as she tipped forward and began to fall. How she tried to flex her wings but they simply didn't respond; she recalled the smell of burnt flesh and realized it was her hide, blackened and scorched by the lightning bolt. And then came the pain, blanketing her shoulders like molten steel, searing through to the tender flesh beneath.

She roared as she fell, screaming in both pain and terror. The ground was coming up dangerously fast, and yet so terribly slowly: She knew it only took seconds, but she could see every detail, crystal-clear, growing larger and larger as she plummeted....

Her landing was not gentle. She crushed part of a bamboo grove; wood splintered and gouged into her hide. It was enough to steal away her voice, but not her consciousness. She remembered the Spiral swirling out of the darkness, a luminous loop of green. The bright eyes fixing upon her, wide and scared; and then the Spiral had screamed in horror, loud enough for both of them. It was almost a relief, in a way. Someone had surely heard; soon help would come....

Help did come. Relief, unfortunately, was much slower in arriving. The Ridgeback had been badly burned by the lightning strike, and further mangled by the fall. The dragons who found her were initially at a loss on what to do. Their healers were not strong enough to undo the damage, and their thaumaturges had no other solutions to offer. Many times they wondered if it might have been kinder to let the Ridgeback die...but it didn't feel right. She clung to life so stubbornly, and they felt they owed it to her to at least find out if she wished to live -- or die.

Where sorcery failed, technology took over. The engineers got to work replacing the parts she had lost. Days stretched into weeks....She had dim, hazy memories of lying beneath a dome of light while the sun crawled across the blue sky, far, far overhead. Would she ever fly again? Would she ever walk? Maybe it didn't matter. So long as she could live...

She regained consciousness in stages. First there was the realization that she still had her legs, her tail. She could still walk, at least. Her wings felt...heavy. She could move them, but they felt weird. Was something wrong? She would have twisted her neck to check, but it was so horribly heavy, and with even the slightest movement, she felt a strange grinding sensation. She imagined, with fascinated horror, that her vertebrae had broken and were scraping together within her spine.

Her vision had also gone...dark. Obscured. The world was still visible, but only through a smoky orange haze. And blackness was closing in on all sides, visible at the edges of her vision. She had heard of this before. The world going dark...Was she dying at last?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Crystaline shut off the machine. As the freezing light faded away, Karmanh pattered forward. He doffed his hat and queried, "Are you awake?"

The Ridgeback grunted. It came from beneath her new helmet and was very muffled. She grunted again, in surprise this time, and let out a short blast of steam.

"Ah, yes. OK, that, um...You see..."

There had been no other way to save her. She had simply been too damaged. Chunks of flesh burnt to cinders, bones pulverized by the fall. Even they weren't sure how she'd managed to hold on for so long. They hadn't been able to heal her, and so they had rebuilt her, replacing her bones with steel rods, covering her living flesh with black iron plates. Her wings had been pierced by some of the bamboo trees, and they had patched these over. She would still be able to fly -- it would just...take some getting used to....She had smashed headfirst into the ground, and her face had been hopelessly crushed. They'd had to replace her eyes, install a breathing apparatus.

"You can still see me, can't you? And you're responding, so you can obviously hear." Still, the Pearlcatcher's ears drooped. He looked despondent. "We couldn't do anything about your sense of smell and your vocal cords. So no talking...not anymore. We are...deeply sorry about that. Perhaps in time, we can do something about it, maybe install a voicebox..."

He chattered on, and on, and on. Speaking of things destroyed, things lost. The Ridgeback sat in silence for a long time and then, after he was done talking, she lumbered clumsily away. Also lost.

It seemed paltry to try cheering her up. So instead, they cared for her. They taught her how to eat and drink through her helmet and gave her a place to stay. They communicated patiently as she pantomimed, for she could no longer speak. They tried to get information from her, but all they learned was that she was one of the Stormcatcher's workers from the Shifting Expanse.

Stormcatcher. The Ridgeback fumed. How deeply insulting for a Lightning dragon to get knocked out of the sky by a lightning bolt. While on an errand for her god, no less. Where was her deity while she was writhing in pain from her fall, marooned in some strange, far-off land? Had the god cared that she was missing? Had he even noticed?

There was a chapel on the clan grounds, and one afternoon, the Lightweaver's priest found her here, head bowed before the great, stained-glass panel. Golden light danced across her skin, and behind her helmet, her eyes glowed, soft and soothing.

The priest introduced himself: He was Radiance, himself originally from another Flight. He had in fact met the Ridgeback before, had prayed over her many times while she was recovering from her grievous injuries. The clan had done their best, and he hoped that in the future, they would find a way to restore her to a more normal appearance.

In the meantime...what was she doing here? He watched closely as she pantomimed, and his orb pulsed as he struggled to read her thoughts. Disdain for...the Stormcatcher...A mental image of the Shifting Expanse, accompanied by a feeling of revulsion. Next, he caught images of the lair and the chapel, overlain with a surge of pride. She seemed happy here. It was almost like...

"You wish to join our clan? Serve the Lightweaver?" he queried. She nodded, and so excited was she that her helmet started heating up, smoke rising in tendrils from the vents. Radiance coughed and batted the vapors away. "Very well, we can talk about that. Can you tell me your name?"

She had had another name, but she scorned it now. It had been given to her by the Stormcatcher's servants, and she would no longer serve that deity. Her allegiance was to the Lightweaver now. With the help of her new clanmates, she chose a new name, and she officially became part of the clan on a bright summer day, with the sun shining triumphantly in the sky and not a dark cloud to be seen.

One might expect her to be frightened of storms after what she had been through, but she was unafraid, almost defiant. She would fly even through typhoons for her new clan. Her goddess' light would cut through even the darkest of storm clouds -- she was Keilim, vessel of light, and no storm would ever again stand in her way.

♦ art by Cryptnoch

Credits & Notes: Coding and stat bars: Disillusionist | Vista BGs: Hazeledpoppy's FR blog | Theme song image: Diamondsuits

Thanks for reading!
Lore Thread / Clan Directory

If you feel that this content violates our Rules & Policies, or Terms of Use, you can send a report to our Flight Rising support team using this window.

Please keep in mind that for player privacy reasons, we will not personally respond to you for this report, but it will be sent to us for review.

0/1000

Click or tap a food type to individually feed this dragon only. The other dragons in your lair will not have their energy replenished.

Exalting Keilim to the service of the Lightweaver will remove them from your lair forever. They will leave behind a small sum of riches that they have accumulated. This action is irreversible.

Do you wish to continue?

Name

Names must be longer than 2 characters.
Names must be no longer than 16 characters.
Names can only contain letters.

Name

Names must be no longer than 16 characters.
Names can only contain letters.