Calque

▸ Gender: Female ▸ Orientation: Heterosexual ▸ Homeland: Sunbeam Ruins

_________ Lightweaver Marble Bust Trinkets A stoic bust depicting the Lightweaver. It is comprised of polished marble that glints in the sunlight. 105

▸ Birthplace: Beacon of the Radiant Eye ▸ Element: Light ▸ Profession: Genealogist

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Calque came to Oakrest to study the ancient genealogies of those buried in Cairnstone Rest. While she is not often in the Citadel, she is well-known among the clan for her easy-going nature. Though some may find it dangerous for Calque to embark on such a field of study, she is not so easily dissuaded. She knows that her time may be short, but her contributions to scholarly fields may be great nonetheless.

Calque's most notable quality is her intelligence. Like the stereotypical light dragon, she is quite well-studied. The only thing she values more than well-argued, intellectual debate is an excellent treatise. When she is not roaming the surface tombs of Cairnstone Rest, Calque is often found in Bo's library.

She does not get along well with the Hunters of Oakrest, as she often wants to study everything they aim to destroy. But while her fascination with things long dead (and oddly undead) is sometimes a point of contention, she knows that for the safety of the rest of the clan, she must allow the Hunters to do their work.

Calque shares her heart and quarters with Jupiter, who is also only rarely found around Oakrest. Though her love is often away making deliveries, when they are together they are an affectionate couple who wish to teach their children everything they can about the world around them.

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-tba-

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Jupiter circled over the canyons that designated 'home' for the third time. Usually by now, Arctic was waving him in, her red silks fluttering in the breeze. But it looked, rather suspiciously, like the regular terrace into the docks was sealed up.

And so was every other entrance.

Laden down as he was with trade shipments, Jupiter was a bit frustrated by this development. But he was relieved to spy movement among the stand of oaks up on the nearby mesa. He hurried over, his huge leathery wings starting to miss the updrafts as he made a clumsy but successful landing.

A ruddy coatl helped unpack his delivery, and as he looked around he noticed a few faces, but not many, and none he really knew by name. "What's going on?" he asked.

"Evacuation," the coatl answered, shaking her head. "The Citadel's been closed for going on a month now."

"A month?!" Jupiter yelped.

She shrugged.

"Who's in charge right now?"

She jerked her head towards the heart of the oaks. "Bordeaux's here. Not that there's much charge left in him, you know?"

Jupiter bit his lip, then set his cargo tidily in a stack before heading to the heart of the copse.

"I think it's much worse than that," a voice Jupiter recognized was saying.

"Calque!" he yelped in delight, and he hurried forwards between the scrubby trees to see his mate holding a book for their aged patriarch to inspect.

She looked up, and a relieved smile crossed her face. "Oh, you're alright," she said. "Everyone thought you were inside. We haven't seen so many, and Blackshore is fairly certain she would have seen them by now if they'd made it out."

She leaned in, touched her snout to Jupiter's jaw before resting her forehead against his. Tension leeched out of her, and she relaxed for a moment. Then, she turned back to the ancient brown guardian before her.

"Sorry," she said. "As I was saying, I think it's worse than we were thinking. I was looking for the names Calamity mentioned - remember that weird blackish coatl? They're fairly common names, but I happened to have just come from the library when the alarms went off. And among my books was this one, which is ... quite old actually. I think it's a copy of a copy at some point."

"What's in the book?" Bordeaux asked, his sides heaving with the effort of sitting still for so long.

"Oh! It implies - not explicitly states, though I wouldn't expect that anyway - but it implies that the ancient tunnels of Oakrest date back to the dawn of our age. And that once, there was a place called the Crystal Kingdom. And then, suddenly, the King and his court were never heard from again. It just vanished without a trace."

"Besides those big doors," Bordeaux sighed.

"I bet if that Clancy guy had elected to stay around, he probably would have seen this coming," Jupiter chimed in. "He seemed pretty clever about this kind of thing."

"Unfortunately, he didn't," Bordeaux said, turning over his shoulder to stare between the trees at the box canyon in the distance, its dim brown shadow the only marker from the surface that Oakrest might be there. "We have to do what we can with what we have," he said, "and hope that the others know how to solve their own problem."

Jupiter gave Calque a puzzled look, and she just smiled and shook her head. "Bordeaux," she said. "I told you I'd help how I could. But Jupiter is okay, and..."

"And you said you'd be leaving if he turned up in one piece," Bordeaux said, not turning back to her. "You have proven most helpful. Please. Travel safely, friends."



There was still something not quite right about waking up within the walls of a young clan. Though the dragons were mostly kind and even intelligent enough to carry on scholarly debates with her long into the night, Maserift still lacked the distinct flavor of home. It was a sense, Calque had rapidly realized, she had come to equate to Oakrest and might never bestow upon another place. But maybe a similar sense could be produced, given time.

Maserift was not very far from the clan they had only just left some weeks ago. In fact, considering everything, it was practically a neighbor to Oakrest. A subtle gradation away on the scale of adapting. But this clan was drenched in newness -its recent rise, its focus on healing and new births, even how the caves smelled fresh and unmarked by long usage. Calque felt herself grasping for remnants of the old, even as she and Jupiter laid their first nest and added to the new. Perhaps it would not be so bad.

So she laid her two eggs and curled around those fragile children-to-be, breathing in the familiar scents of warmth and hope. She forgot that there were consequences of new, and that a scholarly clan only on its first, stumbling legs would possibly be less vigilant and less militant than a clan of hunters and destroyers.

Calque woke up one day to the distant shrieks of a nocturne and the cries of a newborn. A hatchling. Only one. It took her a moment to realize the significance of that and when she did, the nocturne's shrieks came into focus and then fizzled out as she held her remaining child close to her and raced through the caves, following a young, fading scent with a panic equal to what she had felt when she had heard of what happened at the Citadel.

The trail led out to one of the cliffs that the Maserift dragons used for watching the skies. There, she found a tiny, fluorescent nocturne, the source of the shrieks, babbling to a snapper so much larger than her, gazing helplessly at the sky with large eyes. The winds had swept the path clean. Her child was gone.