Karma

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█ Shaded Space 97% imperial | 3% wildclaw 50% starmap | 50% wasp 50% constellation | 50% bee 15% spines | 85% crackle

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Work In Progress Lore by @maocifer
If you own one of their descendants, please feel more than free to incorporate Karma/Moon's lore into your own, and letters from hatchlings/grandchildren/etc bring me copious amounts of joy!

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New Lore Plot:

Taken from his Plague siblings and experimented on by an Arcane Bog, he's designed to be an unrelenting force of death to destroy everyone but Arcana. When he's not being experimented on, he spends his time near the border with Wind and befriends a blind Wildclaw, Azara, as she can't see his monstrous form and unlike her siblings she was never trained to hate and kill because she's blind. They fall in love, but Azara quickly notices that with every passing meeting he becomes more distant as the experiments are taking away his ability to love anything but his master. When the bog finds out about him meeting Azara, he orders him to kill her. She embraces him, hoping their love is stronger than the order, but as she replies his name, he kills her. The master deems the experiment a success and as the high of killing leaves his veins, Karma mourns Azara. The master realises there's still some way to go and can't have him going bezerk. He seals Karma in a tube and he isn't released until the emergency protol initiates because of the chaos of the dying planet. Karma finds the master long-dead under rubble, reaching for his release button. In a fit of mourning, he destroys all the other experiments. He discovers that he's been continuously unsealed over many years, killing targets that Arcana deems a threat to progress. He also discovers that there is a ship that they built to traverse the stars and return to the planet of the gods, and they were experimenting on a dark substance that had attached itself to the ship on their last voyage (a piece of the shade), and that's when the planet began to die. He encounters many dragons left alive on the surface, waring to maintain their territories, mostly dragons of Plague. He invites them to join him on the ship, being the only one who knows the launch code from the master's papers. Only few of them do. He spends a day searching for Azara, of where Wind mightve buried her, and is blocked from her grave by Mooneater, her sister. They battle, Mooneater trained as a warrior since she was born and fuelled by hate from her innocent older sister's death years ago. Karma pins her briefly but is stopped as he reminds him of Azara. She escapes and they continue fighting until they're exhausted. He vows to protect her as Azara would've wanted, and when he discovers that she's been infected with the black he's sure came from space and is killing the planet, he pulls off her infected arm and drags her to the spaceboat.

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Old Lore Plan:

"It seems we have come to an impasse."
Thunder rumbled overhead, shaking the very core of the unstable land beneath the drakes' claws. The weather was in disarray, the once lush land to the east now laid to waste by torrential rains and impactful winds. A storm brewed in the west as well, and the two threatened to meet in an absolute pure form of chaos, destroying the planet on which it all stood.

"Indeed."
The two drakes stared at each other warily, claws flexing and both itching for another fight as their wounds still oozed with fresh blood. Green eyes met red ones in an intense glare, and they both saw the exhaustion within each other.
"If we don't leave now, we'll—"
The Wildclaw cut him off with an angered scoff. "You leave, you are the intruder."
The Imperial rolled his eyes. "I came because this planet is all but dead."
"My planet was fine before you set your claws here! We lived, we prospered!" She shot back.
His red gaze softened slightly. "You kid yourself. You all knew it was doomed, that's why the ships stopped coming... We all knew... they gave up on this world."

Moon blinked away the cloudiness. She wasn't ready to give up on her home and neither was he.

The story had been told to them countless times: the arcane god of the ancient planet saw in its giant eye —the one in which it gazed upon the stars with— another planet among the constellations, green with life. So it gathered its ilk, constructed a space boat, and sent a legion of dragons into the stars. They were supposed to return, in other lifetimes, with documented experience and studies — but they couldn't.
The space boats burned in the sky and they couldn't return no matter how much their ancestors had tried to rebuild it, they simply didn't have the ingenuity of a god.
Their gods didn't abandon them, and age after age, the arcane god sent more drakes to colonise the new planet; often hatchlings that the older ones took in as their own children — their own descendants.
Moon and Karma were two of those hatchlings, none could be created on the new planet without the energy from a god.

In their lifetime, the drakes of the new planet had divided themselves back into their ancient alignments, but their mothers had told them many stories of when they had converged like the stars to aid each other.
Now the clans were alone; the god had stopped sending new drakes and their numbers had declined rapidly. Those who separated also suffered, but their pride and faith kept them from coming together.
Out here the abyss was her only friend, it had been for ages; and the weathered bodies of his family were his.
Of Wind and Plague, they were the only two left.

Karma had a space boat, one that Arcana and Storm had crafted from the debris of others. Plague stole it and he and his siblings had tested it to the moon — not far but it had taken countless days.
When he returned, the ground quivered and shifted beneath his feet. Chaos began to emerge from the depths of their home, like an ancient darkness eating up the energy from the young earth and driving it into madness.
He still had the space boat, the very thing that caused the battles between Plague and the other flights.

Karma had trespassed onto Wind's territory to gather survivors before they fled — to return to their first home, the divided planet of the ancient gods.
Moon attacked him there, defending the land like all fighters were trained to do, but she wasn't the only one highly skilled in combat.

Wind ruffled Moon's mane. "I'm staying," she whispered firmly.

The Imperial blinked twice and his jaw twitched. "So be it." He turned away, limping as he headed off towards the boat. He had others there waiting for him to pilot it, and he didn't want to die. "At least I know when to quit, and put my pride behind me."

The Wildclaw watched him go, getting smaller on the grey horizon as the rumbling of the storm grew louder and the wet soil cried beneath her talons. Karma was right, the land was in pain and their planet was dying.

The sudden urge to chase after him —or beat him to the ship— ran through her like a spring river... so she did.
The thundering of claws behind him caused the Imperial to smile solemnly, and he picked up his pace.




. . .





The hum of machines filled the room beneath the tower, and the elderly Bog rifled through the many papers piled onto the half-log.
"Karma," he began, sensing the young Imp enter from the doorway. "How are you feeling?"
Karma looked around the room, his brow furrowed at the tubes lining the walls, filled with the master's... Oddities. "Good."
"Good," the Bogsneak echoed, his framed spectacles glinting in the dim light from the glowing test tubes.

Karma was uneasy; at any moment the master could decide it would be easier to keep him under constant surveillance, and he'd join his brethren in the glass tanks. Just another subject of Arcana's research.
(wip)