Excidium

4.91m| 5.3m| 733.41kg 16.10 ft|17.38 ft|1,616.89 lbs| 0.80t Rescued from the talons of an Emerald Webwing. The Third Founder of the Storm’s Eye Clan. Born in the month of Germination The Hunter & Gatherer 68/118 warriors to the Windsinger Column Font From Font Meme Banner art by AngHuiQing Banner dividers by Georgianna Flight flags by Oseim

Excidium Overseer of Contracts & Neophytes. You know your place, get back to work. [img]Good Koji Bust resized in imgur to 150 on the narrow.[/img] Pragmatic, efficient, steadfast. I first met the founder in his better days, before... Well, before. I do not remember where I was from, but I do remember cracking my shell at the whispered sound that meant safety. (I have said the word to my own eggs before they hatched.) My first sight in the world was her muzzle, bloodstained and dirt-streaked and she puffed warm, sweet air at me. My second sight was a monstrous gutted bird, the remains of its foot wrapped around half of my egg. My third was of him, he seemed as huge as a mountain, but he had a gentle gleam to his eye. They took me back to their Lair, then a thin scrape in a windy plateau and we took to the task of getting to know each other. I grew quickly, as orphans must, as they went into the wild and returned time and again, battered and triumphant with fresh bat wings and delicate hooves for me. I grew up with them and the Guide when it consolidated from time to time in those days, but they did not raise me. I raised myself. Because they gave much for me, and I had to soon return the favor, this I knew as sure as breath. I think for this I am most grateful. They do not see me as their child and I do not see them as my parents. Centhwevir is my friend, my comrade, time and time again I could depend on his heavy support in the field. And there was her, she was once a wild thing like me I'd learned, I learned much from her about stalking, flight and hunting and strategy and the choosing of.... partners. While I love them and the Clan we have built I can still be objective about them and everything else that has happened. For the continued existence of this Clan objectivity is paramount, sacrifices are called for, and sometimes they must be given. When... it was done a great deal fell onto me, from supporting Petrushka in and out of the coliseum to suddenly having to help decide who should stay to further the goals of our Guide and who should be sent on to the God. They are not decisions made lightly I assure you, but they are never made easier with time. Even so, sacrifices still need to be made. And so here I am, once a lost foundling and now a de-facto leader of a slowly growing Clan. With duties and ... sacrifices to be made. Because there are always sacrifices asked for and they must be given. Servants of the Lord Windsinger’s Clone Army Excidium Axcidium

Sacrifice is such a multi-layered term, I have found. There is, of course, physical sacrifice of the sort I spoke of once before. But then there is a subtler sort of sacrifice, the sort of letting go of those you know.

It has come to my attention that two of our allied Clans have decided to change alliances to another God. This appears to have seeded the idea in several other Clans. We have, of course, remained silent on this change as a whole, though individuals have supported the notion.

This rankles me.

The Guide hinted that that was an aspect of Wind, as it could not be pinned down, it was wont to wander. That it was all very natural.

I countered that one's loyalty to their God should be sacrosanct. It is a pact, like that between Guardian and Charge. Like that between Guide and Clan. I said this hoping to strike at that particular nerve in the light of Centhwevir's change and his silence. If one could simply abandon their birth god, whom they served, whom they sacrificed their own children to, what loyalty could they ever had to begin with? If it should be so easy to change one's alliance, why ever would I have remained? I would have stolen as many as I could from this lair and sent them to the Lord of Storms. But it was this Clan and this God that I was born into, and despite the different elements, I owed it to them to serve them.

The Guide's sturdy form dissolved into air, invisible tendrils trailed through the grasses, and made them ripple against the perpetual wind of the plateau. "Do you see us moving?" It said, and slid back over to its perch above its Guardian's brow. And that was the end of the discussion.


I did not suggest that this clan be called the Eye of the Storm, honestly I thought it overly dramatic a title to claim and have never figured out where the notion came from. But I see there might be some truth to it. We remain, and drift across our God's land as storms race across the horizon. But we are calm through it, and merely watch the turmoil around us. As those we know are spun away into the dark unknown, for it is Wind's nature to part. We sacrifice and serve.

We who remain.



Things were mostly quiet from that point and our roles continued as they must. We fought and quested for treasure and traded among the river clans. It is a horrible thing to be trading in blood and bone, but somehow it is less hard when they are not your own.

I made that bargain with our Guide, years ago, being wise while young I suppose….

Or heartbroken.

…Take your pick.

My first lover was named Laetificat and she was beautiful and very patient with me while I learned. I miss her gentle humor now that she is gone. She was still in the throes of her Search when we met and she thought I was so amusingly serious for my role. She thought I might be her one, but I was not, and she soon left me and the Clan, albeit reluctantly. I heard she died during the God War, the Royal Battle, started by something called an Emperor in the South. I hope she went in the battlefield, as she told me she wished and was not trapped in a dying lair as Rahjah was before he was rescued by us at the last moment.

I was still pulling myself together from Laetificat's departure when Axcidium was brought to me; young, timid and gawky, and very conscious of our difference in age, size and experience. It was odd, taking a younger lover when they are bigger than you. First experiences can be spoiling, I suppose. But I did my duty by my Clan, we were young then and sought alliances, and as all of them were looking for members to bind clans together, then all we could do was offer of ourselves. Axcidium and I came together twice and happily we offered our children to other Clans, trusting they would be cared for.

… And they were.

No sooner than they arrived, it would seem, they were drawn, quartered and sent off to fuel the engines of the gods. From Icewarden to Plaguemother, my first children were sent to stoke their growing flames and it hurt me to my core that a few were never even given names to remember them by.

Axcidium and I tried again, hoping things would be different. I was told our children were so handsome by the other Clans we ran with, that they were so sure of themselves on the hunt. So constant was their flattery and their interest that I allowed my children to be contracted again, though I did take the opportunity to name them. If the other Clan so desired they could spend the treasure to change their memories, but my children would know I loved them enough to name them first.

And for all of their praise, for all of their promises of hunting packs, those children too were fodder for the endless grind of divine war.

And I did an unwise thing, mourning and mad, I had the notion that perhaps it was the colors and genes that would safeguard the lives of my children. I scented out one of my lair-mates in her season, rare she is and still the only dragon of her color in the world. I drove her from the Clan -she smelled so much like my first love, maybe my true love, it made the act so much horribly easier- I kept pace along beside her and kept her from turning back to the Clan and her old mate. Nipping at her hip and heel to keep her moving, pulling her back into line by her crest if she turned. I ran her into the Emerald Sea until she was ready. When she finally turned to face me and we fought.

Savage and fierce was our battle, she slashed ivory claws across my thigh, I whirled and raked my fangs her across her armored face. We tested each other, fencing and sparring, giving and taking no quarter, trying -but not quite succeeding- in drawing blood. …Rolling and clawing turned into stroking, biting turned into tonguing, and the wrestling turned into release….

True mirror courtship is passionate and would naturally involve an entire pack at once, but it was only the pair of us. I am sure that notion must horrify you. But you are not a mirror dragon, when quickened in blood and battle, it helps the eggs and young come out strong.

And our sons were strong. They were canny and clever and quick on the hunt. A struggle brought them forth and so battles of all kinds called to them. They stayed with us for a long time and of their own accord chose to fight at our God's side in the beyond. And, because they had had choice and chose the God that they served in life, I was happy.

But before that. Once I had cringed back. Once that first deed was done. Once I could look the Clan in the eye again….. it was then that I made a request of our Guide. I would continue to serve and stay by the mate chosen for me, who still waited for me. Despite all that I had done. Under the sole conditions that our children would never be sold to another Clan, and if exaltation was to be their fate, it would be only to strengthen the God that I serve and they were born to. If alliances would only be to cannibalize our young, then I would take it on myself to be strong enough and to make my Clan strong and vast enough that we would be an alliance all to ourselves.

The Guide accepted my conditions.



Still…. it hurts when they go. It hurts when the eggs come, knowing where they will go. Though I still think the Guide was fair to ask this as a bloodprice, and it is one that I will fulfill.

While my children are spared the block and the contracts, the others are not, and so I handle their contracts. I know their parents, I know their names, Alaman and I concur on the price to ask for them, knowing that it will not be taken. When they ask me I show them how to pounce and roar. I never let myself forget what I must do to them…

Petrushka brings me new members, and I sort them where they will serve best: the Long Patrol, the Liaisons, the Retinue, the Imperial Company… or to the mana of the Windsinger….

And I distribute their children in the same manner. Perhaps I have my wish, ours is a marriage of sorts, but a hard one and full of loss.

Axcidium roams through the Clan, lithe and lovely, changing garb as easily as a guardian sheds a scale. She has grown into her lankiness and does the God proud, though she changes skins as I do, she never uses it to mislead our foes, for she stays in and among the Clan, and close by. She is fond of a black and blue number that smells of desert sand and my breath and crackles in static on cold nights. The prickle is…. surprisingly pleasant.

I do not think I have ever courted her properly, and I do not think that I wish to. If the eggs are small and the hatchlings not as… strong… somehow, it feels better to send them to our God. Easier. Though I do him a disservice in doing so. But I must pay my dues and my children are the coin. I raise them and train them, and I name them in the style of their parents; the Windsinger will know he is getting a full set.

It is horrible, trading in blood and bone, and hurts the most when they are your own.

I mentioned earlier that mine and the matriarch's relationship is something like a marriage. This is… not quite true… perhaps intimate friendship is better. I wish it could be more, but it will never be. Still…. we keep each other company. Wild things made civilized, we have far more in common with one another than we do with a large portion of our Clan. But Berghexe and Soul Balm and Immortalis also understand, they too keep their company among each other.

When Centhwevir converses with his Charge and the Wind in the still hours of the morning, deciding on where the Clan will move, what our shifting territory will cover… We hang back to let him listen. We phrase the plans for the day in a way that his Munin will understand and can relay to him. I wish there was an easier way. For all of us.


Axcidium is gone, in her place is this shaggy, simple thing.

It was late at night when we realized she was gone. That there wasn't a crackle of blue and black thunder glowing among the Clan as we gathered for the evening's roost.

She was never one to hunt abroad overnight, like some of our Long Patrol, but she was also never gone either, preferring to stay nearby and be a quiet comfort.

I worried she may have fallen far behind the pack during the move, as Chardonnay nearly had a few days before Scarlatti returned with her. Axcidium was not the tracker Sauvignon's daughter was, so if she were lost, she may well stay lost.

I instructed that the Clan continue bivouacking for the night, and sought out Jyouyou the Serpent and our mages Obversaria and Berghexe to accompany me to find our missing companion. We doubled-back down the Clan's trail, through the cliffs and bluffs of the Reedcliff Ascent. Using Berghexe's tracking skills and experience in the dark and gloom of evening to keep our path straight, Jyouyou's strength to carry the tundra along as Obversaria and I flanked them, our eyes open to any break in the path where she could have stepped astray, for anything that would attack a lone and untrained dragon.

We spread out at the last site we had all been together, looking through the regrown bamboo stands in an ever-widening circle. The wind blew against me suddenly and I caught the faintest, worrying whiff of her blood when a crash through the brush brought that burr-covered and bedraggled thing lurching out at us. It was a tundra, matted and panting, sides heaving as it left bloody prints in the dust and crushed grass. I am no green novice to startle easily, but the dragon hen was so pitiful that I was stunned into a frozen silence as she staggered towards us.

It stumbled right up to me and gave me a grin of exhausted delight before keeling right over into the grass in front of me, unconscious.

Jyouyou, bless the thespian, snapped out of her surprise first and immediately took to the air to see if whatever had chewed up that dragon so badly was in pursuit.

But she was all alone and still bleeding from scratches and gouges at her throat and legs, her tail and wingtips were scrapped raw. Berghexe stepped in to bind her up as best she could, tearing her most prized hood into strips as Jyouyou returned and told us the beast was by herself.

Berghexe wrinkled her nose as she worked, tying rough knots in the fabric, trying to keep Axcidium's fading scent over the overpowering reek of sweaty tundra fur and fresh blood that mingled all too well. And then she saw the bird skull necklace, partially smashed and wound tightly around the tundra's neck. She quickly loosened the necklace and held it up for my inspection. Bird skull fetishes were common enough, even in purple but…. but Axicidum was the only dragon I knew who had replaced the traditional black stone eyes for green.

"I… I think we have found our own." She said, and waved Jyouyou over to carefully carry the unconscious dragon back to the Clan, to the care of Kourin the Second and her longneck Menders, with their far more dextrous paws and deeper healing skills.


The Mountain Witch and I walked back in a kind of smothered silence. I stared at Jyouyou's retreating form, long and snake-like on the wind. I barely noticed where my feet landed, Berghexe kept me on the correct path. All I could do was chew a question over and over, bloody and sore as a broken fang. Heartbroken again.


'…. Why?'

She does not leave my side, day or night, and it is… difficult to get used to the feel of thick, cloying fur where there used to be soft, supple hide, crackling in the night. To listen to the muffled gurgle of bamboo leaves and fodder roiling around in her gut, grinding against gastroliths …. to her new habit of nibbling on the green ends of the woven bamboo reeds that make up our bed each night.

There is one thing though. The worst thing. Her silence.

We never spoke much, I will admit, but I liked hearing about the day from someone who did not have to be in control of much of it. It let me discreetly know whether I was doing well or not in my duties. I closed my eyes and listened, and her voice and crackle of her skin, the different perspective, was soothing.

But now I speak softly, because I am not used to speaking gently, and she bumps her nose against my chin at every other word and snuffles into the hollow of my throat and smiles at me in a guileless mindless way. She does not speak… and no one has been able to coax the meaning out of what she haphazardly scribbled the morning before she disappeared.

She just stares adoringly up at me, and she is not the hen I knew.



I knew it was coming…. but there is a difference between knowing something is coming and being ready when it arrives.

So it was when Alaman settled her great bulk beside me on the rise overlooking the newest camp and said it. The pavilions stood straight and proud and dragons came and went as their duties and desires called. I watched a few members of the Imperial Company snake their long way through the avenues around the bestiary and couturier…

"We have known each other for a very long time now," Alaman continued, gentle… but inexorable.

I sighed and looked down where I knew her gaze also lay, where Axcidium played with our children. Two this time, leggy and shaggy and half grown. Under any other circumstance watching mother and sons play tag in the spring grass was a warming sight, but if you knew how they had been…

"The treasure taken has been restored." I replied instead, and gathered my legs beneath me.

"Very considerate of you and much appreciated." She said, and fell into expectant silence again.


The grass rippled with an emerald sheen along the rise below us.




"You would have me change her?" I said, in tone that would have done Dulcia proud.

"She has changed rather a lot already." Alaman replied, mildly brushing off the frost, "And you are still maintaining your vows with her in this current state…"

"She is still in there… somewhere."

"Have you been able to get her to speak again?" Alaman countered, surgically precise.

"No." I pinched a blade between my claws, and looked out over them again, "I do not understand why she does not speak. A breed change does not affect one's mind." The grass split into ribbons in one motion.

"Neither of us would know." She shifted her bulk slightly and leaned on one elbow. "Our sole other examples are Rahjah, who was going mad to begin with and Corvidae. He was not among us nearly long enough to make any conclusions. Though, he is sniffy for a fae so Karearea tells me." She turned an arch glance to the game of tag-turned-keep-away. Axcidium held a cane of bamboo in her flat teeth and led our sons in a merry chase, and just for a second I thought I saw a familiar glint in her eye.

"You could change her back." Alaman said, and I felt the skin on my back twitch.

"She choose this!" I said and looked up at the guardian, daring her to say otherwise.

"Oh yes, she did," Alaman nodded, her green eyes hardening, "and for reasons of her own she is also choosing not to speak, not to interact with anyone but you or your brood." Her lip curled, "If she wore the form of a familiar no one would take her for being a dragon at all."

I sat up at that, bristling. "You dare Alaman!"

"Do I? This Clan has always allowed one to largely find their own place. The place she chose is to be a beast. Your beast. And your hesitation to gene her or put her back into her former shape does not seem to preclude you from carrying on with your 'project'."

My jaw snapped shut on that…..

"Hm. She does not seem to have anything to say about you leading her to brood another batch of your eggs, nor do you seem to care overmuch about her sentiments when you do reserve a nest space. So I ask you what the difference is between you taking her to nest as she is, and your reluctance to gene her as she is? Consider it." She stood then and carefully reached into the fold of her collar with two dainty claws and pulled a scroll from it. "The Lord enjoys all of his children in his wake, and ours, I feel, should maintain a cut above the rest.

She ignored the ice in my glare as she set the scroll down at my feet. "Duties and sacrifices, Excidium," She said and stretched her back, "As you have said. We all have our duties, for our great cause." She turned then and began to walk back towards the pavilions.

I stared at the roll of paper, the faint lines of writing visible through the wrong side of the page. "You claim to know what the gods desire in their tributes, Alaman?"

She paused, her back to me, "Do you?" She countered, her head rising to look over the expanse of the Clan. "There was a time when all exalts were valued equally." She looked back over her shoulder at me. "Times have changed and your humility in maintaining the garb and hide you were hatched with appears to matter very little to the gods now." She turned, lithe as a panther and came back up the rise, "The gods appear to change their whims every day now.”

The fan of her chest rose as her tone deepened in frustration. “Today in the markets the call has been for striped nocturnes.” She snarled, and dug her claws into the earth, “The day before, speckled spirals!” An irritated twitch from her shoulder sent a clod the size of my head rolling down the hillock behind her. “They do not ask for the humble purity of an unmarked hide, yours nor mine. Not anymore. They do not want it!"

I sighed, "It ought not matter the genes, the markings, it is the heart and training that matters above all."

"To us," She said with a shrug, her fans smoothing back slightly. "Who can say that there is no difference in the taste of the Singer's ambrosia if it is flavored with speckles or with ripples. Who of us can say his presence is not enhanced by a thousand faceted imperial wings in his wake. He so rarely deigns to speak to us anymore."

"… I never took you for a theologian, Alaman. I expect something like that from Tlamantini… or even Dulcia before you."

She snorted, "My Charge is commerce and the hoarding of gold and precious things." She leaned down to look me levelly in the eye, "You are my precious things as well, but I enjoy my gold, and I am perfectly willing to trade my precious things for more of it and for the good of my Clan if that is what the gods demand of me."

And then she turned and walked back to her own domain. And left me with choices.


I gazed at her as she slept, chin across my forearm, and I thought of the speckles and facets, the delicately drawn tundra on the scroll in a myriad of gene patterns.

…… I wondered when exactly this cold, calculating, slithering thing in my chest had once been my heart.

Mesacliff Harpy

Familiar

The powerful talons of harpies can crush the bones of their prey.

2700

Thunderstomp

Familiar

The Thunderstomp uses its great horn as a lightning rod, absorbing minor bolts of electricity from passing storms. This charged energy can then be expelled while the rhino is attacking its adversaries.

4800

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