Kjaldasai

She found the hatchling collapsed in the bamboo near the embassy entrance. At first she was simply shocked and alarmed; who had left a hatchling here?! Where had it come from? Why did it look so strange? What had happened to its front legs?
But then a vision surfaced, like a bubble in honey, somewhere back in her long, long memory: an ancestral recollection passed down to her from her foremothers.

Fire raining from the sky, crashing down upon the continent, leaving pits and craters behind; burning, burning, burning. Ash blanketing the ground where there should have been snow. Black and gray dirtying the white ice, charred trees and scorched earth revealed as the snow was melted away and the very soil burnt to cinders.
Figures above, wheeling through the clouds where she could not reach; spikes and spines, long curved fangs with fire spilling through them. Their enemies, the Flamecaller's children, come to strike at the heart of the ice.
A chant, cutting through the vicious song, of many voices together that rose until they called a storm, one that passed her by without touching her but roared through the enemy with a violence even they could not summon up. She watched their forms thrash and freeze, finally dropping out of the sky to the earth with heavy thuds as their wings iced over, and the storm - which seemed to last forever - passed away to the north.
She remembered them struggling occasionally, in the winds, before they froze over completely. She knew some of them still lived, still fought, as she and the others shattered their frozen forms. She knew she -

"Oh, no," she whispered, eyes going wide. "Child, how... how do you exist? How are you here? What brought you from the past to me now?"
The hatchling stirred, but did not wake or answer. She reached forward, as delicately as she could, and used one claw to poke at its eyelid. The eye underneath, devoid of a pupil like all its ilk, was - to her astonishment - not the Flamecaller's orange, but instead a pale, cool blue-purple. Just like her own.
Ice?! she thought, and pulled her paw back, staring. That couldn't be. These were the Flamecaller's children, the very essence of her existence, how could they possibly -
She thought about the imperial with the green eyes, exuding the power of Nature; she thought about the bogsneak and the spiral she knew who reeked of Plague. She recalled the ridgeback that embodied the ocean.
Perhaps, she thought, we can defy our creators, our natures. Perhaps -
This is a banescale, she thought, and reached out with one paw, claws long, sharp, glaring in the daylight. My ancient enemy. That which sought to wipe us from the face of the planet, destroy us and everything we stood for, eradicate all traces of us and our magic. They killed thousands. This is my enemy.
Carefully, she scooped the hatchling up and cradled it close to her chest. "I'm sorry," she whispered, nuzzling the youngling's sleeping face. "I promise we'll all do better this time. Come on."




(Art by Drytil, click to follow!)