Carolyas

"Please give me art. I'm beautiful and important and I deserve it!"

Cold and gleaming, Carolyas’ metal always stands out in crowds - not that he’s often seen in crowds. He wasn't always this way. There was once a quiet, complacent dragon - but accidents happen.

In the Soul Drone colony, Carolyas is the leader, the guide, and the life-giver. Although his partner in creation, Missara, breathes the actual life into the creatures, it is Carolyas who trains them, gives them purpose, and harnesses their full potential. He sees over the colony, using a special stone embedded in his mechanical form. It is not truly a “stone”, in the organic sense, but a fortified mass of circuit boards and signal chips that connect him electronically to his drones. Carolyas’ long arm extends its control over every single Soul Drone that Missara creates - he has a grand plan for all of them, although one would be hard-pressed to extract this exact plan from him.

He knows how they feel, he says; he was one of them, once. Alone, confused, half-dead, and half-robot. He wandered this way for days. For years afterward, he was alone. Forever droning in his head was a tiny voice that listed its desires for Carolyas. Carolyas has, to this day, not learned much about where this voice comes from - only that it must have been embedded in him when he was created anew, by whoever or whatever did such a thing. At first, the voice drove him insane, murmuring constantly without end, getting louder when it felt he wasn’t listening. Eventually, he tuned it out, or perhaps simply became numb to it, letting it subliminally direct him.

One day, the voice began directing him. Automatically he followed, onward through whole realms, over all kinds of terrain, until he was face to face with a dragon named Missara. He thought he had met his creator. Her pale eyes reflected to him his own face for the first time in years, and he saw then how beaten down the journey to Missara had made him.

After some time was taken to nurse him back to health, the pair began talking about their respective stories. Missara encouraged Carolyas to listen more closely to the voice in his head, and together, they began documenting its directions. This is how they built their first sophisticated, organic robot. Although Missara had built drones before, she had never made one quite like this. They realized they were stronger together, and could even harness the robots for something bigger than menial tasks.

Carolyas allows no dragon to be stronger than him, although he doubts this is possible anyway. Of all the drones, he is the most intelligent, astute, and able. This comes with advantages when controlling them.

Carolyas and Missara are not quite this far yet. For now, the drones prepare the colony - building dens, defending the territory, and gathering food to fuel Missara’s soul-breathing methods.

The hive also spends their time scavenging for “parts”, as Carolyas calls them, both flesh and metal, that the pair can study and use in new drones. Some drones are fully metallic, while some are cyborgs, like Carolyas. Some are not one dragon, but a patchwork of “perfect parts”. One day, these drones will be warriors, in Carolyas’ great hive.