Kali Lupine
Legacy Name: Kali Lupine

The Living Legend

She was born of darkness and light, from the souls of the dead and the living. She was meant to be the greatest living weapon ever created. An empty vessel into which The Record Keeper could pour her essence.

"Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history." ~ The Poisonwood Bible By Barbara Kingsolver

The BeginningIn the beginning, there was a kind of uneasy peace in Gaira. While the humans that inhabited the fledgling world squabbled amongst themselves, their creator and her foe simply watched and waited. She was The Record Keeper, and he The Unknown. Twin and yet opposite, they were beings of pure energy. As such they were unable to set foot upon the land they both equally longed to control.
The Record Keeper devised a way around this, creating empty bodies called vessels that she could inhabit to walk among those that lived on her world. She wished to be loved and adored as their goddess, but how could that be so if she was powerless to reach out to them? A period of trial and error followed, in which she learned that such empty bodies devoid of a soul were useless to her cause. Without a soul they simply withered to dust or rotted away. Such a vessel that would be fit to house The Record Keeper must also hold a soul. To create an empty body was child’s play to her, but a soul? Even she and her counterpart were unable to create a soul out of nothing.
She was unwilling to give up. Time, being of little consequence to a formless being of energy, wore on and on. Finally she seemed to have struck upon a glimmering of an idea, which she nursed until it grew to become something fantastic...and yet, terrible at the same time.
If she could not make a new soul, couldn’t she simply forge one out of other souls? A frightening thought to say the least, but it was not as if such a plan was devised by a lesser mortal. No it was she, The Record Keeper, being of purity and light. Who could call her methods into question? They would realize she had the whole realm’s best interests at heart. So forge she did, out of pieces of an unknown number of souls, one new complete soul. If such a thing could indeed be called such.
The Record Keeper was able, during this experiment, was able to cut away from the souls she had gathered the attributes she so desired her vessel to have. She was a vain and fickle goddess and her mortal shell had to be up to her rather lofty standards.
She forced life into this new soul by adding her essence to it, gifting it with uncommon power. But after all, it would be hers to wield would it not? There would be no danger in it. Unbeknownst to her, The Unknown was lurking close by, and was able to add to the mix some of his own essence. Who would this new weapon answer to now?

"The new was woven in with the old, like the darning of a sock" ~ Girl With a Pearl Earring By Tracy Chevalier

The Vessel
From the instant she was gifted life, she answered to no one save herself. She was not the mindless weapon The Record Keeper expected, but instead had her own will and personality. She knew what she was, and more importantly, what she did not want to be.
However, she did side with The Record Keeper...to an extent. She was not a being to be ordered around at the whim of a spoiled goddess, but rather someone who desired balance in the world. She saw herself as that balance, both literally and figuratively. She had been created by both good and evil, and was a mix of the two. A blend. Harmony. She wished such harmony upon all the lands of Gaira. For she knew there would be those in the future, beings of great power who thirsted too mightily for the war between sides to end. She was wise with the shared history of her creators, and she knew that neither side could be allowed to become too powerful. Thus was her first, and at present rather unheard of title: The Balance Keeper.

"...A particular sort of delight that something beyond us was large enough to destroy the inexorability of our routines." ~ Into The Forest By Jean Hegland

Kali Lupine
She lived and died, was reborn and lived again. Countless times, shaping history through the ages, with little care or attention to her own needs or wants. If she was unhappy in her work, it is unknown, but she did not complain...
She was born into her current body by means of a liaison between the werewolf queen Niesha and the dark dragon lord Krain. Such a coupling was not only unheard of, it was forbidden. For The Record Keeper had decreed that none of the great races, the werewolves, the werecats, and the dragons, would interbreed. With The Record Keeper a reason was needless, her will was law. But on this occasion she reasoned that such an offspring would have too much power.
Niesha became pregnant and fled her pack, for within all female werewolves the mothering instinct is strong, but it was even more so in her. She cradled the growing life within her and hid. The outcome was inevitable from the beginning. Her birthing den was found by members of her own pack, and judged a traitor, she was put to death. Not before, however, a lone pup was born to her. A female, and despite her parentage she was of royal blood. A pup is not an easy thing to destroy. True, perhaps in a purely physical sense it would have been nothing to kill her, but who among the females of her kind could look upon such a helpless pup and wish only death for her.
Perhaps it was fate, rather than loyalty or mother instinct, that drove a lone female to smuggle the pup far from the pack’s grounds. Little could be done for her though, and through no fault of her caretaker, she found herself in the hands of slave traders. She was purchased like a sack of grain, in her infancy, by the lord of a small human town. This lord’s name is lost to us, as the only living resident of the town refuses to utter his name. She was brought with the others purchased to be inspected. As an infant she was perhaps spared the humiliation aspect of being stripped and prodded, but the pain was no less intense when she was branded. Her number, XII, seared into the skin over her left eye. She grew, and became well known in the town by the only name that had accompanied her thus far: Kali.
While far from happy, she was a content child. She toiled hard in the mines that had been dug deep in the bowels of the earth around the town. She pleased her overseers with her strength and endurance, and as such received the small treats that kept her loyal. Kali knew she was a werewolf, but had no idea what other blood ran through her veins. Nor did she seem to realize that she had the power to overwhelm her captors and purchase her freedom with her own strength.
Who known how long this arrangement could have gone on, not indefinitely, of course. For we known what she did not, that she was The Balance Keeper reborn. At some point her power would awaken and her memories would flood back. This was not to be however. The lord had grown unusually attached to his young slave, at the tender age of twelve her trust was violated horribly by her owner. No care was given to the poor child, and anger and hate boiled over within her. Reacting to the intense emotions, a raw surge of power shook her and was unleashed upon the undeserving town. When Kali clawed her way out of the rubble, she was the sole survivor of the calamity.
Kali roamed the lands of Gaira for a time, living by her strength and fangs, with her steed Tundra to guide her. She was numb with shock and outrage, and it would be an unlikely hero that would soothe her tattered heart. His name was Sirus Griffin, a werecat, specifically a lion. They should have been enemies. They should have never fallen in love and broken the law by having a child. But Kali was not a typical werewolf. Not having been raised by her people, she had no aggression for this burly old werecat when they crossed paths. So fall in love they did, and from their love a child was born, one that broke The Record Keeper’s law yet again.
They had but a short time together, it was not long after their son was born that Sirus’ people learned of his betrayal. He was killed by treachery, for he was an old hand at battle and had survived many fights. Kali fled, thinking she had no chance against those that sought to destroy her and her child. Having only recently learned of her paternal linage, she fled to the domain of the dark dragons.
Krain, however, was not pleased to see his daughter. Here was the proof that he had violated the sacred law. And what’s more she had in turn violated said law with a child in her arms to prove it. Not that he cared himself for the law, simply for the repercussions of breaking it. He was offered the child to hold, but he only offered treachery. Between his claws the child’s life blood ran. When he turned to his horrified daughter, it was his turn to forfeit his life.
It was not long after this that Kali’s memories, and with it her power, returned. But her experiences had shaped her, she was no longer the content guardian of balance. She had become embittered and hardened. She swore to never again to love. To breed was one thing, necessary even. She had birth many half vessels in the past, all that she had nursed then given up to be raised by others. She could not afford to mother them, nor to grow attached. But they might be useful in the end, to the cause. Love however, had no more place in her heart.
She left behind her old title and it was replaced with a new one. Others noticed the cold power she exerted and the coldness with which she dispatched those she deemed a danger. She had always done her trade in secret, living in the shadows. Now for the first time she walked among those she both protected and killed, and they learned to fear her. She was known as the Living Legend. She never expected anything to change...

"We are our injuries, as much as we are our success." ~ The Poisonwood Bible By Barbara Kingsolver

Love
Then one day it came to pass that the angel king Lael, the father of one of her children, offended her to a degree she felt she could not ignore. He had a daughter, Alicorn, who was a halfling with a human mother. She was a young woman of grace and beauty, and many young men wished to make her their bride. The king had an unnatural lust for her however, and did not wish to let her out of her golden cage into the world. He desired to own her beauty for himself. He let it be known that anyone coming before him wearing the pelt of the Living Legend would have his daughter for their wife. He reasoned that would put an end to it all.
Perhaps he was vain, or stupid, but he truly never once thought this attention would vex kali. But vex her it did, and to the angel realm she went. He was much afraid of her, as she had single handed almost decimated the angel population years back. He assumed she was back to finish what she had started, but no she was not there for that. She calmly explained that she was, as he requested, standing before him wearing the pelt of the Living Legend. As such, she wanted her prize.
Lael started to object weakly, but Alicorn wisely wanted out and agreed to go with Kali. Once she had the princess, Kali no longer wanted her. Rather she had never wanted her, but wished only to vex her father. She tried to dump Alicorn along the way as she traveled, but the spoiled girl kept following her. As gruff and hard handed as Kali was with her, Alicorn refused to leave. Slowly love blossomed between the unlikely pair, to a degree Kali never thought possible.
In public Kali will never acknowledge her love for Alicorn, but in private she makes up for it. She so loves this girl that she has taken her for her wife, the first time she has allowed herself to be led to the alter. Time will only tell if they are allowed to remain together by fate...

"Love is a big and wonderful idea, but life is made up of small things." ~ Lullabies for Little Criminals By Heather O'Neill

Tidbits-Although Alicorn is Kali’s soul mate and true love, she also loves Scythe very deeply. She has taken him as her mate and allows him leeway that few others are gifted with.
-Kali’s mount is Tundra, a Draconic Steed, the first of his kind and one of the last. She refers to him as her brother.
-Kali prefers to remain in hybrid form, shuns human form, and sometimes travels in wolf form. She almost never takes her dragon form.
-Kali plans to keep her currant body, as she has found it suitably tolerant to her powers.
-Kali’s first love Sirus was reborn with a vessel body by The Unknown’s power. far from causing trouble he has taken another mate. Both Kali and Sirus still have soft spots in their hearts for each other.

Art
HA Representation
Art by me (User not found: talexia)
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Art by Kyonkichi
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Amazing art by Dracien
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