Calecor

ECOLOGY

Environment any
Organization solitary

When a world suffers a global calamity—a tremendous loss of resident life-forms due to asteroid impact, rapid climate change, war, or other apocalyptic scenario—the ramifications can ripple far beyond that planet. In some cases, as the torrent of souls leaves the planet. The essence of the fey world surrounds and contains this blast of anguished energy, waves of planar force wrapping around it like an oyster making a pearl, until the two elements combine and solidify into a new entity, a calecor.

A calecor is the fey embodiment of the planetary disaster that birthed it—nature’s violent reaction to the cycle of birth, growth, evolution, and death being catastrophically and irreparably interrupted. Biologists and mystics are unsure why some disasters result in the creation of a calecor while others do not. After all, most planets suffer events that were disastrous for some and beneficial for others, and evolution itself kills off existing species through natural processes, such as when newly evolved trees absorb enough carbon dioxide from an atmosphere to cause global cooling. To date, the best theory is that the dying fey associated with a world’s biome have an innate sense of a planet’s natural order, a sort of racial memory for the planet as a whole. Therefore, only extinctions that this aggregate fey consciousness deems the work of outside actors trigger enough resentment to coalesce into a calecor.

Calecors not only take forms suiting their planet’s primary environments, but also have sphinx-like shapes, with the body of a hunting cat and great wings of overlapping leaves.

A calecor’s body is formed not of flesh, but rather vines that wrap and twist around pieces of broken stone, such as rubble from a native civilization destroyed by the calamity.

Instead of a head, the vines of the creature’s neck writhe up and cradle a holographic globe split down the middle into two pieces: a perfect, real-time representation of the calecor’s bonded world. A calecor is 10 feet tall and can weigh more than 6 tons.

Always encountered singly, calecors have little culture and might not even be aware of the existence of other calecors. As soon as a calecor emerges into consciousness, its first action is to leave the fey world and travel back through the planar breach to the world whose death spawned it. Once there, it does everything in its power to undo the damage and reset the ecosystem to a stable state, magically tearing down the structures of those it deems responsible for the tragedy and terraforming regions too blasted to support life. So deep is the calecor’s bond to its planet that it instinctively knows everything happening on or within it, and it is able to see and hear events on the other side of the world just by thinking about it.

Instinctively able to speak any language, a calecor’s mind is nevertheless as broken as the globe that forms its head, its mind split between painful visions of the past and the overwhelming desire to heal and nurture. Those who attempt to make psychic contact with the creatures report a devastating, disorienting whirlwind of different thoughts—the death cries of a billion organisms—and such contact can seriously harm those who lack superior mental fortitude.

Although not inherently bellicose, and in fact gentle toward organisms it deems in need of recovery or repopulation, a calecor has no patience for those who would despoil its world or oppose its mission.

In such situations, interlopers might be warned off with painful visions of the terrifying apocalypse that led to the calecor’s birth. If that tactic doesn’t work, a calecor shifts gravity to keep foes off-kilter while it picks them off, breaking minds and disintegrating bodies until the threat is neutralized.

Those who can convince the calecor that their goals align, however, might find themselves with the most powerful ally on the planet.