[s0] New compounded description

[chalcedony_starlings]

Main description

Dragon. Or dragons? They look like one, but with a striking color scheme. Much of them is split down the middle between black and white feathers, but if you look closely, the feathers often move more independently than they really ought to. Apparently this creature is based on a flockmind of drackels—but now they gleam, too, with pervasive interlacings and augmentations in glorious bronze…

The whole is somewhat larger than a horse in each primary dimension, along with at least four meters of total wingspan. The body plan broadly matches the usual for a quad dragon, though the legs end in paws with more digits than you might expect, and the tail has a forked tip. Most of the surface of the body is black on the left and white on the right, with traces and dots of bronze scales covering it like circuitry. The wings are an exception, each one composed of broad expanses of chaotic black and white feather surfaces bordered at the front by a jointed coppery structure.

Further up, the neck is primarily composed of chaotically braided drackel weave with a more regular bronze spiral overlay. The head mostly resumes the bilateral coloration across the tapering muzzle and the macroeyes above, and the back of the head is graced with three pairs of bronze-tipped horns.

Further down, most of their chest and belly is covered with paler, broader, overlapping bronze escutcheons which reflect their mood.

Dangling awkwardly around their neck is a square rod of a material somewhere between marble and crystal, attached to a cord at both ends. The rod has two patterns of angular joined-up writing carved into alternating sides of the exterior; the one on the lighter sides translates to ‘QUARTZWING’, and the one on the darker sides to ‘METIAGON’.

Legs

Their legs are almost fully four-way symmetrical with each other except for the feather scheme. Any joints are hidden except when bent, though their movement suggests a usual one middle joint on each. The exteriors are mostly vertically-oriented feathers, but lines of bronze reinforcing struts are visible on the outside, though the connections within are hidden. The ‘paw’ at the end of each leg ends in ten to fourteen ‘digits’ radially splayed from the trunk, with a padded bowl-like shape in the middle. And yes, as you might have guessed, each digit is primarily a beak, and they do sometimes choose to open their eyes…

Tail

Their tail begins from an area where the two sides meet, with a radial surface pattern of bronze leading inward to the base. The tail itself is composed of double-stranded avian filament, black and white drackels attached to each other one-for-one along most of the length before separating closer to the tip. The tips differ subtly in shape: the last constituent on the black tip faces outward so that its beak forms a sort of spike, but the analogous one on the white tip displays a poof of feathers instead.

Wings

Their wings display streaky chaotic two-dimensional patterns of black and white drackels, with the feather tiling regular in positioning but chaotic in coloration at each point. Along the front of each wing are four narrow coppery rods connected by rotatable joints, with the last rod being much shorter than the others and swept backward. Extending front-to-back within each wing are bronze support struts, barely visible between the feathers, with one requisite strut for each joint and then others as needed. The back edges of the wings are tightly defined by lightly jagged dashed lines of packed sideways beaks pointing outward.

Head

Their head carries an angular, elegant face, with mostly black feathers on the left and mostly white ones on the right, but with much more speckling of opposite coloration than on the body. The top of the muzzle and the back part of the chin are covered with dense overlays of bronze scales. Within the muzzle are two rows of ‘teeth’—and yes, each tooth is a beak, and they can nibble individually.

The two primary macroeyes above are concave and composed radially of eighteen to twenty closely packed microeyes each, belonging to inward- pointed radial structures of drackels. Most of the left macroeye reflects in green, and most of the right in purple, but there are usually one or two microeyes of the opposite color as well. A third quasi-macroeye sits further up in the middle, but it's covered with alternating black and white feathers in a camera-shutter-like pattern, reinforced with a circle of bronze dots around it, and it's hard to see what's behind all that.

From the back of the head, trailing partway down the neck, are three pairs of horns, with bodies made of a marbled black-and-white stony material but tipped in cones of gleaming bronze. The top pair of horns is Bezier-like with opposite bends near the base and tips, but the two below have simpler lightly downward curves.

Drackels (info field)

Drackel, n. One of the presumably-eusocial, reconfigurable, semi-intelligent birdlike creatures who compose Chalcedony and their ‘aura’. Also presumably applies to others of the same genus, should any ever show up, though they don't seem very common around here. They're not strictly birds, and they're not necessarily detachable from each other, depending on how they're currently set up, but that's sort of the base state. Etymology: from “dragon element” by analogy to “pixel” and “voxel”, influenced by phonetic similarity to “grackle” (but note the differing endings).