Editing Caelians (section)

== Aging ==
When caelians are born, they are typically featherless and hairless, with bright splashes of shining color, every eye shut, and their bare, bony wings jutting out. Their eyes are quick to open, and their soft, fluffy chick feathers follow quickly. The down of childhood may not exactly match what a child's adult feathers look like. They don't have halos for most of their childhood, either.

With the advent of puberty, all this changes. This can be a traumatic time for many caelians, as it's when many abnormalities make themselves apparent. They shed their chick feathers--if they shed them at all--in favor of their adult feathers. Feathers can some in weak and fragile, leading to tattered looks, or curly and useless for flight. The growth spurts at this age also affect wings, so children find out if their wings are too small, or growing at different rates, or similar issues.

Over the course of childhood, vague clouds of light gather around the child's body, and these clouds slowly condense into halos. Again, during puberty, these halos settle into their final shapes.

Caelians have the second longest potential lifespans: most caelians will live to see their 100th bday. (Cave-ins are an on-going issue in Dolsia that lowers average life expectancy, but the technology has reached a point that those aren't remotely as common as they used to be.) The biggest issue facing elderly caelians is respiratory illness. The stale, stagnant air of the caves--polluted with dusts molds and more--takes a toll eventually. 

Visually, their markings pale with age and, sometimes, shift color. The color shifts are never extreme and typically just reveal a color that was already present. For example, a reddish-black fades to maroon, or orange fades to yellow. The process resembles sun-fading. 

Elderly caelians generally have less feathers as well. It takes them much longer to grow in feathers after a molt, and the molts aren't quite as clean, giving most older caelians a scruffy, ruffled look.