Caelians

It is said that the first caelians were humans, once. They were the first to ascend the Coronus mountains, and what they found atop the highest peak was glory itself, woven into the stars. The revelation they experienced there changed them, and they sprouted wings that let them dance in the light. That, however, was a very long time ago. In this day and age, the magic is faltering. Children are born with twisted wings, and all live beneath a broken halo. Today's caelians look far different from the caelians of yore, as, increasingly, caelians lose what made them special and more and more resemble ordinary humans.

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.

Body Language

When you startle them, they poof.

Eyes

One of the key features of caelians are their many secondary eyes: the higher the number, the more unusual. These secondary eyes may have eyebrows or eyelashes of their own, or they may be without. For the especially lucky caelians, all of these eyes will work perfectly, allowing the caelian in question to have a greatly expanded field of vision. Most, however, are not so lucky. For many, their secondary eyes don't open at all. Some might have an eyeball still, able to be palpated under the surface or manually revealed, but others may simply have a slit in their skin and flesh beneath.

For those whose eyes do open, vision varies wildly. If there is no pupil, then there is no vision at all. If there are too many pupils, or misshapen ones, or no iris, then there is vision, but it cannot focus properly nor can it adjust to light. Vision from eyes like this is nearly always blurry or shadowed in some form or another. Vision can be so bad that there's no recognition at all beyond light, shadow, and the suggestion of form. Some have made glasses for their secondary eyes, but this hasn't caught on widely.

Typically, those with sensitive and painful secondary eyes simply cover them with clothing, but some take it a step further. In extreme cases--where it always hurts to see, or the eye is in a particularly inconvenient location--some opt to have these excess eyes removed. As the eyes are a part of who they are, even in caelian communities beyond Dolsia, this is controversial, yet still worthwhile for many.

Primary eyes--those on the expected area of the face--aren't immune to problems either. Occasionally, caelians are born without these eyes at all. But more typically, they have visual impairments: nearsightedness, farsightedness, colorblindness, and the like. Dolsia is the birthplace of spectacles, to fill this need.

Traditionally, caelian eyes are marked by colorful scleras with pale irises. Multiple sclera colors could even be found on the same individual as a mark of beauty. But in today's day and age, in some, even that feature is disappearing, as children are born with white irises and colorful sclera.

Halos

Caelians have a natural ability to perform light magic, and this magic can take a variety of forms. Caelians can create small glowing balls of light, shapes of any sort, and even (typically harmless) lightning strikes. Any idea that involves an intangible source of light is within their capacity. Their ability to sustain this light is entirely dependent on how stable their halo is: a fully formed, unbroken halo provides the most stable magic. Caelians with glitching halos tend to create glitchy lights, and caelians with melting halos tend to create lights that simply melt away. Fractured halos tend to have lights that flicker, and starred halos tend to fall to pieces. Only whole halos and only whole halos produce consistent light. Caelians with mixed halo types often experience a random set of effects.

The number of halos a caelian has reflects the power of their light magic. Just one halo translates to one small ball of light, whereas a caelian with nine or more halos could singlehandedly light a stadium or city block.

Halos form around a caelian's magical center: this is the place it's easiest for caelians to manifest light from. Halos hover, on average, about six inches away from the skin, though this distance can be much shorter or larger, especially if the halo encircles a limb. A halo will never be further than touch range. They can bounce around a bit as the caelian moves: for example, if a caelian turns their head quickly, their halo may lag a second behind. Halos tend to move closer to their owners and avoid clipping into objects when possible. Some caelians can consciously move their halos around a few inches, and this is often shown off in a similar way that kids like to show off being double-jointed.

Tangible halos can be grabbed and taken, but being separated from their halo makes a caelian incredibly sick. Taking a halo is like ripping away part of someone's soul, and taking one for too long will eventually kill them. How fast it does so depends solely on how many they have.

Sleep

They don't have much of a circadian rhythm.