Hammaspeikko

Hamma was born in Punjam Hy Loo, much like any Sister of Flight. However, her mother wasn't an avian humanoid like the rest of them, but one in a string of insectoid Sisters tracing back to a "normal" Sister of Flight who had been transformed by the flying elephants.

Now, we know the flying elephants of Punjam Hy Loo can drain all the negative emotions away from a person. It's a defence mechanism, grooming behaviour, and a method to form semi-symbiotic bonds with species that can keep pests away from their nests. Such a bond existed between the elephants and the Sisters of Flight, with the elephants aiding in keeping doubt and conflict away from the Sisters. But once — as Hamma can recall being told at least, as it's hard to be certain of the past of a people who enjoyed stories and song so much they saw little reason in writing things down — a troubled Sister was secretly so bitter and lonely and envious that the touch of the elephants changed her down to her core, and she fell ill and moulted all her feathers before emerging different.

The Sisters of Flight looked after their changed kin — light-heartedly dubbed a "Swarm Sister" — but it became quickly apparent something was wrong, and she wasn't built to live in the same way as her avian counterparts. Through a handful of tragically short-lived generations a list of abilities and needs were found and catered to, starting with the initial discovery that a Swarm Sister could, even weak and nearing the end of her life, enclose herself into a silky cocoon and effectively die, with a child bearing a resemblance to her emerging a while later. And ending with the discovery made too late to fully save Hamma's mother of the intended diet of a Swarm Sister.

Hamma was raised among the Sisters with their own young, then, her diet consisting of crystallised emotions collected from the nests of the flying elephants. Aside from that and her looks, she was a perfectly normal Sister of Flight herself.

She learned with them, trained with them, sang and flew with them, and matured with them. She had friendships and loves. And then once she was a full blown adult, she realised the crystallised emotion didn't nourish her anymore, not in the way it had before. And one morning she woke up in her silky-papery nest and found a few tiny, pearl-like… eggs. And like any functional adult, decided she did not have the emotional bandwidth to process that and instead ignored them and went about her day, only to discover the next morning that her stash of food was gone, but her nest instead housed a handful of little, finger-sized… wasplings. Who were busy producing some kind of honey directly into one of her food containers.

A strange thing, but with the help of some of the elders Hamma understood that this must be what a Swarm Sister is supposed to be, and that while consuming memories of emotions helped her grow into a person, now she needed to feed them to her little wasplings, who would then in turn produce honey that gave her the nourishment she needed.

Unfortunately, the ceaseless buzzing about of the ever-increasing numbers of wasplings — they didn't seem to tire nor die as long as food was plentiful, and Hamma didn't have the heart to just dispose of any of them, because weren't they family too, and ones that looked like her to boot? — started to make some of the more skittish or younger Sisters nervous, so Hamma set out to settle somewhere else, from where she could still easily travel to Punjam Hy Loo to help look after the elephants and collect the fragments form their nests. She was there when the Maharaja first arrived to hunt, but didn't linger afterwards, still in a crucial stage of setting up her own home. When she next returned to the palace, she heard of Rashmi and Haroom and their child, and sent many of her wasplings into the jungle in the hopes that Rashmi would send her a message and ask her to shelter them.

She never heard from them. She never heard from any of the Sisters of Flight. She was stuck fighting against invasion on her Hive from creatures of the region she settled in and once her home and hatchery were secure again and she could visit Punjam Hy Loo again… it was like a haunted museum, filled with wooden sculptures.

Hamma had learned the stories and warnings on why every sister must excel in battle, never to fall for an enemy or accident. She searched through the empty halls for one specific statue, and called all her wasplings to scour the surrounding forests and villages for a sign as well. But she couldn't find Rashmi. And that, combined with what she'd been told the last time she visited, painted a nasty picture. Everyone was gone. Every Sister of Flight.

But not her.

Hamma isolated herself in her Hive for years, only emerging when her wasplings reported there were no shards of emotion to harvest from the elephants. No Sisters meant no symbiosis, and thus no steady supply of nourishment for the wasplings. Their numbers started to dwindle. If they all died Hamma would as well, and then no one would remain to remember. So in a desperate bid Hamma sent the healthiest of her wasplings out with a number of little pearly eggs, with orders to follow the ideas of the mad maharaja and target teeth, preferably loose ones from children so as to not do permanent harm, but any damaged ones as well.

Somehow, it worked. And so Hammaspeikko paints and weaves murals and tapestries of life in the time of the Sisters within her Hive, with a complicated mix of longing and betrayal, and scrounges up what she can in a world devoid of the people who cared about accommodating her needs.