Callie the Dog

Callie is a Blink Dog. She hid under your porch because she loves you.

In her youth, Chervina the Architect became entranced with the idea of raising Blink Dogs and installing them in the enclaves of her house--living embodiments of the mark of House Ghallanda. The difficulty, of course, was that Blink Dogs were almost impossible to tame, being very difficult to capture and even harder to keep contained. After many failed attempts Chervina gave up.

Then, years later, while overseeing the construction of an enclave on the edge of the Demon Wastes, Chervina came across a young female Blink Dog. The bitch was starving and near death, but she was also pregnant with a litter of pups. Of her pack there was no sign. Chervina took the poor creature in, hardly daring to hope that her long cherished dream might come true at last.

Sadly, the bitch was too far gone, and whelping her pups was more than her wasted body could withstand. Chervina buried the mother's body in sorrow, and then turned with joy to her three new Blink Puppies.

At first, Chervina thought that her inability to train the puppies was due to their youth. Then, as they grew, she suspected it was because she herself lacked an affinity for animals. It wasn't until a passing druid met the whelps that she realized the truth, and cursed herself for not seeing it sooner. There was only one reason a Blink Dog--an animal with the ability to teleport--would stay in such an inhospitable land as the Demon Wastes. The poor dead bitch had been helplessly stupid, and she'd passed that unenviable trait along to her pups.

Chervina tried, she really did--she even gave the dogs the gift of speech, in the hopes that greater communication would allow them to learn--but in the end it was no use. She would never be able to breed noble mascots from such tainted stock. She gifted the puppies to Yoren d'Ghallanda as a novelty, and washed her hands of the whole affair.

Two of the puppies seemed content to live as lapdogs in the Gatherhold, but the third--a runty female--disappeared and was never heard from again. Not among the Ghallandas, anyway. But a roaming Druid, one who had once visited Chervina the Architect, now had a new puppy that gamboled at his heels.