BREEDS

You probably have noticed that there’s some differences between, say, me and you. I mean, you’re up on that branch, for one thing, and I’m down here on the ground looking up at you and risking having folks think I’m crazy if they drive by and notice me chatting you up. You’re probably more comfortable that way, cuz it’s how you were born… with the feathers and all. I’ve been around long enough to be okay in both forms… I just happen to think this one looks better, what with my fancy lapel pin and rings. Jewelry doesn’t work so much in bird-form. But I digress… There are two breeds of Corax: homid and corvid. But honestly, it doesn’t matter much to us whether you were born with arms or wings. We don’t discriminate; we all pretty much start out on the same footing, regardless of what form we were born in.

 

Okay, so, in the spirit of full disclosure, there’s more than just a sense of fair play in why we don’t tend to pick sides based on whether we had feathers or not at birth. Honestly, it’s kind of a moot point: we’re all “made” Corax more than born one. You’re not one of us because a Mommy Corax loved a Daddy human — or raven — very much, or any of that cabbage patch, summoning the stork nonsense. You’re a Corax because someone — another Corax — saw you and thought you would make a good wereraven yourself. Then they did the rite and awhile later — congratulations, it’s a Corax! Okay, so it’s a little more complicated than that, but… you get the idea. Oh, one last thing — there’s no such thing as a metis Corax. We can have kids with each other — don’t look at me like that, kid, I don’t mean you and me, specifically, just Corax with other Corax. Anyway, we can inter-breed and all; the kids just can’t become Corax themselves. You can’t tie a fetish egg to the spirit of a Corax-Corax crossbreed, because Raven’s a slippery cuss and he likes us to spread the wealth. Bear that in mind when you’re thinking about nesting. It can be heartbreaking: believe me, I know.

 

• Corvid: Corvids

are born ravens, like you. If someone’s set you up with the Spirit Egg Rite, y’all generally undergo your First Change when you’re about 8 or 10 months old. The bad news is, that means you don’t tend to know much about a lot of human stuff.

You can fly like the dickens, though.

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And the other good news is, you’re not going to die of old age at fifteen or twenty. If you keep your beak out of trouble — and good luck with that — you can live as long as a normal human does, rather than as short as a bird. Let’s see, what else. Y’all are usually pretty cliquish, talkative — even by our standards — and a little fuzzy on the notion of property rights where shiny things are concerned.

 

• Homid: As for my kind? We tend toward the twitchy loner type. Most of us are tallish, and skinnyish, and we’ve to a tendency to have noses that politer folks call “sharp” or “aquiline”. Honestly, we look kind of like walking can-openers, if you ask me… but folks usually don’t. We get kind of focused — normal folks call it obsessive-compulsive, but we know it’s just paying attention. And we like to move around a lot. Homids like me get screwed in the flight department but pretty much have the rest of the spectrum to play with.

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TRIBES

Technically, we don’t have tribes. We’re generalists, built to survive anywhere, under any circumstances. It just doesn’t make any sense to have one batch of us who can call down Helios and another group that can eat eyeballs to see what a dead man saw, but never the twain shall meet. Gaia needs us all to be able to do what we have to in order to bring back the stories. And besides, we’re all such blabbermouths that none of us would be able to keep from spilling the beans on our group’s super-secret Gifts or Rites or whatever. Before you know it, we’d all know what the rest knew, anyway. That being said, though, we went intercontinental back in the days when obsidian arrowheads were hightech. That means that we’ve got our own little set of subcultures, if you know what I mean. Here are the big breakdowns. There’s a few dozen smaller ones out there, but these are the ones you absolutely need to know if you’re going to stay out of trouble.

 

Chasers

So, first off, we’ve got the Chasers — and I mention this because you kinda got that feel to you. Chasers are loose murders of young brats like yourself who get together to play X-Files. They hang out and dare each other into poking their beaks into places they really can’t handle on their own — and probably shouldn’t as a group either. Sure, it’s fun to go poking after spooky stuff; all kinds of interesting things hiding out in the shadows. Just make sure if you join up with a band of these guys, that at least one of you has the brains to keep an eye on where the exits are. Finding a Nest O’ Banes is all hunky dory; deciding to play “Clean Out the Nest” with your little buddies is a one-way ticket to the Great Deep Fryer in the Sky. Don’t be dumb enough to think stumbling onto something interesting means you’re tough enough to deal with it yourself… That’s what the wolves are for — point-and-click furry missiles of Gaian destruction, and all that. Anyway, running with a trouble-squad can be fun for a while, but most Chaser murders break up after a year or two. That’s about how long it takes for the members to realize they cramp each other’s styles, and go off their separate ways.

 

Leshy

Leshy are from Russia and that neck of the woods. When they’re in homid, most of them are bald — not to mention missing one ear — but they do make pretty birds. They’re tricksters as good as any of us: forest-critters who keep to the deep woods when they can. Lots of the Leshy are corvid — maybe three out of four? And they’re more paranoid than the rest of us put together, but that just makes them really good at spying and watching each other’s backs. Oh, and once they start talking? Pack a lunch. You’re gonna be there a while.

 

Hermetic Order of Swift Light

So, we’re not all fun and games around here. The Hermetic Order is the business arm of the Breed. Basically, they do their Gaia’s-gossip thing for the right price. For decades now, they’ve been working out of the Big Apple, where they rent this set of posh offices on Madison Avenue that could keep the rest of us in bird-feed for the rest of our lives. The sign on the door says “Helios Overnight Services”, and if you need to get something important delivered — Grand Klaives, corporate blueprints, hostages, you name it — they’re the people to go to. But their big money makers aren’t “things” at all — they’re secrets. Passwords, bleeding-edge code, blackmail fodder, and anything else that someone doesn’t want brought to light? Chances are that HOS has it available — for a price. By tradition, there’s only one actual Corax in the HOS nest, but that’s just a formality. A bunch of the rest of us are involved, on a freelance basis, running packages, gathering secrets, scouting on potential clientele, and the like. And some of those “freelance” positions have pretty much become full-time, long-term gigs, if the rumors are right. Tradition is tradition, but since communication tech has gone global, things have really picked up for the Hermetic Order of Swift Light. Their CEO is riding the headwinds of technology at this point, and there are big things on the horizon for the “company”. Who knows, maybe a time will come when we’re all working for HOS, in one way or another.

 

The Gulls of Battle

On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got the scrappers. A quick heads up, kid: these guys aren’t weirdoes that cross-bred with seagulls or something freaky like that. The Vikings gave the Corax that name, back in the day, and some of us still claim those ties — even if they haven’t ever set foot in Scandanavia. Gulls are kind of a paradox. On one hand, they have first-hand ties to Hugin and Munin — Odin’s two best birdie buddies, Thought and Memory. Gulls spend a lot of time on the wing looking for epic stories, digging up forgotten tales of old, and that kind of stuff. On the other hand, they like corpses as much as any of us (and more than some). And the one place you can find both story fodder and dead bodies is the battlefield. If you want to find a fight, follow the Gulls. I mean, the Valkyries used to ask these guys directions. Think about that. The Morrigan And, speaking of scrappers…

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The Morrigan

are a trio of battle-crow biddies, old and dry and fierce as autumn leaves. They’re from the Old Country… But they can show up anywhere — well, anywhere there’s about to be a hella buncha blood and battle, anyway. These gals don’t show up to have a little chat; if you see them, you can bet there’s death and destruction on the horizon. There are always only three members of the Morrigan, and they serve Raven’s… less pleasant… aspect. They’re all about endings — usually the permanent kind. In fact, whenever a Corax joins the Morrigan, she loses her old name and takes up a new one. And it’s always one of the faces of the Morrigan from legend. Bebd, Nemain and Morrigu — always the same names, ever since they started writing legends down. It doesn’t matter if it’s your lover of 50 years who gets picked; the woman she was dies the second they settle that new name on her, and her old life is gone. All she lives for, from then on, is battle. The legends say that Morrigan and Dagda were married once, then something happened and she all turned cold and bloody. That was, as you can imagine, the end of that happy union. The same thing happens with her namesakes. You can see the story all over again every time a new raven joins the Morrigan. One light dies in her eyes and a new, cold one starts burning. It’s creepy as hell. Word is that all three of them have the Sight, that the wind tells them when the next big battle is going to be. I’m not saying it’s not true — they’re always there every time the wolves take up serious arms, and goodness knows the Garou are about the biggest battle-slingers around. The Morrigan always bring eagles with them, too. Big, sharp-beaked buggers that feed on the corpses after the Morrigan drinks their eyes. You see three of our kind — all female — and a bunch of eagles showing up somewhere? You either high-tail it out of there, or
prepare to be a part of the fighting, cuz things are about to get crazy.

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Murder’s Daughters

Now, the Morrigan are scary because they’re genuinely nasty, and because Raven’s put his blessing of murder down on them. Murder’s Daughters, on the other hand, are scary ’cause they’re wannabes. Each and every one of them wants to be part of the Morrigan someday, and they’ve got this crazy notion that the way to one of the three spots is to out-nasty the rest of the gang. It’s stupid, ’cause I ain’t yet seen one of the Daughters get picked for promotion, but they keep trying to prove they’re the baddest of the bad, in hopes of catching someone on the nomination committee’s eye. They’re always picking fights, causing trouble, and generally being the biggest bitches they can get away with. A lot of the time, they end up in over their heads; they spend a lot of time after dark in the sorts of clubs where the vampires go, trying to prove they’re more bad-ass than they really are. Trying to be bad, yep, yep, yep. Pulling it off? Sometimes. But more often than not, they end up stirring up trouble for themselves and everyone around them, or worse yet — proving how rough-and-tumble they are by turning on anyone who doesn’t take them as seriously as they think they deserve to be taken. A murder of pissed-off sisters will pluck out your eyes and use ’em for marbles — and they’re always looking for excuses to be pissed off. Oh, and it’s a girls’ club only. No boys allowed. It’s a time-honored tradition dating back all the way to at least 1952, which is the first time anyone was gutsy enough to use the name in public. On the other hand, I’m smart enough not to argue. I like my eyes right where they are, and I never was any good at marbles.

 

The Sun-Lost

These guys are stuff you should know about, even though they aren’t technically a group. Sun-Lost is what we call those who’ve turned their back on Helios and wandered off into the Umbra full time. It’s crazy, I know, to cut yourself off from what amounts to half your soul, but some folks do. They just lay down their responsibilities, their messages… even their eggs in some cases… and go wandering off into the Deep Umbra to see what might be seen. Most of the time, they’re never heard from again. We figure they just see something shiny out there and… keep going. But sometimes they come back into the shallows — the Near Umbra, or even out into the “normal” world.

If you meet up with one, prepare to hear some fascinating stuff — just don’t let it give you any ideas about heading out to the Great Black Beyond yourself, fluffy-feathers. There’s stuff out there that would eat a little-bit like you without even needing to spit out the bones. Most of the time, though, even if a Sun-Lost comes back, we don’t hear about it first hand. We just get sigilscratched reports of things they’ve seen. It’s almost always something important — you don’t wing your way back from the Black just to say “Hey, saw a Bane with three extra toes today”. So if you find something like that — you tell folks about it. No one really knows how many Sun-Lost there are… I mean, time works different out there, and the rules are all wonky. One thing is for sure, though — when one of them dies, we know about it. A single black feather shows up at the spot where the lost one’s spirit egg hatched. No one knows how it gets there. Wind-spirits, I’m guessing, or some sort of supernatural woodgie that makes at least a part of them come full cycle back to their beginnings. But it happens. That’s why we’re pretty sure that Huginn and Munin are still alive, by the way. No one’s ever seen a feather for them. And yes, we know their hatching places. Stupid question. Of course, we know. We’re Corax, ain’t we?

 

Tulugaq

The Tulugaq are found in the Pure Lands — that’s like Canada and the US… (Don’t look at me like that. They were pure, once upon a time. That’s another story, kid; can we get back to the one I was telling?) Anyway, the word Tulugaq is actually Inuit, and some of the folk who claim it are actually from up north. But they’re just as likely to be related to the Cherokee or the Miwok or the Paiute as the Inuit themselves. None of the rest seem to mind that their name is co-opted though, so who am I to raise a fuss? The Tulugaq (you pronounce it just like it’s spelled, honest) are cool customers; at least that’s the impression they’ll give you right before you realize they’ve stolen your shorts. They’re the trickster’s tricksters, and they take the job damn seriously, which means they’re always practicing — and pissing people off. Raven and Coyote are both big players in a lot of Amerind myths, so it’s no surprise that the Tulugaq hang with the Nuwisha more than most. What is surprising is that they’re still speaking to one another after all the jokes they’ve pulled, but I guess you get pretty forgiving when you know it’s going to be your turn up to bat next, so to speak.
As for the rest of us? It takes a while for a Tulugaq to open up to outsiders, but once you establish some trust, they’re as chatty as anyone else. Spend a few weeks or months following one around and learning the way they think — then zap them with a prank they can respect. One of the kind that teaches something, points out a weakness, or is just too clever to stay mad about. If you can pull that off, you’ll be all right with the Tulugaq and the werecoyotes both.

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