Vultura

The birds flutter down when she arrives to feed them and clean their enclosure. It's not just that she tends them - previous Strigekeepers haven't always been so well-regarded by the birds - but that she resembles them too, two legs with long-taloned toes, two purple feathered wings, jewelled jesses to mark them as royal...

In her family, all that was cause for disdain, to be so different to any other dragon, to be a banescale, but here, among distant cousins that so pride the birds she resembles, it secures her a home. Her cousins are strange folk - so focussed on magic, so keen on their secrecy - but she can hardly mind that. Their magic is fascinating, often beautiful, something she never had cause to learn or be allowed before she left. It is slow going, learning to cast, and her best magic comes from divining fortunes, from strige-work and not anything else, but it is something that makes her more secure in her new home and she cannot be anything but happy about that. She has a home at last, one where she is accepted.

A home in danger perhaps - whispers of war drift through the air like feathers - and she's not sure how she feels about that, the family she was raised by and the family she dwells with going to war but, well.

She is a banescale. The birds are seen as ill-omens by outsiders. Perhaps it is only inevitable.

Besides, her responsibility is to the birds. Infortuna settles on her shoulder, toothed beak scraping along the filigree of her hood, as Auspice and Omen tidy the bewit ribbons attached to her own jesses. Hers are more elaborate than theirs - more like jewellery and the clothes prized by the mages and sorcerers she now dwells among, but they’re of the same colours, share the same designs. When Infortuna is hooded before a hunt, her hood has engraved the same designs as the filigree Vultura wears - the filigree markings of the Royal Mews.

The whispers persist, not just occasional shed feathers on the wind now but consistent as bird calls. They call the striges ill-omens in her homeland but she knows the truth - it is just that they fly with the final message before a war, that they are intelligent and bear their own magic, that they have some seer gift to See what will come.

When the striges call, one must always listen.

(She does not think her ancestor will. Even if she wrote a letter, a warning of what her nest-family is treading towards... no, she is a banescale and so their bane: they will not listen. She could tell those she now serves - should, really, as the striges keeper, tell them that what was a maybe is becoming a strige-sung certainty...

(But family is family, and both are kin. Is it cowardice to wish for no war at all? To hope that as long as it remains a maybe it can be prevented?)

Infortuna's song is discordant. It always is, one strige singing alone - but when the others join in, they create a harmony, and just maybe, Vultura thinks, there can be hope.

Lore by EssayOfThoughts