Eavenvor
The Eavenvor is the high-cold morph, and it is not a separate line. The genetic lock the Alverians set has never been opened, and what divides the Eaven is not blood but sky: a pair nesting high enough or far enough north has been known to throw a chick of this form, and the form cannot be bred for. Under Alveria they were the General's storm-riders.
They are heavier through the chest than the base and shorter and broader in the wing, white-grey in the coat with black barring at the primaries, and crested, so that an angry Eavenvor doubles the apparent size of its head. They fly into weather that grounds everything else, and they do it in country where the god trees themselves give out.
Body
Heavier through the chest, shorter and broader in the wing, white-grey in the coat with black barring at the primaries, and crested, so that an angry Eavenvor doubles the apparent size of its head. The wings still grow off the dorsal keel as in every Eaven, the ribcage is still a cage of hollow struts run through with air sacs, and the claw still locks out at a foot of curved bone and does not retract under load. What the morph adds is mass in front of the wing and a shorter span to carry it, which is what lets the animal work air that would fold a longer wing.
Lightning takes to them and does not kill them. The old bronze leg-ring earths it through the claw, and a Watcher of this morph coming down out of a thunderhead trails fire from the talons. The ring is the only object an Eaven owns, issued at the making and handed down from the burned to the born, and in this morph it is also the reason the creature is still alive.
Country
They nest above the snowline where the god trees give out, in the highest hollows of the last of them. The nest is the same nest: deadwood and shed feathers, added to every season until it is the size of a cottage, ringed in god-tree resin that the sire lights with a brand carried home in his claws and that burns low and cold for the whole of the brooding. At that height the ring is doing more work than it does anywhere else in the species, and from below the tree shows as a crown of small red lights in a place where nothing should be burning.
The country round such a tree is the ordinary Eaven country made thinner. No large predators for a day's walk, because they were eaten. Ground black and rich under the crown from six thousand years of dropped kills and swept ash, though at that altitude nothing much grows on it. Nobody lives near enough to have a word for the lights.
Regard
The learned who know what the Eaven are call the whole species the Unposted, and mean a soldier whose war is over and who has not been told. The fear that the Eaven might one day answer the call is chiefly a fear of these. They were the General's storm-riders when there was a General, and the weather that stops an army does not stop them, and nothing in the recitation of any chiefdom has ever suggested the order was withdrawn.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How many of this morph there are, since the chiefdoms are numbered and not counted
- Where the snowline god trees stand, and whether any chiefdom above it has been named
- What the storm-riders were actually ordered to do, and whether that order was ever stood down