Role in Its Society:
High above the wind-scoured passes, Crownfeather rules a south-facing sun shelf—a rare ledge warmed by morning light. She leads a mated pair and two yearlings, trading airspace with rocs and yetis by ritual display rather than constant bloodshed. Salted meat laid at the cairn buys safe passage; drums and crossbows do not. Caravaners whisper that she can read fairness: she harasses poachers, ignores shepherds who leave tribute, and stoops on manticores with ancestral fury. To locals, she is both storm and stewardship—predation contained by pride.
Appearance Description:
An eagle’s proud head with hooked black beak; amber eyes that glow like thawed sap at sunrise. Forequarters feathered in slate-to-ice-white plumage rimed with hoarfrost; hindquarters the tawny, winter-thickened body of a lioness. Along her neck: a time-darkened iron coronet tangled in plumage, bent into a circlet by years of flight. A thin scar crosses the cere of her beak—memento from a manticore’s spine.
Backstory:
A century ago a hill-king’s hunting circlet was laid upon a cairn where a griffon once saved his scouts from a snow giant. As a fledgling, Crownfeather stole the gleam from that cairn and wore it home. The ledge became hers; the cairn rite, tradition. When ogres came beating war-drums, she learned to fear that sound and broke three of their number off the shelf in a single morning. Since then she has raised clutches on the same golden rock, teaching hatchlings the rules of tribute and restraint—a rare economy of mercy in the peaks.
