Skylance - The Roc

Role in Its Society:

Skylance is not a queen of a flock—she is a weather event with talons. In the Stormwrath Peaks she patrols thermals like a sovereign patrols roads, claiming sun-warmed shelves for nesting and using katabatic winds as highways. Griffons respect her flight corridors, veering when she tilts a wing; manticores trespass only when starving or desperate for trophies. Shepherds read her migrations as augury for avalanches and lean winters. To mountaineers she’s both curse and covenant: leave salted meat at the cairn and Skylance won’t stoop on you; ignore the rite and you become a red smear on white stone. Her coming is a local season.

Appearance Description:

A cathedral of pinions: slaty backfeathers grading to winter-white primaries, each rimed in hoarfrost. Her talons are yellow ice scythes; the hooked beak is black basalt. One primary bears a bronze cap—the remnant of a dwarven skyhunter’s tracking harness. Around her neck hangs a rag-snagged banner scrap, wind-hissed to threads. Close up, her eyes are stormglass: pale, reflective, pitiless.

Backstory:

Skylance hatched in a nest blasted by lightning. A young manticore raided the eyrie; only Skylance survived, flinging herself from the crag and trusting the storm to hold her. Months later a dwarf aerie-warden trapped her with weighted nets and fitted that bronze quill-cap, intent on “civilizing” the sky. She learned a lesson older than language: nothing that walks can be trusted. She tore free in a gale, keeping the cap as a scar she could flex and remember. Since then she has hoarded high ground, shiny things, and the strange quiet that falls before snow.