A bearded vulture is a huge bird, its wings spreading wider than a tall Human is high, long and narrow and pointed like a falcon’s, with a long wedge-shaped tail. Its body is rust-orange to cream below, the colour coming from the iron-red dust and pools it bathes in, and dark slate-grey above. Its head is pale, with a black mask through a red-ringed eye and a tuft of black bristles hanging under the beak like a beard.

It glides low along the ridges with hardly a wingbeat, and is silent but for a thin whistle at the nest. A dropped bone striking stone from a height cracks like a breaking branch.

Bearded vultures live on the crags of the Stormcrown and the highest ridges of the Ironspine, and drop their bones on the Long Tread and the bare rock shelves near it. They are very few, a pair to a long stretch of ridge.

A bearded vulture eats bone above all, swallowing pieces whole and digesting them, and marrow, with a little meat and skin. It finds the remains of goats, whistlers, and anything else that died on the heights, after the eagles, cats, and gluttons have finished. It takes a bone too large to swallow up high and drops it on a chosen stone, again and again, until it breaks. It never kills anything large and avoids people.

A pair nests in a cave or under an overhang on a cliff in midwinter and raises one young, which takes many years to gain its adult colours. A bearded vulture may live forty years.

They do no harm and give nothing but their feathers, which Kindreds sometimes carry. Their ossuary-stones on the Long Tread are only a nuisance, scattered bone and broken shards underfoot.

Edgeway Kindreds read a bone-strewn stretch of the Long Tread as unlucky ground, where beasts have died and travellers may follow, and they walk it quickly and without speaking. Dwarven wardens of the high stretches call the birds the road’s sweepers. Kindred tellers say the Giants of the hidden basins keep bearded vultures as other peoples keep dogs, which no one has seen.