Crows and Ravens

Overview

Crows and ravens are the black scavengers of the open world: they follow ploughs, rob gardens, and come down wherever something has died. Because they gather where death gathers, and sometimes before it, they are the birds of omen. Augurs, necromancers, and commanders read them, and ordinary people watch them with a wariness that is not quite superstition.

Appearance

A crow is the length of a forearm, glossy black from beak to claw, with a heavy straight bill and a square tail; in sunlight its feathers show a sheen of blue and purple. A raven is the bigger bird, nearly twice the crow's weight, with a shaggy throat, a deeper, arched bill, and a wedge-shaped tail that shows in flight. Crows rise in loose, quarrelling flocks; ravens come in pairs or small companies and soar on stiff wings over ridges like hawks.

Crows caw, harsh and repeated. A raven's voice is a deep, hollow croak, and it has many others: clicks, knocks, and a bell-like call heard in the passes. A carrion roost smells of what it eats.

Habitat and Range

Crows live in farmland, along roads, at the edges of woods, and in towns, nesting in tall trees and on towers. Ravens keep to higher and emptier ground: crags, mountain passes, and border country, where a pair holds a wide range for years. Both gather in numbers over battlefields, plague country, and any landscape heavy with carrion.

Behaviour and Temperament

Both birds are clever, bold, and patient. They eat almost anything, grain and grubs as readily as the dead, and wait on the edge of a fight or a slaughter for it to finish. Crows mob owls and hawks and remember a face that has wronged them. Ravens play, cache food, and follow hunters and armies on the march for what they leave.

Their most remarked habit is to gather early. A flock settles on a field or a pass before the blood is spilled there, as if called, and turns all at once when death strikes nearby.

Abilities

Scavengers are drawn not only by smell and sight but by trace-attraction, the pull that death and its residue in the Whispering Trace put on the living, so their gathering and flight answer to pressure an ordinary eye cannot see. That is what Crow Reckoning reads to learn which pass will see blood by sunset, and what Carrion Warning binds into a web, so that a camp knows its pickets are struck when the crows turn at once. Crow Reckoning overreads plague country and old battlefields, where the birds gather for every reason at once.

Life Cycle

Crows and ravens pair for life and come back to the same nest each spring, a bowl of sticks lined with wool and hair. Three to six young fledge in early summer and stay near their parents for a season. A raven may live twenty years; a crow rather less.

Uses and Dangers

The birds give little to eat and are eaten only in hunger. Farmers net and stone them off the seed, hang dead crows on poles to warn the rest, and pay boys to scare them. Their worth is in what they tell: soldiers on the border watch them, and a ranger who knows Beast Speech can ask crows who crossed the ridge, though they answer only in simple meaning.

Lore and Belief

Most peoples hold that crows know death before it comes, and a flock settling on a roof is bad news for the house. Ravens are thought wiser and older, birds that remember. Soldiers call a gathering of crows over a camp "the tally". In Omen Thread a caster may bind ravens gathering at dawn to a chosen warning, so that for one commander they mean the eastern road has failed; the meaning is the caster's binding, not the birds'.

The belief is half right. The birds do not foresee; they are pulled towards where death is gathering, which is why the augurs can read them and why they are wrong wherever death has gathered too long already.

Where It Appears

• Augury Magic
• Morphic Magic
• Necromancy
• Path Magic