It's bird month at the Pet of the Month club. Right now, Barathrumite+ patrons are casting their votes by Friday, August 16th, 11:59PM PDT or getting their eyes pecked out.
Kismet
"I know what the maps say, Kuqat. They're wrong! What the hell is a 'deathland' anyway? Name's so broad as to mean nothing.
I'm telling you, friend, if you head east from the Rainbow Wood and find just the right rust-painted path, you'll come to a lake covered in algae, its shores teeming with weird sponges, corals, and metals. A Palladium Reef.
And that's where they live, these beautiful birds. They carpet the lake like blooming redbuds. And when they take flight... oh, the heart sings!
Kismet here, she was pecking algae bits from the corpse of a Putus Fool who must've drowned trying to break in his slug. Yes, that's right. She took to me real quick. I made sure to scoop up handfuls of the turquoise plant-cheese and feed her nice. And she followed me all the way back here, to the marsh..."
Peck
"It's been said that Qud is a layer cake of civilization. Among the myriad materials of those layers are metals of various kinds: flat iron, mirrored brass, tarnished chrome, algae-caked palladium. When you take account of all these metals, you notice a commonality. Holes. Small holes bored into every hundredth or so metal surface I've seen. And if you're like me, you can't help yourself; you reach into those bewitching burrows to see what gifts lay therein. I've found my share of goodies this way, but the best of them all is the egg omen. You see, the egg omen is when you reach into the narrow darkness and through some sharp twigs pull out a smooth, beautiful egg. A tinpecker egg! Bless those industrious birds. They take the edifices the Eaters left behind and reshape them to their motherly needs. No metal is hard enough to withstand their eager pecking! Of course I return the egg to its nest. I don't need an egg. But the egg *omen*... the egg omen is most fortuitous..."
Porphryptus
O, to be a vine on the Hanging Hills! No accounts of the peculiar customs of humans have enchanted me like the pillow books out of the courts of the fiefdoms of Odrum. Allow me to recount one of the more colorful practices. In court, it is common to display wealth and status through the keeping of fanciful caged birds. Particularly in Doria, the courtiers have bred birds to a stunning degree of ornamentation. The books are filled with the antics of these avian beauts and the trouble they cause their possessors. They've ruined suppers, soured alliances, and even killed their noble breeders in the course of court displays gone tragically wrong. Occasionally, the birds themselves rise to power and supplant their aristocratic progenitors. Some, however, abide by their natures more straightforwardly, taking advantage of an ajar gate and simply flying away to another life.
-Collected notes from the Baccata Yewtarch
Gloaming
The owls are not what they seem.
The spectral gleam!
There! Across the psychic sea!
To say I 'see'
is not quite right.
It's not quite sight.
It is older.
From the time before heat burst from a point, and showered the cosmos in light.
It was colder.
Oblivion stretched across and through the borders of unending night,
As if in a dream.
They're not what they seem.