One thing I like exploring in some of my art commissions and stories are how cultures might have different developments, based on various factors.
With the Thordani, a race of eagle people, there’s been a bit of ink spilled over this. Particularly their religious stuff. They’re from a Greyhawk-inspired D&Dish world originally, and while I no longer strictly adhere to the game rules for freeform RP or writing, they still help.
Two of my more recent innovations will be discussed today. One is that with their their eggs, they’d probably have developed ways to dye, etch, or otherwise mark them. You can do this in real life of course, but not with eggs you intend to hatch. But they have those techniques, and use them to decorate the eggs. Sigils for what they hope for the child, or protective runes in their belief, and so on. It’s also common for a bit of the shell to be kept for the future.
Another one is imping. “Imping”, short for “implanting”, is a process where a donor feather from a prior molt is grafted or implanted into a live bird of the same species, essentially as a form of ‘repair’, as feathers are dead tissue and many birds only molt once a year. In real life, there are lots of considerations about this, given you’re usually working with an uncooperative patient, and the difficulty of finding donor feathers; many falconers will keep prior molt feathers around as, essentially, ‘spare parts’. But it can help a bird be released sooner if it’s otherwise healthy as opposed to waiting for the molt.
Having feathers for flight, the Thordani would have obviously developed mechanisms for dealing with feather damage fairly early in their medical research. And having some healing magic adds that. But one thing that I realized was that you can do more with that.
Thordani bondmates (think basically marriage) will actually remove flight feathers from one of their wings, and imp in their bond’s feathers there, and vice versa.
Picture above commissioned by me from Brenda “Windfalcon” Lyons
I thought this would be a good way for them to show devotion. It both visibly displays that they are married in a visible way, that the bondmates are two parts of a greater whole. It also shows a degree of trust between the pair; the bond is there, helping with every beat of their wing, helping support them.