The Crow People

When we are born, a crow is sacrificed in the name of the child and in honor of the birth. Its face and upper beak are cut away and adhered to the newborns head. The unguent glue by which the child’s new face is attached is made from the bones of those fled in war or those lost to illness.

By this initiation we, The Crow People, are forever reminded of our connection to death, for it fuels that which lives, and reminds us of our debt to the ancestors. It is they who taught us how to hunt both crow and caribou. It was they who showed us how to plant the seeds year in and harvest them year out. And it was them who made the rites and rituals. Without them, the crows and our forbears, we are lost; forever scraping our way through life, through an abyss, an oblivion.

But they do provide life and we are ever grateful.

The crows grow abnormally large in the foothills, or so we are told by those passing through our land. Because of the large size, they’re sacrificed and the fashioned masks are able to be placed and molded to a babies face without much manipulation. The crow’s eyes are removed and given to the godparents for safe keeping. Wither by magic or science or both, the crow-mask grow with the child. As we mature, old feathers fall out and are replaced by new plumage, shiny and soft as oil. Our faces are covered to the jaw with the feathers and are then stop to meet the hard obsidian beak.

No doubt other fauna or even flora were attempted to become part of ourselves. Perhaps back in a time just before the creation of the world, our people attempted to embed goat horns to their forehead, projecting verity and strength. Or mint leaves sewn into fingertips to spread its sweet-tingling scent wherever one was to place their hands. But for what ever reason the god have deemed them to stay separate from us—other than through the occasion ingestion—and we forever belong solely to the crows.