High in the broken mountains, where the wind screams past stone like a dying beast, narrow ledges cling to the cliffs—blackened by ancient fires and stained a deep, rusted red. There, amid withered flora and sun-bleached rock, dwells a tribe of bird-men. They do not fly. Their wings are shriveled remnants, plucked bare and bound with strips of sinew and cloth, as though flight itself were a sin they chose to forget.

Their bodies bear deliberate scars: feathers long since torn away, skin hardened, split, and carved into patterns that echo forgotten avian sigils—twisted now into something unrecognizable. Each cut is precise. Each scar remembered.

Each wears a mask of carved wood - long, crude, and uneven. No two are alike. Some are split and re-bound, others jagged with ritual cuts. The masks are not decorations. They are penances.

Beneath them, it is said, their faces are worse.

They descend only at the Conjunction, when Guthay’s burning amber slides behind and looms over Ral’s sickly, mottled green.When the twin moons hang as one above the wastes, the Riven Flock comes down from their hidden mountain lairs.

They do not come as a raucous flock, but in unsettling silence.

They hunt without haste. A lone traveler, a distant fire, a small encampment - these are enough. They do not slaughter wildly. They take what they need. Blood is drawn into bowls of bone and hollowed-out gourds, never spilled without purpose.

And yet, of all the blood beneath the moons, it is that of humans they seek above all.

No sage, no survivor, no half-mad hermit has ever given a reason why. Some claim it is punishment, that they believe man carries the stain of their ancient shame. Others whisper that human blood alone mirrors something they lost… or something they became. A few insist the truth is worse, that they do not know why themselves, only that the ritual demands it, and so they obey.

Those few who survive speak of the rite.

The Flock gather in circles at the edge of the wastes, where the sand turns dark and gives way to desolate badlands. They cut themselves, reopening old wounds. Human blood is poured across their bodies, onto their masks, over their crippled wings. They chant in broken, rasping caws, like wind forced through a cracked reed.

And always, at the height of it, one removes their mask.

No one who has seen what lies beneath has lived long enough to describe it clearly. Only fragments remain in the stories—too many eyes, or none at all; beaks split and fused; faces that seem wrong, as if reshaped by regret.

It is rumored that long ago, before the mountains fell silent, the Riven Flock were something else. Aarakocra, as the bards would muse. Proud and sky-bound. A tribe that turned upon its own kind in some forgotten betrayal, slaughtering nest-brothers, burning their own rookeries, or worse.

No one remembers the truth. Only the guilt endured.

So they clipped their wings.

They carved their flesh.

They hid their faces.

And now, when the moons cross one another, they skulk down from the mountains, not as hunters, but as penitents, seeking human blood not for hunger, but to fill the absence where their own has failed to wash them clean.

Yet the moons keep meeting.

And still, they are not forgiven…