steelfeathered

Hisako is a Tortall OC without any connections to major canon characters!

She's a Stormwing, a kind of metal-feathered harpy standing four feet something high with a wingspan of around thirteen feet, and has been so for a good four hundred years. As an Immortal or mythic creature, she can be killed but ages very slowly and will stop when she appears to be in her fifties. She has Yamani and Copper Islands ancestry (think Japanese and Indonesian) and some suggestions of lines on her face, particularly across her forehead and the corners of her eyes, clearer in some lights than others.

Ref, lightly nsfw alt.

tl:dr backstory: human thief girl was turned into a Stormwing and exiled with the other Stormwings into the Divine Realms. Centuries later she returned, becoming more distant from her origins and gradually fully embracing her Stormwing nature. Longer backstory (with cannibalism mentions)


Hisako is from the Tortall Universe but a good two hundred forty years before the earliest-set book, about two hundred years after Tortall became a sovereign nation formed from part of a dissolving empire. At that time, humans shared the world with Immortals (beings shaped by dreams, who could only die of violence or misfortune), and greater and lesser gods who came and went from the Divine Realms, many of them fueling and aggravating human conflict.

Hisako herself was born in Port Legann and given a name reflecting her mixed Yamani heritage. She was a middle child with many siblings and an extended family worked all manner of menial, primarily dockside jobs - porter, fisherman, fishwife, netmender etc - and generally scraped and struggled together to get by. Several family members had the Gift of magic which helped, but they had little training and trying unfamiliar magic without help is dangerous. Hisako herself had the Gift in a deep blue-green color.

As a child she and some of her younger siblings were caught up in a riot and would have been trampled if not for the local Stormwings, a small flock known as the Bile Gulls, who swooped down, carried the children off, and deposited them somewhere safer. Hisako was fascinated and became friends with them. Stormwings have a general disdain for mortals but make an exception for children, particularly ones who are struggling. The flock could be snide and crude but they were also a stable presence that at worst didn't mean her harm and at best were quasi-parental, particularly a woman named Kyaire Sharptail, so a mutual affection developed. What's Stormwing-reek compared to fish entrails left in the sun? She got used to the smell. When Hisako was roped into helping hunt a unicorn - semi-willingly taken outside of the city and then imperiled so a unicorn would come to her and be killed - only the Bile Gull Stormwings wholly sympathized. They'd rig up rope harnesses to take her flying. As she grew up they advised her on finding her way in the world, though as beings that don't starve or suffer much from illness and don't have to rely on money the practical aspects were limited. One had been a human himself long ago and encouraged her to develop her Gift.

The few mages willing to teach her either had minor Gifts with limited utility or were cagy, hostile, or in one case got murdered four months in, and generally had a criminal bent. So, as she got older Hisako became a burglar, using her Gift to help hush her steps and break into the homes of people with more money than she had, which wasn't saying much. The dream was to save enough money to leave the city and get magic training at the City of the Gods or the southern university, from the kinds of respectable and prestigious teachers who'd turn their nose up if she approached them as a dockside girl. Magic was a ticket out for her and her family if she ever got free of the gangs and the Rogue, the king of the local underworld. At their best, Rogues were leaders taking care of the poor of the cities whose undergrounds they ruled over; this one, at this time, saw Hisako as a means to great personal profit and that superceded anything else. She repeatedly sabotaged Hisako to keep her in the city and willing and available to contribute to various criminal activities.

Hisako had found it was possible for a human to become a Stormwing, and while speaking to her friends after an opportunity was snatched away she ardently wished she could become one herself. They refused to turn her on a whim and by the next day Hisako wouldn't have said such a thing, but it stuck with them, and Kyria tore out one of her feathers just in case. A few years later, Hisako was found to be cheating the Rogue and was attacked in a crowd, literally backstabbed. She was actually meant to survive and take this as a warning and a lesson. The Stormwings didn't know that and swooped down and drove off the people around her - including the Healer who would have saved her, meaning they suddenly had the strong conviction that she was about to die. Kyaire gave her feather to Hisako, telling her to drive it into her own flesh. A woozy, uncomprehending Hisako did so and was transformed on the spot into a Stormwing.

This healed all her wounds and took away Hisako's human Gift. Up in the sky, and in the Bile Gull roost, she struggled with a different body, different magic, a different place in life. Many of her human friends and family made no effort to contact her, though the break might not have been total. But, not much more than a week passed after the change before one of the major events in the setting occurred - the banishment of Immortals to the Divine Realms, a spell wrought by a massive coalition of very powerful southern mages who also installed a barrier that kept them from returning. Violently dislocated to another realm where all animals and plants were minor gods and thousands of newly banished Immortals contested for limited territory, Hisako struggled further. She was still clumsy and inept in her new body, forcing Kyaire and the others to defend and take care of her when they were in trouble themselves. Hisako was slow to think of herself as a Stormwing and regretted the change on top of losing everything she'd known. There was some resentment back and forth as a result. She'd also had very little idea of global politics so the expulsion seemed to come out of nowhere.

The Bile Gulls joined a greater aggregation eventually known as the Mortal Fear nation that gradually established itself as the largest Stormwing nation. Hisako adjusted, though for a long time she felt othered and still half human. She wasn't comfortable with certain aspects of Stormwing nature, either, never having had a chance to feed and engage with their purpose, but she came to love flight and to be better at telekinetic magic than most other Stormwings.

Content to take a low position, she made a lot of non-Stormwing friends, particularly among minor gods who were nearly as affected by the barrier as she and hers. The most prominent of these was Ariset, or as she called him, "avocet". He had been a human seer who'd attracted the attention of the chief seer god, who intervened on his behalf when he was killed and helped him to ascend. They shared some of the same struggles in adjusting. The Divine Realms are beautiful but inherently very ordered. Once they'd been there for more than a few years, it became clear how variations on the same patterns were repeated day after day with very little change. Hisako traveled, tried cuisines she'd never have sampled as a human, tried not to make enemies, and she and Ari scried on the Mortal, Dead, and Chaos Realms until it all started to feel meaningless to her.

The Stormwings' collective problem became clear. Usually, they fed off the energy of mortal fear, anger, and suffering, as well as the bodies of the war-dead. As Immortals fasting didn't harm them, but they were weaker for the lack and reproduction became increasingly difficult. Few steel eggs were laid and fewer hatched; worse, trying to lay them started to become lethal. There were not enough Stormwing chicks to make up for the numbers of adults dying. A Stormwing named Jachull became Queen of the Mortal Fear nation and made plans to capture the few mortals who ended up in the Divine Realms and either convert them into Stormwings or torture and kill them to feed on. This was rather fraught and controversial. Hisako was her consort off and on for about twenty years and got to know her quite well.

Hisako got her name, Godsup, from one attempt to do something less evil, in which Ariset offered himself up to be eaten by Hisako and Kyaire (he got better) with the idea that he'd been mortal recently enough that it might help. He did insist that Hisako be the one to kill him, the first time she'd killed anyone, and something she found quite upsetting. Overall Godsup is actually a bit of a mocking or self-deprecating name. Minor gods can be killed as easily as mortals, leaving their bodies to be consumed or otherwise used, and immediately appear in fresh new bodies. Everything eaten in the Divine Realms is part of a god of some description. It's like being called "breadeater". The effort didn't work, but Ari gave her one of his vertebrae as a token and to prove that no, honestly, he was all right and not upset.

After four hundred and fifty years Emperor Mage Ozorne found out how to poke holes in the barrier spell, summoning Immortals to the Mortal Realms and coercing or making deals with them. For many Stormwings, Jachull included, the draw of finally being able to benefit from human strife again and continue the species outweighed their core anti-war purpose and the indignity of serving a warlike mortal ruler. Hisako's first experiences with being on a battlefield, drawing strength from the death and suffering, left a profound impression on her. She'd spent four centuries bathing and trying to hang on to some clothing and a more human aspect, and very uneasy at the idea of eating and otherwise defiling the corpses of the war-dead, but found a great satisfaction in it, even a spiritual fulfillment. On top of that, humans saw her with such revulsion and she was so revolted in turn by their habits that it was easy to turn away. Hisako fully embraced her Stormwing nature at last.

After a few years Ozorne was transformed into a Stormwing and lost his magic and his throne, after it was revealed that he'd imprisoned the queen of the Stone Tree nation to secure the cooperation of its new ruler. While they had some things in common, Hisako was disgusted by his actions and his ability to twist things so that not only did he manage to escape Stormwing justice for his crimes but to clamber back on top. Even moreso when Queen Jachull backed him and committed Mortal Fear to fighting. Hisako dithered and consulted Ari, then committed: Stormwings were created out of sorrow and revulsion for pointless war, and making war to feed on the enemy is disgusting. She persuaded a number of friends not to participate in the conflict, having to go on the run as this was seen as treachery. Kyaire remained.

In a great final battle above Port Legann the queen of the Stone Tree nation killed Jachull. Ozorne was killed and proved to have been working for a primordial goddess who wanted to destroy everything, and who the other gods then wrestled back into quiescence. Kyaire grew in influence, rapidly taking over leadership of Mortal Fear, though the nation was weakened and indebted to Stone Tree. Despite what had been discovered she didn't look kindly on Hisako and some of their friends for abandoning the previous Queen and after a vicious argument had them barred from the nation.

Along with many other Immortals, Hisako and company found places in the Mortal Realms. They drifted north into cold pine forests, well away from her old home. Soon enough there were new wars and skirmishes, of a smaller scale. The knight guardian of a refugee camp refused to allow Stormwings to consume even enemy dead and a slighted Hisako, entirely alienated from humanity, offered no help, even when the camp's children were rounded up to be delivered to a necromancer. She'd dedicated herself and her small flock to feeding off them and trying to raise Stormwing chicks at last.


Powers and abilities:

Flies well, walks poorly. On the ground Hisako's fastest gait is an awkward shuffling hop, like a large vulture. In the air she's much quicker and with the help of just a touch of her magic she can stay aloft for days, soar very high up, and hover if she's far enough from the ground to beat her wings. It's harder to fly in wet conditions. When it's bright out she can angle her feathers to reflect light and dazzle people. She is quite strong and could carry a human in the air - ideally a rope would be involved - if they're on the small side. Her eyes have a hawklike visual acuity.

Her larger feathers are almost as flexible as keratin and cut like very sharp knives, as do her teeth. A feather removed from her cures and becomes rigid, and can be used to permanently turn someone else into a Stormwing, severing any inherent magic they had, or used to make mage-killing arrows. Hisako's smaller feathers are also metal but don't have those cutting edges. The down is like steel wool. The first Stormwings were born from volcanoes, so normal fire can't harm her and is if anything a good way to bathe.

She can eat and may enjoy a snack now and again, but doesn't feel hunger or thirst, or suffer much from exposure to the elements (being caught in the rain still isn't fun). Being around the fear and suffering of mortals, particularly humans, strengthens and energizes her and she can analyze their feelings to understand the nature of the fear (anxiety, existentialism, scary stories, fear for a loved one, immediate fear of death etc).

To someone who can see or sense magic, hers has a bright red-gold aura that's very easy to identify even from a great distance. She can enhance flight, inspire terror, telekinetically move things as if with hands, shield herself from damage, scry (using water, fire, blood, or a mirror to look at things happening far away or into someone's memories), and cast scarlet bolts. She can also work magic on her own shed blood, and that of other donors, to make a central pool that splits into several gelatinous, amorphous black blob "darking" servants which can act as jewelry and pockets and scrying tools; if she gives one to someone who's contributed a drop of blood, it can work like a private network device. (Some characters can make much more advanced, independent, even sapient darkings but Hisako's not at this level. Even her level would be a major undertaking.)

She can understand animal communication but doesn't have an inherent ability to talk to animals and many animals are inclined to dislike her, so with animals that aren't mentally augmented the utility is somewhat limited, more like she can read their body language without looking.