White Cormorant

White Cormorants are known to the sailors of the Western oceans to be omens of ill-fortune. Ghostly birds, white-feathered and almost transparent, sighted in approaching fog as they circle and dive. If a crew spots a white cormorant, then they are doomed to soon be wrecked upon rocks unseen while enveloped by the accompanying fog, never to be seen again.

Many consider white cormorants to be a myth, an elder’s tale to teach young sailors that they must never dare weather that denies them view of the course ahead. But, they are quite real. White Cormorants are a rare subspecies of Cormorant, known only to a few savants and interested divinities (such as Oplath Daigono Shar), and to sailors who ply the coastal waters of the Southwest, where the birds can be glimpsed in the fog which clings to the Cormorant Isles off An-Teng.

Fewer still know the origins of the birds, birthed from the hands of the Solar Exalt Milesandra Dark-Cowled during the height of the First Age. Cormorants whose very blood, infused with the life-charged essence of Creation, was siphoned away in favour of ghostly concoctions infused with the death-charged essence of the Underworld. Milesandra transformed ten thousand cormorants in this manner, binding them to her secluded island palace, and while many perished over the years as the essence of the dead overwhelmed them, others survived, not alive and not dead, both already dead and undying.

The cormorants of course are not malicious, they dive for fish though they need not eat, and nest though they cannot breed, they do not draw in sailors and do not harm the living. They are, however, not of Creation, and as they are bound to a place not connected directly to the Underworld their existence fades slowly over time. Their nesting colonies within the mists of the Cormorant Isles cling close to motonic cabling and essence batteries still filled with necromantic energy, the only way they can renew their strength and continue their unchanging lives.