The Kingfisher is one of the breeds in which the sheepguana’s magically influenced origin is most apparent.
During the day it is mostly a solid, no nonsense breed, a reliable producer of high quality wool, milk and meat. Its fluffy fleece can be spun and dyed into excellent yarn of all colours and its eggs are considered a delicacy. While they are sometimes capricious and as prone as any other breed to the occasional bouts of pyromania that make the sheepguana one of the more challenging species of livestock, Kingfishers are generally gentle and never show malice or intent to harm without ample provocation.
Yet for all the desirable qualities it shows in the daylight, it is for very good reason that guardians familiar with the Kingfisher avoid getting near their animals at night and will under no circumstances sleep in their pastures.
There are many strange rumours going around about how they change after dusk. Many are simply the stories of bards whose familiarity with farm animals ends with the stew they eat on somebody else’s coin, but there is also the other kind; the tales murmured by the shepguanherds themselves around a dying fire well out of earshot of the flocks, or solemnly passed on to the rare apprentice in shepguanherd’s huts turned to show only a solid wall of carefully maintained wards to the pasture.
Some claim to have seen their Kingfishers cry blood or walk on bodies of water, others swear that under the stars the beasts are linked to their dragon ancestors to channel their elemental powers. Yet another story has it that in the darkness they grow throats made of shadows and tongues of silver moonlight to whisper ancient and terrible secrets into sleeping birds’ ears. In these stories, their voices are said to be soothing, almost hypnotic, the aural equivalent of burning incense.
All that is known for sure is that staying with a flock after nightfall is to court gibbering madness and any who fall asleep are later found dead by either suicide or what appears to be pure fear, often having gouged out their own eyes or having scrawled desperate but incomprehensible warnings on the dirt in their own blood.
If the wind is right, distant observers will sometimes hear eerie chants calling to forgotten gods in dead languages and even after the hottest of nights the first rays of the sun will reveal their pastures to be covered by a thin layer of frost forming mysterious runes that evaporate before one can fully grasp their alien shapes.
When a Kingfisher dies, whether by slaughter, predation or natural causes, it is best to separate the skull and leave it with the flock where it will disappear during the night. If one tries to keep it from them, be it by the swiftest horse, the proudest ship or the thickest walls, upon the next dawn it will be gone with no living witnesses and a swathe of devastation cut back towards a flock innocently basking in the morning sun. Few birds are willing to speculate on what they want with the skulls and all of them agree that we will regret finding out.
While the order of Quailadins sees them as a cause for concern, authorities insist that highly productive Kingfishers are quite harmless and merely recommend that they should not be cared for by chicks.
Sheepguana facts 