The East PacificBoard

Argentavis sapiens
A species of sapient carrion birds, closely related to the Andean Nonscian condor. They lived only in Nonscio, never progressing far enough to leave the continent -- they hardly even left the region of cliffs and canyons where they'd grown to sapience in the first place. In this region, they formed three major settlements. In these settlements, and the smaller ones, a variety of early tools and cave art can be found.

It is evident that, while these people subsisted entirely on carrion, they had a rather complicated relationship with eating the bodies of their own dead. Every argentavis sapiens settlement has a communal grave dug to the west of it. The general procedure for burial seems to be as follows:

[1.] Dig a very deep hole with your beak, your clawed hand-feet, and shovel (rock carved into a pointy dish shape and painstakingly tied to a stick). Alternately, if there's a suitable hole to the west of your settlement already, just use that.

[2.] Pluck all of the dead person's feathers and put them in a jar. You'll need them later.

[3.] Strip every single bit of flesh from your dead loved one's body (paying special attention to the head). This meat will be shared among the entire settlement, with the deceased's family members eating of it first. Leave the marrow. If you break a bone in the process of flesh-stripping, put it back together and mold clay around the broken part.

[4.] Lay your loved one's bones out at the bottom of the grave. The skeleton is to be lying on its back, wings fully extended, legs and neck straight. Place shiny stones (usually chunks of iron pyrite) in the eye sockets.

[5.] Pour mud over your loved one's skeleton until only the very tip of their beak protrudes. Before the mud dries, cover it evenly in the feathers. Pour another layer of mud over the feathers so they cannot blow away. The next dead person will be laid to rest on top of this last mud layer, and the entire burial process will be repeated for them.

Due to the mud, these graves tend to be excellently preserved in the fossil record.

Sadly, the argentavis sapiens had barely started on their journey as a people before they were wiped out by disease. A young argentavis, venturing unadvisably far from his nest, came into contact with an early human; he contracted a respiratory infection from this human. This disease, while barely a cold to the humans it came from, would be the Black Plague of the argentavis. It wiped them out in droves.

The argentavis did not have a great understanding of medicine. In fact, they would 'prescribe' cuddling as the cure for most ailments. This accelerated the already quick spread of the illness, and eating all the plague dead didn't help with disease control either.

At some point, they caught on to that. The few survivors in each settlement set fire to their old homes, with their beloved dead still lying untended in the nests, and flew far away to start again; this started a very short-lived tradition of the unwell flying far away from their settlements and self-immolating . . . until the gene pool nightmare created by those very few survivors led the species to completely die out.

The argentavis' language, having never been committed to any form of writing, is lost to time; so is the rationale behind most of their practices. The fact that there was a rationale (that these were even rational beings) is not even known -- only the self-immolating dead have ever been found, always solitary, and the settlements lie undiscovered in hostile mountainous terrain.

Some forgotten facts about the argentavis include:

[1.] They were monogamous

[2.] They lived until about 50 years of age

[3.] They worshipped the sun, considering it the giant burning egg from which all of Valsora hatched; their graves were positioned so the setting sun would seem to come down and collect the dead, restoring them to their original place.

[4.] They avoided other sapient species on purpose, preferring to spare themselves the revulsion normally brought on by their source of food.