Finndi

The Finndi
Like many on Haarkuun, the Finndi are a diaspora people stranded long ago by the vanished Great Ones and scattered across the network. Until recently they were cut off from their homeworld Skrax-Kivath which in their own tongue means the sun-warmed stone-nest.
Finndi stand about five feet tall and feature hollow, powerful bones, a mix of scales and feathered wings, forward-set predator's eyes, the bright crest they raise and flatten to speak to one another without a sound. Their flight is fierce and brief, a burst of powered wingbeats and a long glide from one high place to the next. On a battlefield or above a crowded canal-city, that advantage is significant.
The Finndi of Haarkuun live on cliff faces and canyon rims, and in the abandoned upper tiers of the old Great One cities. They prefer the towers and rookeries no ground-bound creature can reach.
From above they watch everything. And watching, it turns out, is a most valuable skill on Haarkuun… The Finndi are the world’s messengers, scouts, and brokers of secrets able to move faster than any ship or railway can carry word, slipping between borders no human or Krukari or Haarkuuni agent could cross, selling what they have seen to whoever pays best. Every power courts them, but they remain fiercely independent.
On their homeworld the Finndi lived by rigid lineage and ancient law. The ones who dwell among the other peoples have traded all that for something looser and more dangerous: a cosmopolitan world of trade-guilds and Roost Houses, where mercenary service is honorable and a clever flier can rise on wit alone. In war they are feared less as an army than as individual terror from above: dropping out of the sun onto officers, gun-crews, and powder stores, and gone again into the sky before the rifles can answer. The Americans ingratiate themselves with them, and the Finndi, who bristle under any command, like the Americans best for it. Napoleon's marshals court them. The Royal Haarkuun Company courts them. The Haarkuuni princes court them. They take each coin, and keep their own freedom.
But underlying this the old nest is calling the Finndi of Haarkuun home. Proud, traditionalist Skrax-Kivath has begun to reach back across the dark toward its scattered children and the Finndi who have built free, mercenary, profitable lives among the lower peoples must soon choose between the nest they were born to and the sky they have made for themselves.

Sculptor: Thai Ngo