Tengu

"Do away with your superstitions and your gods, your phantasms and the shadows in your head; open your eyes to pierce the silken veil of faith, and embrace knowledge, for in knowledge there is not only power, but tranquility. Tranquility for all who care to grasp it."In a remote and mountainous region on Yantsu Island known to outsiders as Quyin-Dao, a silence is softly broken. A silence that has lingered for more than two thousand years has within the last century slowly begun to come undone, and with it, voices long-forgotten have been re-introduced to the world. These voices belong to the reclusive and enigmatic Tengu, whose very existence since their silence has been treated with the same respect as an ornament of paper-thin glass. With the passing of decades, centuries, and millennia, legends and myths of the Tengu have developed amongst the surrounding Yantsu people, often distorting who the Tengu truly are - some myths claim that the Tengu are vicious monsters that are best avoided, others claim that they are dishonored humans who have taken on the guise of birds to exile themselves from their communities in shame. But as the silence slowly comes apart, so too do the myths.
One of the first myths to be shattered when the Tengu began to reappear is the one concerned their supposed monstrous appearance. Rather, they are nothing short of kaleidoscopic to look upon. Thick and dazzlingly colorful plumage engulfs a body of above-average human height, the regality of a bird of paradise or a bearded vulture fused seamlessly with the intellect and civilization of human kind. A straight and noble torso is crowned by the skull of a bird, complete with piercing eyes and a hooked beak, and ends in a tousle of tail feathers that stretch to about the length of an average forearm. Where the torso ends, thick-skinned and featherless legs begin: these are nor the thin and gangly legs of secretary birds, but much better suited to supporting a creature of this size. Their thighs are approximately as large as those of humans, but their legs grow slimmer further downward, until reaching the feet, where the Tengu walk upon the very tips of their toes, much like the reptilian raptors of the jungles to the west. Their hands too are entirely featherless, but covered in thick, dark, and wrinkled skin. These hands are equipped with opposable thumbs, and upon each finger is a glinting talon... but fear not. They are almost exclusively used for picking berries.
== Peace is a state of mind ==
Although the Tengu have been a mystery for more than two thousand years, within the last century, valuable insight into their ways of life and thought has been gained by the pioneers and ambassadors who heard the quiet breaking of the Tengu silence, and decided to listen. The discoveries they made shattered one myth after the other. What they found was a dragon's hoard of philosophy that should not have belonged to a people that had been isolated for all those many years, yet there it was. Within the mountainous region of Quyin-Dao, they found that the Tengu had spent all their time in solitude contemplating every thinkable worldly and otherworldly question: mathematics, biology, phenomenology, psychology, theology, and so on. A truly legendary library atop the highest mountain of Quyin-Dao holds the treatises and contemplations of all the wisest Tengu that have ever lived, a titanic trove of philosophy that no mortal mind could ever chew through in just one lifetime. All this has elevated the Tengu to become creatures unrivaled in their understanding of the world around them - even surpassing the Myaani, who prefer to embody and protect the natural cosmos, where the Tengu seek only to understand it down to the final atom. And, indeed, the Tengu have comprehended the existence of the atom as well, among many, many other things.
And all of this for one singular purpose: peace. Peace at mind, soul, and body. The Tengu are all stalwart pacifists and consume nothing but greenery and fruit because of their adamant belief in maximizing peace and minimizing pain for all living things. A cornerstone in Tengu culture is the refusal to think that the purpose of life can be anything but to appreciate it. What, would a Tengu ask, am I set here on this earth for, if not to enjoy my stay? The Tengu see no justification for pain in this world, and have decided to wage war on all of it, as the only thing they will wage war against. And this is not just physical pain, but mental and spiritual pain too: a Tengu will often tell you that an aching soul aches because it is frightened, and that it is frightened because it does not understand. Therefore, the Tengu have rigorously engaged in the quest for total understanding in order to eradicate all fear and pain within themselves, and bring peace to their minds, so they might finally enjoy the world they belong to.
In Tengu society, this fundamental dogma has taken on a number of forms. One is the principle of the 'Right to Peace'. The Right to Peace is perhaps the most important guiding light in Tengu politics, and it is the Primus Motor for the execution of organizing the communities that make up the region of Quyin-Dao. In effect, the Right to Peace declares that any given Tengu must at any given moment be able to shed their mind of all worries, so that they might contemplate the world further, find understanding, and therefore peace. Therefore, the Tengu have established a rigid but flexible political system that allows any Tengu to take what they need in order to relax, and then give back to the rest of the community as their passion and strength allows them. The way this is all organized is by way of local direct democracy with representative democracy on a larger scale. The region of Quyin-Dao is split up into 89 different cantons, each which is located directly unto a mountain - making every mountain a different canton - and atop of these mountains lies an Eyrie, equivalent to a capital city, but on a much smaller scale. In every Canton, all Tengu vote on equal footing on local matters, and they do so by plucking one of their feathers, dipping it in resin, and writing their vote on it when it has hardened. Fortunately, Tengu feathers grow back after about three weeks' time.
But on matters concerning all of Quyin-Dao, direct democracy becomes too difficult, and therefore, a parliament of 178 gathers in the heart of the region every summer solstice to discuss the affairs relevant to every living Tengu. The parliament is made up of two representatives from each canton: a philosopher and a scribe - the 'left and right hand of the mind', as they are colloquially known. Every year, two new representatives are found and delegated, so as to ensure that new thoughts are brought to the table, and previous representatives do not stagnate in their seats.
But although the lust for understanding is in itself a journey for inner peace, it has also taken upon some rather religious characteristics for the Tengu, and sometimes expresses itself in rather disruptive ways. The Tengu see themselves as largely atheistic - they do not worship neither spirits nor gods, but see them only as powerful natural forces that can be analyzed and understood as well as any other - but with time, understanding has come to seem a lot like Understanding with a capital U. The very idea of understanding something has become deified, and philosophers are worshipped as prophets who spread the holy word, creating strange hierarchies that allow for the domination of one Tengu over another. Philosophers who revel in this phenomenon are often seen wandering from mountain to mountain, screeching about the 'One True Path to Understanding' while frantically thumping books they themselves have written or outright wearing their treatises on their clothes. Fortunately, these 'prophets' are often just weather, and disappear with the passing of time, so that a more free approach to understanding - and therefore peace - might be regained.
== Unreputable Bloodlines ==
But thought it may seem that the Tengu are creatures that could never be capable of any harm, they carry within them seeds of something much darker. For though they would certainly wish otherwise, they are bound as cousins, brothers, and sisters to the nefarious Yokai, a class of otherworldly creatures known to plague Yantsu Island in particular. These Yokai stem from a fifth world known as the Betwixt, which sometimes exists and sometimes does not. Whenever the gravitational fields of The Dark Below and The Light Above move too close to one another, the resulting arcane friction gives birth to a entirely new world where nightmarish and perplexing creatures are born - sometimes harmless, but almost always not. The Tengu are, technically, not of the 'harmless' sort.
Most of the Yokai remain trapped in the Betwixt (which takes the shape of nebulae upon the night sky), but occasionally, they slip into the world of mortals, where they seem to have picked Yantsu Island as their favorite place to wreak havoc. Now, regular monsters are entirely natural to this world, and so are even angels and demons, but Yokai are one of the few creatures entirely unnatural, and that includes the Tengu. This has left no small mark on the behavior of the individual Tengu. In their childhood, they are often erratic, destructive, and greedy, but with good parenting, they are taught to understand their own nature, and overcome it. However, there are those Tengu who never make this step, and grow up to be as they were originally made: monsters. Their feathers often turn either pale white or inky black, their eyes go red, and they become cunning hunters and predators that murder, steal, and pillage either on their own or in terrifying packs.
This has been a point of great and terrible disaster for the Tengu in the course of history. In the most primordial years, Yantsu Island belonged to the Yokai. Humans did not exist upon that island, except for when the Gaun Eil conquered it and enslaved everything within it. But when they too were eradicated, and the 10.000-year period known as The Silent Years began, the Yokai regained control of the island, the Tengu reigning among them. Many of the Tengu then were of the vicious kind, but a small handful of them had begun the first steps toward ascension. Throughout all of The Silent Years, those Tengu who had learned to control their evil blood were forced to hide in caves in the mountains, for fear of being slaughtered by their dark brethren. But when the Humans returned at the end of the Elven Genesis about 2500 years ago, they began another conquest of Yantsu Island, seeking to eradicate every last Yokai if they had to. An organization of elite Yokai hunters was established: The Order of the Crouching Monkey, which exists to this day.
Over the course of more than 300 years, the Humans - spearheaded by the Crouching Monkeys - retook Yantsu Island piece by piece, and they brought with them their new immortal Emperor, who they claimed had a prophetic right to this land. The Yokai put up a good fight, among them being the dark-hearted Tengu, but the Crouching Monkeys could not (or would not) tell the difference between those Tengu whose Yokai nature controlled their minds, and those who had ascended beyond such madness. Therefore, enormous swaths of innocent Tengu were butchered or expelled back to the Betwixt, almost to the point of extinction. And the Tengu did not know the Human tongue, and therefore could not explain to them what a mistake they were making.
Fortunately, there were anthropologists and occultists among the Humans who were more curious than their bloodsoaked cousins, who saw the patterns: the white- and black-feathered Tengu always attacked first, but those with brightly colored feathers always only defended themselves. They never pursued, never killed, barely ever harmed. They published their research to the samurai lords that had at this point already conquered large swaths of land, and it rapidly grew in popularity among the Human populace. It did not take long before the research found its way to the Emperor as well, and upon seeing it, a safe haven for all Tengu was immediately declared: the mountains of Quyin-Dao. It was to be a reserve where the Tengu could rest, be safe, and repopulate their decimated people.
The Crouching Monkeys, having been the first to commit such acts of genocide, were wrought with shame to realize what they had done to mere innocents, and decided to dissipate immediately. Some thought it a shame to see them disappear, others found it the only right thing to do. But ever since, the Tengu have been a horribly touchy subject for the Yantsu people, and for more than two thousand years, they have restrained themselves from interfering with them at all. But now, after all this time... the silence breaks. Softly. Slowly.