The Birdman vagabond

A vagabond of Loshev, known around the town for years and locked up a handful of times before this. When the Birdman sightings were the only thing anyone would talk about, he made himself a suit of feathers and went out to be seen.

The suit was better work than anyone expected of him. Constable Tariq al-Mahir could not account for it at all: he had no idea where the man had found the materials or how he had put together something so elaborate. Real feathers, layered, from more than one bird. Raven and crow and blackbird are close enough in shape and color that at a distance, or at night, nobody could reasonably be expected to tell. In full daylight on a table it is obviously a mess, and Aldo, who knows the trade, judged it poor. It came in with blood on it. Whoever took him had beaten him badly first.

He was still alive and in the cells below when the company came asking. The costume was being kept only until the details were settled and would be burned after. He had told his captors that he was not the only one, which nothing has since supported, and against which stands the plain fact that the sightings stopped the day he was taken. Tariq had glimpsed the thing himself during the first panic and does not believe what he saw was some fool in a costume, though he grants that nobody else could tell the difference either.

What it cost is the part the town has mostly not been told. The rumor traveled, and the Muharib came into the region hunting it, having heard there was a bird man to be found and being monster hunters by trade. What they did once they arrived was sack Loshev, go through the estates for what they held to be theirs, and maim a good part of the town guard. Aldo, standing in the constabulary looking at the costume, was careful about how he put it: he did not know how many people were aware that this man had caused all of that. Tariq agreed that some of them might feel a certain way about it.