Book One – Chapter 15

No matter how people dressed, featherless beings always appeared much too exposed. Too … naked. Fur, he could appreciate. The bony overgrowths of a kyrthik’s exoskeleton, he could tolerate. But smooth, utterly bare skin, like that of wizards, tairan, or humans, made his feathers itch. It was worse when they had hair on their heads. Worse still when they had beards. It looked as if someone had plucked them pitifully clean, yet forgotten the most obvious parts. The long hair of humanoid females disturbed Yu the most. With short-haired males, he could at least imagine they had been stripped once, and the stubble was simply regrowing in those places first. But the females — No, that was deliberate. That was downright creepy as fuck. It was as if they had committed to the plucking, obsessively keeping their bodies bare for months and years while compensating with those grotesquely excessive crests that were their hairdos. And then, above that, there were the tairan and wizards who dressed themselves in clothing made from fur. There was just no end to this mess.

Now, humanoids were one thing. But Deltington and Estingar were actual. naked.  avians. Wings of taut leather slouched against their backs, separate from their arms. Their three-fingered hands, tipped with curved, chitinous claws, flexed and curled as they gestured, the spurs along their knuckles twitching with every movement. Their legs bent sharply backward at the knee, ending in talons much larger than Yu’s own. Despite the cold, they wore only a set of bulky trousers, their chests naked and their clawed feet bare against the stone floor. Just looking at them made Yu shudder.

At first, he thought them entirely featherless. But when they sat beside him, he noticed the faintest layer of down — less than feathers, more like a thin, velvety sheen. A near-invisible plumage that did nothing to soften the raw exposure of their forms but only added to their alien strangeness.

Yu could not tell them apart. That, more than anything, set his nerves on edge.