gryphons-of-aentha

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not evil anymore i want to be loved now

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had another dream under anesthesia involving Iadros, now not only does he have a human boyfriend but they both dance competitively together and I’m pretty sure at least one of them is trained in classical ballet and the concept of a gryphon hybrid and a human coming up with modern/ballet fusion choreography when one of them can fly in his true form is too good I give up it’s canon now

[gryphons-of-aentha]

had a dream last night with a young adult/late teens Iadros which has me thinking more about him as a character moving forward. which I hadn’t really done because he’s like three years old in the current canon (which is the equivalent of like a five year old human because gryphons age insanely fast as cubs but still). but anyway he’s kind of great and a ray of sunshine but also has the typical gryphonic inability to chill and I love him.

he has a very “this will be a good day and that is a threat” energy

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fact: gryphons, regardless of gender, all have the Mandalorian Instinct and will not hesitate to adopt any small defenseless being that comes near them and protect it with their lives.

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i am fine thank you for asking! though recently there has been a darkness growing within me

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exile as a concept is so funny. it's like "we don't care what you do after you leave just as long as you get the fuck out and we never have to see you ever again"

[gryphons-of-aentha]

The Approximate Plotline of the Gryphonverse (pt. 3)

This is the part where everything gets very weird, jarringly fast. I suspect there must be a way to rework some of this to make it cohesive enough with the first two parts to compile it into one story, but for now I’m afraid we’re stuck with massive, strangely meta genre whiplash.

it also becomes more apparent that the reason all this coincides with Earth dates in real time is that I’ve been making a lot of this up as I go for over ten years now.

So Kyran, and shortly thereafter Iadra, who chased him through the portal, suddenly find themselves on Earth circa 2008. Or rather an alternate timeline Earth that was created when some human teenagers with a basement laboratory, and an interdimensional being badly disguised as a talking dog, accidentally tore a hole in reality, which is what Kyran’s hastily-made portal led through. The humans (and space dog) quickly become entangled in the gryphons’ conflicts as it becomes apparent that the connection between their worlds isn’t going away on its own and none of them know how to close it. A couple years and several shenanigans later (during which Talon and Iadra have reunited and befriended the humans and dog-alien, and Kyran has made enemies of them), Aentha and Earth remain strangely linked and everyone starts to notice signs of something strange at work.

(it’s here that I should mention that the humans, in the original series of short stories I wrote documenting this when I was fifteen, were pretty much self inserts of me and my brother for shits and giggles/stand-ins. Due to conflicts with certain potential subplots that have cropped up that I want to use, this is no longer canon, but it means the Wielder is currently not much more than an empty character slot because I haven’t figured out how I actually want to approach him as a character, aka I am trapped in Jonathan Sims purgatory and don’t know how to get out. So aside from things he definitely does because it’s required to progress the plot, there’s basically a conspicuous void there right now. also the sword was originally called the Ancient Katana™ [the ™ is somehow pronounced but nobody can figure out why or how, and speaking the full name causes the lights to flicker even while outdoors] because I was making fun of all the stupid and sometimes kind of racist tropes that crop up with chosen one narratives, but these days I’m not sure where that falls on the line between “making fun of a dumb racist trope” and “just being racist�� so I’m shelving that until I get some second opinions on that one)

Unbeknownst to anyone, larger forces are at play in this pseudo-Earth: an entity similar in nature to the Powers of Darkness, but that feeds on narrative tropes rather than suffering and is substantially more powerful, was drawn by the first Rift created by the humans, and has been manipulating events on Earth in order to trap everyone in a repeating narrative that provides it with a consistent energy source. This comes to a head when one of the humans accidentally becomes some kind of Chosen One known as the Wielder (according to the space dog, who is the only one versed in this stuff) by finding a magic sword that can manipulate both interdimensional energy and narrative tropes (among other things). Kyran, meanwhile, has been looking for this sword, because during some events that tore the Fourth Wall (an actual thing in this story) he realized that he’s been cast as the villain in whatever story they’re all stuck in and therefore can never actually win, which he’s becoming increasingly desperate to do since he’s now back in debt with the Powers of Darkness and needs to resolve this situation and focus his attention back on Aentha and overthrowing Shale. The sword can potentially solve both of these problems, and also make him immensely powerful. With the Entity still manipulating everything, this leads to him inadvertently becoming the Wielder’s arch nemesis but gets him no closer to actually claiming the sword.

Eventually Kyran manages to break reality enough to force a confrontation with the Wielder on neutral ground where the Entity’s narrative won’t prevent him from winning, but due to some unforeseen external factors fails again, and gets his soul bound to the sword. This essentially traps him in a pocket dimension unless summoned by the Wielder and renders him physically unable to cause any actual harm to the Wielder or his allies. On the plus side, the Powers of Darkness can no longer reach Kyran, so as long as he’s bound to the sword and by extension the Entity, he’s safe from any consequences he’s racked up. Incidentally, it also cuts off the by-then-considerable hold the Powers of Darkness had over his mind. No longer clouded by the influence of a malevolent multiconsciousness and with not much to do while trapped in the void, he engages in some actual self reflection for the first time in his life and isn’t thrilled with the conclusion (this by no means makes him instantly a better person, but it does gradually lessen the degree to which he’s an abject asshole). He also discovers that due to his gryphonic heritage, he has a limited amount of control and mobility in interdimensional space (though the sword prevents him from going to any physical dimension) and he finds his way to a gryphonic ruin that seems to have once been part of either a temple or a library, and discovers more about gryphonic history than any Aenthian gryphon ever has. The Wielder mainly leaves him to his own devices in there, since they’re still enemies but at this point there’s not much either of them can really do to the other, and while the sword’s power to bind some beings is intended as a kind of familiar mechanic, Kyran is really not the kind of bound creature to be anything but a belligerent hindrance if summoned. Also every time they interact it tends to end with someone getting stabbed.

The destruction Kyran caused in his bid for the sword, meanwhile, created a schism that broke all known gateways between Earth and Aentha, trapping Talon and Iadra back in their own world. Not knowing what happened to the humans or Kyran, and with no way to find out, they mainly just go back to their lives, now living almost entirely on the outskirts, since things between Andolia and the neighboring gryphons are still getting worse. After a year or two they have a son, who they name Iadros (gryphonic tradition is to name the firstborn cub after the mother regardless of the cub’s gender) and mainly stay occupied with that until the political situation gets dangerous enough for the gryphons that they start to consider ways to access Earth again, with the idea that maybe the Wielder’s Chosen One status would help them solve the whole mess, but at the very least to get Iadros out of harm’s way while he grows up.

About five years after the schism was created, circa 2017, they finally find a way back, unknowingly thanks again to gryphons being powerful interdimensional beings who created a number of their own pathways and pocket dimensions between worlds. As it turns out, things have been developing on the Earth side as well. Kyran and the Wielder have, if not become friends, at least reached a kind of truce, since it turns out when rendered unable to be an evil warlock Kyran’s default state is “Genealogy Aunt but make it goth,” and he’s trying to track down the lost origin world of gryphons, partly for something to do while he’s been trapped in a pocket dimension for five years and partly out of the newfound desire to do something non-destructive for once. It’s almost less of a redemption arc than a quarter-life crisis that happens to lead in a positive direction. Anyway, he needed the Wielder and the sword in order to travel to other worlds on the trail of this lost dimension, and has at least agreed to not stab anyone with letter openers in exchange. Probably helps that they’ve all gone from a gaggle of cosmically-overpowered teenagers to slightly more emotionally mature cosmically-overpowered twenty-somethings.

After some time of this, during which more monster-of-the-week things happen in the course of this ultimately fruitless search for the lost world, it becomes apparent that Kyran probably isn’t interested in killing them all anymore and the Wielder offers to free him from the sword (this will not reattach his soul to his body; his soul currently resides in a crystal from which it can’t be unbound, but giving the crystal to him will separate his will from the sword and the Wielder and he’ll be able to travel around physical reality on his own again). He refuses, knowing that both the Powers of Darkness are probably looking for him at this point and the Entity has a vested interest in him remaining the villain, and he’s very certain that he doesn’t have the willpower or actual power to fight them off and they’d end up back at square one. Especially since the whole soul-trapped-in-a-crystal thing makes him vulnerable to specifically that kind of danger. As long as he remains bound to the sword, the Powers of Darkness can’t get to him to call in his significant debt, and the Entity can’t do anything because technically he’s still the villain of the story and is being forced by the sword’s power to not fight the Wielder. Technically. This was the point where I awkwardly realized I’d accidentally set up a perfect gay enemies-to-lovers plot and had to completely rethink the Wielder as a character because I love that trope too much to just not use it.

Anyway, Talon and Iadra aren’t thrilled to learn that Kyran and the humans are on more or less amicable terms now, since their last few interactions with Kyran have done nothing to indicate that having him around will be conducive to safely raising a child and Iadra in particular has still not forgiven him for what he did to Talon, and without five years of context, the fact that the three (four counting the talking space dog) of them are kind of working together now feels like a bit of a betrayal.

There’s no time for this to really come to a head, because their attempt at magic-sword-based rules-lawyering has actually not fooled or appeased the Entity at all, and it’s very set on returning equilibrium. It tries a couple tactics to get Kyran to turn on everyone or vice versa, including but not limited to sending a double of him to Earth to cause problems (it doesn’t work because the sword renders that impossible and they all know that) and trying to provoke the talking dog who still doesn’t really like him into acting on it (he doesn’t because he has a moral compass and better things to do), but the arrival of Talon, Iadra, and Iadros provides exactly the opportunity it thinks it needs, and it finds a way to hijack Iadros. And unfortunately there’s going to be yet another part to this.

[gryphons-of-aentha]

The Approximate Plotline of the Gryphonverse (pt. 2)

Because this is what you were getting yourselves into when you followed me.

Right, so, Talon and Iadra join up with Kyran to overthrow Kyran’s asshole father, who happens to rule the country. They end up working well together and form a sizeable group of aquei and one or two additional gryphons who Iadra managed to convince. If not for the fact that it was all being headed by a seventeen year old with absolutely no martial experience at all (not to mention a much greater talent for dividing people than uniting them, which was great for starting the rebellion but not finishing it), it might have worked. Unfortunately, it was being headed by a seventeen year old, and he doesn’t believe in stealth or subtlety because he’s melodramatic enough to want an audience when he confronts and in theory usurps his father. While they do manage to make a heavy dent in the king’s guard/soldiers and cause a lot of problems for him, they’re overpowered without much effort in the end. Talon and Iadra manage to escape the aftermath mostly unscathed, though not all the gryphons do, and Kyran is arrested and very promptly exiled on the spot. The king’s hope was likely that the humiliation of such a complete and public defeat would prevent him from ever showing himself in Andolia again, but as it turns out humiliating Kyran has roughly the effect of throwing water on a grease fire, and he was already plotting revenge before he’d even finished storming out of the room. 

Meanwhile, Talon and Iadra are trying to figure out where to go from here because this whole fiasco has made the Andolian impression of gryphons even worse (largely because the king is actively pushing the narrative in that direction to throw the blame off himself, since Kyran managed to make himself into a massive PR disaster). Even Talon is finding himself less welcome in a lot of places than he used to be, and distances himself from the places he is welcome to avoid bringing unwanted attention to them, so he mostly hangs out in the no-man’s-land with other gryphons unless his town has some kind of monster-of-the-week situation he needs to deal with. Iadra does have to rescue his ass more than once when he overestimates the goodwill of a few villages, because he’s entirely too optimistic when it comes to judgement of character, but while she's more wary about which aquei she’ll interact with, she enthusiastically jumps on the reputation-grinding sidequest train (gryphons are very fond of three things: proving how badass they are with dangerous heroics, being complimented about it, and receiving shiny things, so this is really the gig they were made for) and even becomes cautiously friendly with Talon’s hometown.

Barring the occasional snag, they do this pretty successfully for a couple years until who should show up again but Kyran, with an even bigger chip on his shoulder and an even more horribly ill-conceived plan to get back at the king.

Among the many powerful eldritch forces and arcane loci that can be encountered in the wilderness around Andolia is what I vaguely dubbed the Powers of Darkness and then never got around to actually naming properly. Anyway, the Powers of Darkness are a sort of multi-consciousness/hivemind/sentient form of malicious energy that feeds on suffering and conflict, generating from and partially comprising what I equally vaguely refer to as the Eleventh Dimension. Just don’t ask too many questions about this one. Obviously, Kyran looked at this extremely powerful malevolent force that has no agenda other than causing more misery that it can feed on and a resume of imprisoning souls via impulsively-made contracts as long as time itself and thought “yeah I can probably use that and deal with the consequences later” because he has learned nothing in the last two years and is still holding a massive grudge about his previous defeat. He proceeds to summon and make a bargain with this thing, certain that if he inflicts enough collateral damage along the way it will satisfy whatever price the Powers of Darkness would otherwise take from him.

He doesn’t tell Talon or Iadra this, he just states that he’s found a source of power that can potentially raze the capital to the ground, to which both are like “okay, no, committing war crimes over your unresolved daddy issues would be bad, actually.” Iadra has been pretty thoroughly done with him since he almost got them killed last time and is wary of burning the bridges they’ve been carefully rebuilding, but Talon, giant stoic golden retriever that he secretly is, still thinks that Kyran has potential if he could just be steered off the wildly destructive path he keeps going down and probably would be, if not a good king, at least a better king than Shale given a few years to mellow out. Two years ago this was probably true, but now he’s strongly underestimating how much Kyran should not be put in charge of anything. This leads to the first major conflict Talon and Iadra have ever had, which eventually ends in Iadra just throwing her hands up and going back to Talon’s town to brood about it and continue what they’ve been doing, assuming Talon will come to his senses after the plan inevitably goes to shit, having known him long enough to be confident that he’ll survive the consequences just fine. 

Those would have been safe assumptions if not for the fact that Kyran was much more dangerous and stupid than either of them were prepared for, and even Kyran wasn’t prepared for the fact that the Powers of Darkness also possess the more subtle tendency to slowly get into peoples’ heads and drive them to extremes they’d never reach on their own (not that this absolves him of wanting to destroy a city but he was very much under their influence by that point). Now granted, his desire to work with Talon was sincere; they’d become very close during the first rebellion attempt because Kyran’s lack of a competent father figure matched up well with Talon’s deeply ingrained Mandalorian Instinct™ and there was a good reason why Talon was so willing to give him the benefit of the doubt here. The problem is that Kyran didn’t think to read the fine print while making deals with actively evil eldritch forces and was confronted with the consequences of his actions much earlier in his plan than expected. Suddenly realizing that he’s much less impervious to said consequences than he flippantly assumed, and pretty thoroughly cornered, he does the last thing available to him that doesn’t involve actually dealing with his own shit and paying the price himself, and turns on Talon to sacrifice him instead. Normally a moderately competent but inexperienced teenager against an adult gryphon whose day job is fighting things would be a laughably unfair fight, but the Powers of Darkness have a vested interest in Talon losing, and to the surprise of both of them he falls very quickly to Kyran, who hacks off one of his wings (unfortunately for Talon, the Powers of Darkness don’t feed on death or amicable defeat) and leaves him to bleed out, then flees into the hills, very much traumatized (albeit not as traumatized as Talon) but confident that he’s off the hook and determined to now proceed with his plan.

Luckily for Talon, this all went down not far from a fairly isolated aquei homestead, and he’s found by the couple who lives there, who heard all the crashing and screaming and are both 200% ready to throw down until they arrive on the scene and find nothing but an unconscious gryphon hybrid in a puddle of blood with one of his wings laying several yards away. Given the current state of interspecies relations, they probably would have killed him had they not recognized him as that guy from that one weird town, but fortunately all the sidequests have paid off. They haul him back to the farm and he eventually makes an impressive physical recovery, though due to the circumstances of losing the wing he’s kind of stuck between forms and can no longer shift to fully humanoid or fully gryphonic, which is an unusual state to get stuck in but still very livable in his case (he mostly just looks a lot more like a winged aquei than an regular half-gryphon). Still, losing an entire limb and all ability to fly is a lot, and he’s down for the count both physically and psychologically for a good chunk of time.

Iadra, when she doesn’t hear from him or Kyran for a while, starts to wonder if maybe something went wrong. Eventually word reaches her that Talon is dead (which even Kyran believes to be true, since the only two people who know otherwise are keeping their mouths shut) and she immediately decides to hunt down Kyran herself and absolutely murder the shit out of him. He’s not easy to track down, as he’s currently laying low and gathering power for what he’s determined will be the final assault on the capital and his father, and she has to increasingly rely on her human form the deeper into Andolia she goes, but Iadra is extremely determined and Kyran is pretty bad at being subtle, and she eventually tracks him straight into the capital. The ensuing fight between an accidental evil warlock who’s also the king’s bastard son and a horse-sized flying apex predator with fairly recognizable plumage almost immediately causes a scene and also a lot of property damage, and the king’s guard arrives quickly to apprehend both of them (or they will, just as soon as everyone stops flailing claws and dangerous forces around). Kyran, who this time lacks both the biased support of the Powers of Darkness and the element of surprise, fares much worse against Iadra than he did against Talon. So, in a last-ditch move of desperation, he calls on much more power than he’s already paid for to try and portal himself out of there.

Which is how he, and by extension Iadra, find out that Aentha has an inherent interdimensional connection to the planet Earth, and specific humans who live on it. And unfortunately, this is getting too fucking long again so I guess there’s going to be a part three.

[gryphons-of-aentha]

The Approximate Plotline of the Gryphonverse (pt. 1)

Because like. I’m never gonna actually write this shit in any form, it’s gotten too convoluted and weird and pretty much officially exists only as a collection of ideas and drawings, and I guess this blog now.

This is gonna be long as fuck, just so you know what you’re getting into behind this readmore.

The whole thing starts out as fairly standard, fairly tropey high fantasy-type stuff and takes place entirely on Aentha, centered around the country of Andolia, a fantasy-feudal country with a vaguely German bent, with added notes of French and Celtic. It’s populated almost entirely by aquei, which are the closest thing Aentha has to humans (and they are very close, I just couldn’t think of a reason to have actual humans evolve separately on a completely different planet when Earth and actual humans are also canonically a thing). It’s bordered on one side by sea and all others by wilderness that, for various reasons ranging from “it’s impassable and useless” to “it’s literally cursed and/or protected by powers we don’t want to fuck with,” remains virtually untouched by civilization and is at best halfheartedly disputed over with other nearby countries. There’s trade by sea but otherwise the country is fairly isolated from its neighbors. Anyway, Andolians don’t like gryphons. The ‘why’ of this situation isn’t really established, but they’re a rather xenophobic bunch, more so the further you get into the heart of the country. The people who occupy villages/homesteads closer to the borders are sometimes more chill about them, which is fortunate, because that no-man’s-land that the aquei don’t want is full of gyphons, because gryphons are both well suited to impassable mountainous regions, and not afraid to fuck with powers most other people won’t. The latter trait is probably a lot of the reason Andolians are wary of them at best and actively hate them at worst.

So at a certain point, circa 1980 in Earth time (which won’t become relevant for a long while yet but does matter since everything in this lore canonically occurs in real time alongside our world), a half-gryphon baby ends up in the custody of a small Andolian town. It’s too large and central to have had any previous contact with gryphons but still small and out of the way enough that nobody in the capital gives two shits what goes on there, so the existence of this gryphonic child goes largely unnoticed. What exactly happened to his parents is still not established and honestly doesn’t matter, but it’s Andolia, so the likely answer is “nothing good.” Gryphons who do venture into the country proper frequently meet unfortunate ends and people who willfully associate with them don’t do so great either. In any case, it’s likely that the aquei parent’s family were residents of this town and took in the kid, who was subsequently named Talon, because Andolians don’t really do subtlety with their naming conventions. The town proves to be a surprisingly supportive environment to grow up in, mainly on the logic of “if we raise this kid right we will never have to deal with the local bandit problem again because we’ll have a gryphon and nobody will want to fuck with us.” Incredibly, this Timon and Pumbaa logic actually works out, and Talon finds himself more welcome among small town Andolians than any gryphon has probably ever been because he’s quickly developed a reputation as a “good” one and turned into a local hero (though one that everyone in the region keeps kind of quiet about so as not to draw attention from the capital or anyone else who might not like it). 

Eventually, some time in the late 90s Earth time, he meets Iadra, a full-blooded gryphon. They form a bond, eventually becoming definitive life partners, and Talon also reconnects more with the gryphonic half of his heritage through her. The townsfolk aren’t really thrilled about Iadra, and she’s not really thrilled about them, but they adopt an attitude of “I guess if Talon likes you, you can’t be too awful, guess you can hang around” to which she basically responds “appreciate the unbridled confidence in my character, but no thank you” and mainly stays on the outskirts and never really gets involved in aquei affairs to the extent Talon does, especially since the interspecies tensions are getting worse lately.

Meanwhile, as all this was semi-quietly going on in a small town nobody cared about, other things were semi-quietly going on directly in the Andolian royal court. The king, Shale, was really hitting it off with a woman who had just kind of shown up in the capital one day calling herself Ember. Through a combination of charisma and political shrewdness she managed to endear herself to most of the court and take on an unofficial advisor position, and also have an affair with the king. Eventually, circa 1989, this led to a son being born, who they named Ash (meanwhile, on Earth, Taylor Swift was being born, which isn’t important to this story it’s just something I realized just now and thought was really funny). The king had no other children at the time, so his first reaction was “hey, free heir” until it came to light that Ember was not wholly aquei, and in fact had some gryphonic heritage and so, by extension, did Ash.

A prudent move here might have been to cover this up, accuse whoever exposed Ember of slander, and just let the kid inherit the throne anyway. Sadly, prudence was not a trait King Shale possessed in abundance. So what he did instead was lose his shit over it and very publicly throw Ember out of his court, after which she quickly fell prey to any one of the many people who were pissed at her for the deception, and was killed. Shale then denied both the affair and the fact that Ash was his son, but made a show of magnanimously “adopting” the gryphonic bastard child and allowing him to remain at court. This was an entirely political move in response to the fact that the gryphons on Andolia’s borders were getting tired of exactly this kind of shit, and he hoped that he could use Ash as a kind of “how can you say I hate gryphons, look at this one who I raised and keep around out of the goodness of my heart” card.

Unsurprisingly this did not work out nearly as well as Shale imagined it would, and instead of a loyal walking virtue signal/gryphonic liaison, what he ended up with was a resentful and confused teenager who had been raised with the combined knowledge that A) gryphons are terrible, dangerous creatures with few redeeming qualities and nobody likes them, and B) he was part gryphon. So, not unlike Taylor Swift, he responded to everyone’s expectation that he would be a shitty person by turning into a shitty person. This uneasy state of affairs carried on until Ash was around sixteen, at which point he accidentally stumbled across the fact that he was actually the king’s son, and not the son of a random courtier with poor judgement as had always been vaguely implied. He also found out what exactly had happened to his mother. He immediately confronted Shale about this. Shale, who had always been paranoid about Ash trying to usurp him, entirely missed the point of the confrontation and instead of addressing the lying or the unofficially sentencing Ember to death thing or the general environment he’d made Ash grow up in, angrily doubled down on the fact that Ash would not be heir to the throne, ever, because he’s still a gyphon and that’s not a thing in Andolia, and even if he wasn’t he’d never be fit to rule and was clearly an ungrateful little shit. Ash, who up to that point hadn’t remotely wanted to rule, immediately decided out of pure teenage spite that fuck you, he was going to usurp his asshole of a father and do exactly that, so he set about stirring up dissent and delving further into his gyphonic heritage, with which he quickly became mildly obsessed since obviously his aquei side wasn’t doing anything for him. In the course of this research he came across records of an unrelated full-blooded gryphon named Kyran who had been executed by the king on trumped-up charges as a political maneuver some years prior and, since he no longer wanted to use an Andolian name and didn’t know his mother’s real name, he decided to adopt that one.

Cut back to Talon and Iadra, who are among the gryphons getting edgy over the king’s increasing levels of bullshit since it’s putting Talon’s town and everyone he associaties with at risk, and making things even more difficult for the local gryphons, who are having trouble even venturing into the outskirts to trade unless they’re very stealth about it. Iadra starts to think that maybe they should take some direct action and go after the king directly, a plan Talon is extremely dubious about since they have zero meaningful political allies and he doesn’t want to paint a target on the assorted farmers and villagers who would back him. That is until Kyran shows up and announces his plan to overthrow the king himself, along with a grandiose plan to change things for Andolia’s relationship with the gryphons once he takes over. And Kyran does have political allies (though not many, and not without substantial effort on his part). Talon decides that’s enough for him to go along with the idea, so he and Iadra join forces with Kyran’s rebellion and know what this is too long I need to make this a multi-part thing.

[gryphons-of-aentha]

random fact that is one of my favorite random facts: Kyran’s original given name was actually Ash (not in the sense that I ever planned to name him that, I mean his parents canonically named him that and he changed it later). He goes out of his way to avoid anyone knowing this, not for angsty reasons as you might expect given the general way he is, but because he knows exactly one other individual named Ash, and it’s a talking, ABBA-obsessed space dog with whom he's been in a state of constant mutual loathing since the 2000s, and he absolutely will not give him the satisfaction of knowing.

[gryphons-of-aentha]

[gryphons-of-aentha]

An addendum to the previous post: even two full-blooded gryphons don’t actually reproduce in gryphonic form (or fuck in gryphonic form in general, it’s not that they can’t, technically, it’s just that they aren’t designed for it and it would be more uncomfortable/difficult than enjoyable- but even if they do they can’t conceive that way). When pregnant, they lose the ability to shift out of their humanoid form and don’t regain it until a couple months after giving birth, right around when the cub starts being able to shift (if not always voluntarily) and switches over to solid food. During that period of time the other party who can still shift handles anything that requires the ability to fly or fight or otherwise be a horse-sized flying apex predator, and then once parent 1 regains shapeshifting abilities they swap duties until the cub is old enough to start flying, at which point it’s pretty much a joint parenting effort from then on out.

As a rule gryphons actually have more sexual dimorphism and more heteronormative-leaning tendencies than more other fictional races I write. Not sure how that happened, and worth noting that there are exceptions to any generalization stated. Anyway, the most noticeable differences are that males are fluffier and on average slightly larger, and tend to take on a protective role in groups or families, but they’re very performative about it. They’ll puff up and get in your face at the drop of a hat but will pretty much always give a threat/opponent the opportunity to back down and leave before they resort to actual violence (they will do this regardless of what form they’re in). Females are less prone to posturing; this does not mean they’re less volatile, it just means that if one is coming for you then it’s already too late to run. Possibly because the social dynamics of the average gryphon colony imply that if something wasn’t already scared off by a male being a massive chad at it, there’s no sense in trying to bluff it into a retreat twice.

Speaking of colonies, some gryphons do like to live in large groups. Some colonies are nomadic, some function more as a small village, they vary in size but never get larger than “small village” size; there aren’t large gryphonic cities or anything. Plenty of gryphons also prefer to live alone or with a partner (they’re usually monogamous and, while they don’t practice marriage in a human sense, they stay with a partner for life and usually won’t ever take another if one dies or they’re otherwise separated) and some (like Talon) like living among aquei or other races provided they’re welcome there. They aren’t native to any one region on Aentha since they aren’t from the planet in the first place, but unsurprisingly are more often found around mountainous areas.

[gryphons-of-aentha]

So these are not really classic mythology gryphons. They look similar (part of the time) and don’t like horses, but that’s about where the similarities end.

The most essential factor in understanding how these gryphons work is knowing the fact that they shapeshift. All gryphons have two forms they can take, one of which looks mostly indistinguishable from a human except for the gold/yellow eyes (and passably similar to an aquei, which is the most analogous species to humans that Aentha, the planet they mostly live on, has) and the other of which usually looks like what you’d expect a gryphon to look like. Not always, because gryphons are capable of producing offspring with aquei and the resulting hybrid will also be able to shapeshift, but their gryphonic form will be very obviously a combination of the two. The appearance of gryphon/aquei hybrids varies depending on what percentage of each is involved, and operates 100% on rule of cool. Weird/awkward-looking hybrids don’t happen because gryphons are just Like That. Aquei, at least in the country most of the named characters are from, have some long-standing issues with gryphons and tend to shun hybrids, but gryphons consider anyone with any gryphonic heritage at all to just be one of them. Even Kyran, who’s so heavily aquei that even his “gryphonic” form is indistinguishable from a regular dude unless you get uncomfortably close to him, is still considered a gryphon. 

Gryphons also age differently from humans/aquei; as cubs they mature very fast in comparison, but start slowing down to human speed around what would developmentally be the early teens. Then they just keep slowing down, pretty much indefinitely, so a gryphon who looks like they’re in their mid twenties is probably around forty-sixty, and a gryphon who actually looks old enough for a senior discount could have been around for several thousand years. Even then they age very well and stay active (like, really active, we’re looking at an entire species of adrenaline junkies) right up until the last 1-3 years of their lives, at which point they’ll finally start to noticeably deteriorate physically. Outside of Aentha they’re actually capable of a conditional immortality because in some dimensions they can manipulate time, but that’s a whole other post.