By Jonathan Wojcik and Rev Storm

ENTRY 23: DEATH RITE BIRD

This was actually one of the last new monsters we ever saw when Rev was playing! It had basically been the same old beasts and dogs and ghouls for long enough, we thought we might have encountered pretty much everything, and then suddenly this giant mummified tweety bird fetus falls out of the sky! But what is this giant mummified tweety bird fetus?!

"In the time when there was no Erdtree, death was burned in ghostflame. Deathbirds were the keepers of that fire. The birds are graveyard fire keepers; it is said they rake out the ashen remains of the dead from their kilns."

Deathbirds also have multipl associated items. The description of the Sacrificial Axe reads "Hatchet used in ancient sacrificial rite. A Deathbird is depicted as a malevolent deity." The Twinbird Kite Shield's description goes "The twinbird is said to be the envoy of an outer god, and mother of the Deathbirds." And the Death Ritual Spear says "Ritual spear used by priests of old who were permitted to come among the Deathbirds. The priests became guardians of the birds through the rite of Death, which also serves as an oath sworn to their distant resurrection."

What we can glean from all this, it seems, is that the Twinbird was another of the outer gods or cosmic entities, and that it had dominion over death, with these birds as its "grim reapers," before the Erdtree came to muck everything up for everybody.

Whatever it is and why, the Death Rite Bird is a wonderful design. Take a humanoid corpse, stretch it out until its a big long bony tube with equally long limbs, add shadowy vulture wings, and then top its grotesquely elongated neck with an oversized skull that accidentally(?) but very strongly looks like a heavily decomposed Tweety Bird, and I mean that with the utmost respect; the big rounded cranium unpleasantly calls to mind a human baby, and there's a splendidly unwholesome coldness to those big, round, empty eye holes. It's much more disturbing than if they'd given it a more ferocious looking skull, but it's also much more charming and lovable than the actual Tweety Bird ever was.

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