When Among Crows

A Polish man in his late twenties who carries a fern flower and a bow in a guitar case through Chicago. Raised by his grandmother Joanna⁶ to serve the Holy Order, he was trained from childhood to identify and kill creatures, though his grandmother's pedagogy included striking him across the face to discipline his empathy. He possesses expert archery skills, speaks Polish fluently, and navigates the creature world with an unsettling calm that disturbs those who expect a mortal's fear. He befriended a young zmora named Lena¹⁰ in secret while serving as her family's executioner, and her death shattered the ideology he was raised to uphold. He is gentle with those he was taught to hate and ruthless with himself, seeking not death but diminishment, a way to stop being what he is.

A zmora bartender at the Crow Theater in Chicago, small and pale with a sly smile and hoop earrings the size of fists. She is afflicted by a hereditary curse that forces her to witness visions of Holy Order executions, consuming her waking hours and slowly killing her as it killed her mother, her aunt, and her cousin¹⁰ before her. She possesses exceptional talent for illusions, able to create detailed false realities and duplicate herself to confuse enemies. She killed her own mother at the woman's desperate request, using the magic generated by her mother's suffering to grant her peace. She speaks little Polish despite her heritage, which isolates her from the zmora community. Fierce, skeptical, and afraid to hope, she is nonetheless drawn to Dymitr¹'s unusual gentleness toward her kind.

A male strzygoń with luminous bronze owl eyes and dark hair. He serves as zemsta, bound by oath to hunt the Holy Order in vengeance for his people, a doomed duty he inherited when his predecessor fell to a Knight. His own kind fear him because the constant magical debt they owe him makes him more powerful than they are. His mortal mother, terrified of losing him after his father's sudden death, brought him to Baba Jaga⁴, who transformed him into something that could survive. He affects casualness and sardonic wit to mask the certainty of his eventual death. He fights in a shifted owl form with black wings and sharp talons. He is drawn to Dymitr¹'s beauty and his refusal to show fear, seeing in him a clarity most mortals lack.

The oldest and most powerful witch in North America, who appears as a young woman but can shift to reveal her true age. She lives in a crooked apartment impossibly larger inside than out, stocked with jars of teeth, dried herbs, bones, and a stuffed squirrel in a cowboy hat. She destroyed the Uptown Theatre in a rage after a rival witch nearly outwitted her. She does not move in straight lines, morally or magically, and her bargains always demand a steep price. She is neither ally nor enemy, merely ancient and endlessly curious about what desperate people will offer.

Dymitr¹'s younger sister and a devoted Knight of the Holy Order. She followed Dymitr¹ to Chicago against his orders, convinced he is on a fool's errand. She wears ruffles and bright lipstick when not dressed for combat. She was the one who cleaned Dymitr¹'s bloodstained hands after his first kill, telling him he had killed an it, not a person. She fights with two bone swords and summons enchanted crows through blood ritual. Her love for her brother¹ is fierce but expressed through violence, the only language their family taught.

Dymitr¹'s grandmother, a Knight who chose her name to honor Joan of Arc. She taught Dymitr¹ to spot creatures in crowds, to wield a bow, and to suppress the empathy that made him flinch from killing. On the eve of his ceremony, she struck him across the face to discipline his doubt, then gave him a journal of Knight curses and named him her successor as curse-bearer. She saw in him the capacity for the Order's darkest magic. She believed he would do things no other Knight had accomplished.

The ancient leader of the Kostka strzyga family, who looks middle-aged with copper hair in a 1920s finger-wave bob. Her yellow eyes are piercing and predatory. She runs an underground boxing club where her kind feed on the aggression the fights generate. She is casually cruel, provoking anger to feed upon it, and demands painful sacrifices as the price of her wisdom.

The youngest of the Dryja family's three zmora leaders and the most receptive to humans. She wears a long needle with a spider ornament in her hair and can plunge a room into darkness with her illusions. She distrusts mortal men because she has made their worst nightmares come true and knows what they do when they feel cheated: they summon the Holy Order.

A sheid who works at a banshee-run hospice. She casts no shadow and sometimes a wing glints at her shoulder. She hears whispers of what is to come, which gives her an unsettling serenity. Her people fled persecution during the war alongside other Jewish refugees. She grants sanctuary to Niko³ without demanding payment, telling him he has already paid enough through his service as zemsta.

Ala²'s young zmora cousin who loved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and dressed as the purple one using her father's necktie. She fought Holy Order Knights with a kitchen broom to defend her cursed mother and was executed years later by the same pair of Knights after her father betrayed her.

An ancient forest spirit with a stag skull for a head, flowers growing in his eye sockets, and hooved feet. He guards the Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary and the fern flower on Kupala Night. He fled the Holy Order's purges in the old country less than a century ago.

A południca with a bare rib cage, a pulsing black heart visible through the bones, and milky white eyes. She carries a massive sickle and tests those who seek the fern flower by opening their chests to examine their hearts.