First Feather (World Guide) (Patreon)

Barbarian fey'li culture is often quite a bit more alien than many alien cultures. This is largely a consequence of a combination of prolific fertility and limited resources resulting from the deliberate rejection of most technology more advanced than stone age. With a birth ratio of 37 females per male, extreme even for the fey'li, the sheer excess of prospective huntresses leads to numerous very strange and sometimes quite incomprehensible means of keeping the population under control.

At the age of nineteen, all women are sent from the home towns out to the all-female 'first hunts', villages that typically contain a hunt leader, a shaman, a dozen feathered huntresses, and up to fifty unfeathered tribe members. The latter are directed by the former to undergo a series of tests in order to earn their first feather and become a proper huntress, and perhaps even show promise as a future shaman. Very few will pass these tests, each of which is selected to dispose of those who fail in one fashion or another. Success is judged in degrees, and only those who have fully satisfied their elders will be granted their feather. Those who don't are sent one more tests until they fail or are finally judged worthy.

Each year a first hunt will accept between two and three hundred new supplicants. Of these, only four or five actually manage to earn their first feather. Outsiders seeking to earn acceptance by the tribe must go through the same process as the natives. 

One of the more popular methods of paring down the number of prospective new huntresses is the Hell's anemone, a fresh water creature seemingly, and quite possibly, taken straight from the Nine Heavenly Hells itself. Prospects are required to dive into shallow lakes containing numerous anemones in order to prove their courage by trying to get the anemone to poison them, without being caught. A brush with a lone tentacle will trigger a heady state of euphoria. A bit more will reduce inhibitions. A few good brushes will virtually eliminate survival instinct. Those who retain their presence of mind will escape so their elders and peers can see just how close they came to being caught. Those who don't are drawn in by the high, embracing the feeling as the tentacles embrace their bodies.

Serious contact with an anemone's tentacles results in a state of euphoric physical helplessness. The anemone inserts a breathing tube into the victim's mouth as it wraps them up and draws them into its transparent body. There, the victim is not so much eaten as her own flesh merges with that of the creature, a process that can take between twenty minutes and several days depending on how satiate the creature happens to be. The victim remains alive and aware to the very last moment. Whether or not the end of the process is actually fatal to the victim's conscious mind is unknown.