Vesperine Nightcollar
For three days the eye at The Flower — the one the record calls Nectarhaven — caught only motion: a blur at the port, a trembling of the red glass, a shape gone before it could be counted. The realm logged those visits as nothing at all, mystery visitor, unresolved. Then, on a bright morning at the very end of August, the blur held still long enough to become a bird.
He was not what Emberwood expected. The nectar-court had been ruby-throated from the first — Veloria the Swift, Ruby Sue, Thistledart, all of them fire at the throat, all of them throwing their color at everything. This one wore black. Vesperine Nightcollar keeps his color folded away: a throat like a band of dark cloth, plain from almost every angle, until he turns into a low sun and the bottom edge of it burns a sudden narrow line of violet — one stroke of it, spent in an instant, gone the moment he turns back. He shows it the way the evening shows its last light: briefly, and only to whoever is still watching.
At the feeder he is the smaller presence. He gives way to the ruby-throats more often than not, taking the shaded port, the off-hour, the quiet gap between their quarrels. His wings hum a lower note than theirs. His voice is a dry tick, easy to lose under everything else. He does not announce himself, and for the better part of a week the realm did not know he was there.
And he came late. The black-chinned kind pass through North Texas only while the season holds; by the turn of September the road south is already open under them. To join a place in the week before you leave it is a strange sort of arrival — more promise than settling. Emberwood chose to take it as one. A bird who finds the nectar in the last warm days, and lets the light catch him doing it, is a bird telling the realm he knows the way back.
Oaths & Portents
Council Seat: None — Hearthfolk; hummingbirds owe allegiance to no council, only the season
Oath: To arrive even when the arriving is nearly a leaving, and to let the light catch me once before I go.
Portent: When Vesperine turns and shows the violet at his throat, the season has rounded its corner — what comes next is the long road south and the waiting for spring.