Moonlight Dwelling

Way back when Xanth was new and the creatures were experiencing the first great radiations of forms, becoming all the magical combinations we know today, we half-people felt an affinity for each other. The full-men from Mundania came in savage waves, killing and destroying. We half-people had to cooperate merely to survive. The goblins lived adjacent to we harpies or is that us harpies? I never can remember sometimes even sharing the same waves. They slept by day and foraged by night, while we foraged by day.

So our two species were able to use the same sleeping areas. But as our population grew that was not enough room for us all. Some of our hens had to move out and build nests in trees. They got to like that better, and still do perch in trees. But the goblins became covetous of our space, and reasoned that if there were fewer of us there would be room for more of them. So they conspired against our innocence. Their females, some of whom in those days were very comely, lured away our males, corrupting them with with..With their arms and and legs. We had not been so long diverged from human beings that our males did not remember and lust after what they called real girls, though most human and humanoid women would not have anything to do with vulture tails.

When the lady goblins became approachable I would term them other than ladies, but I'm not supposed to know that sort of language when these creatures beckoned our cocks oh, males are such foolish things. And so we lost our cock-harpies and our hens became soured. That's why we have a certain exaggerated reputation for being impolite to people. What's the use of trying, when there are no cocks to please? No. There were no more eggs no fertile ones. There had never been a great number of cocks our kind hatched about five females for every male and now there were none. Our hens were becoming old and bitter, unfulfilled. There's nothing so bitter as an old harpy with an empty nest.

We hens had to seek males of other species. We abhor the necessity but our alternative is extinction. Since we derived originally from a cross between human and vulture. I under that was quite a scene there at the love spring we have had to return to these sources to maintain our nature. There are some problems, however. The human and vulture males aren't inclined generally to mate with harpies, and we can't always get them to the love spring to make it happen and when they do, the result is always a female chick.

It seems only a harpy cock can generate males of our species. So we have become a flock of old hens. And this is what the cursed goblins did to us, and why we hate them and war against them. We want to kill all of their males, as they did ours. We shall fight until we have our vengeance for the horrible wrong they did us. Already we are massing our armies and gathering our allies among the winged kinds, and we shall wreak a fittingly horrible vengeance by scratching the goblin nation from the fair face of Xanth!

By Heavenly Helen