Bestiary

Kudu is a trickster. He may look elderly and frail, with his wrinkles and slow movements, but that’s part of the tricks he uses in order to make people lower their guard around him. In truth, he is not nearly as old as he appears to be, but he’s a very wise creature because everyone underestimates him. They consider Kudu feeble while, in fact, he’s taking

notes and observing everything around him to use later in one of his antics.

The tortoise doesn’t trick people out of cruelty, though. He does it to survive. Because he is so slow and low to the ground, and because he has no defenses like the elephant’s tusks or the cheetah’s claws, he has developed many ways of deceiving his opponents through nonviolent but ingenious ways. Kudu is adept at camouflaging himself to hide amongst anything around him. An aggressor might think she’s attacking Kudu, only to discover that she’s attacking a rock, a deadlier animal, or even herself. Kudu uses his knowledge of plants in the surrounding area to make potions and then trick the person into drinking them. Such potions cause the victim to fall into a deep sleep, spill her most tightly kept secrets, and even make the person slip into a false reality (as in a psycho­ tropic drug’s hallucinations) or drift over into the Penumbra without a way to get back home.

In fact, Kudu is so smart that he brought the knowledge of the Tree of Life to the animals in the forest. Once, there was a drought, and all the food dried up except a bojabi tree, which was guarded by a ferocious python. The animals were starving, and they went to the python for food. Without any knowledge, however, they couldn’t remember what the python told them. After many days and nights of watching the animals forget what the python had said to them, Kudu hatched a plan. When the python told him the fruit was edible, he sang a song out in front of the python to all the animals about the food. The animals ran to the tree and ate merrily, and so Kudu was lauded as a hero among them.

Because he has an insatiable hunger for knowledge, Kudu is a valuable ally. If a mage can’t solve a particular puzzle, needs to know how to make a potion, or is having trouble locating something, it’s a smart idea to come to Kudu and beg for his limitless knowledge. Kudu can’t turn down the opportunity to humiliate someone and assert his knowledge over someone else, and so appeals to his vanity tend to work well; if the person appealing to him knows Kudu will try and trick her eventually, she can even try to trick him first (but good luck with that).

Kudu is a very busy tortoise, with many children to take care of, and a wife who requires much from him during the day. Thus, he vets people who come to him for help by asking them to solve a very difficult riddle. Kudu is patient, and he can wait for hours, days, or even weeks for the seeker to answer his puzzle. If that person solves it in a way that Kudu likes (which doesn’t always involve an honest or straight solution, as Kudu appreciates cunning as well), he’ll then grant that clever mortal the information she seeks.

Even in his humanoid form, Kudu looks like an ancient tortoise, with wrinkles hanging low from his face, his dusty shell, and his slow speech and dull mannerisms. He can be found living in a modest hut with his wife and children, surrounded by a garden of fresh spinach, collards, carrots,

and yams. Being a god, of course, he can appear as an actual tortoise, ranging in size from an unremarkable river tortoise to a titanic creature of appalling size and power.