What if you could live for 150 years, but your entire people were dying out?

Dr. Maxim os Storm looks thirty-five years old. He’s actually seventy. He’ll stay in his physical prime for another thirty years, and won’t show his true age until he’s past a hundred. This longevity is the gift, and the curse, of the Stormcrows, a clan of people descended from those who escaped the fall of Thule three thousand years ago.

But living longer than ordinary humans is only the beginning of what makes the Stormcrows unique.

Descendants of a Fallen Atlantis

Three thousand years ago, the advanced island civilization of Thule sank beneath the waves. A handful of massive airships escaped, carrying the survivors who would become the Stormcrows. Their leader was Arent, who had been related to the royal family of Thule but was stripped of his right to use the eagle emblem shortly before the catastrophe. Ever since, his people have made their emblem the stormcrow: a particularly large, intelligent corvid associated with bad news and warnings of danger.

“os” is normally a designator of nobility in the Old World, but everyone who claims Thulean descent styles themselves “os Storm,” no matter how humble their profession. It’s a declaration: We are the survivors. We are the ones who escaped when Thule fell. We are Arent’s people.

 Living 150 Years: What It Really Means

The Stormcrows have an average life expectancy of a hundred and fifty years, but that time doesn’t pass the way it does for ordinary humans (whom the Stormcrows call “Continentals,” regardless of which continent they actually hail from).

For the first twenty years, Stormcrows mature at the same rate as mundane humans. Then comes the gift: a hundred years in the prime of life. Only in their last thirty years do they age at the same rate as normal humans again. In those last decades of life, they gain the ability to see auras around other human beings, showing the humans’ clarity of purpose and spiritual state.

Spending a century in your physical prime allows you to accomplish extraordinary things, if you have the drive. Maxim os Storm is a case in point. In his seventy years, he’s earned a medical degree, mastered the operation of ancient Thulean machines and a few of the engineering principles behind them, accumulated decades of monster hunting experience, and was apparently a champion at jousting reenactments back when that was fashionable forty or fifty years ago.

But a long life has also allowed Maxim a long time to accumulate grief. He’s buried his parents, watched one uncle turn into a fanatic, another uncle stop caring, and the beautiful noblewoman he once loved fade into a middle-aged political matron.

Dr. Doolittle Van Helsing: The Gift of Animal Telepathy

Many Stormcrows can communicate telepathically with animals, especially their namesake stormcrows. The main limiting factor is the animal’s intelligence, which is why most Stormcrows confine themselves to conversing with the highly intelligent corvids who share their name.

Maxim is initially the same way, but he keeps finding himself in situations where he needs to talk with other kinds of animals. Over the course of the Hunter Healer King Trilogy, he successfully communicates with: three stormcrows (naturally), at least two horses, three or four dogs, a wolf, and a doped-up jaguar. I joked once to someone that I should have named him Dr. Doolittle Van Helsing instead of Dr. Maxim os Storm.

This rapport with animals often gives him an edge. The stormcrow birds carry messages for him, and sometimes do reconnaissance work. His friendship with Scrimshaw, the fierce white stallion from Chloe Fortebat’s herd, saves his life at least once. And when the capital city is terrorized by a pair of mysterious animal attacks, Maxim can simply interview the suspects.

The Price of Ancient Blood

The Stormcrows are physically more durable than mundane humans. They’re resistant to cold, possibly somewhat harder for evil sorcerors to enslave, and can “power through” pain and fatigue to a greater extent than ordinary people. Combined with their longevity and animal telepathy, they should be thriving.

Instead, they’re dying out.

Generations of marrying “whatever degree of cousins the priests will allow” has crashed their live-birth rate. The descendants of Arent, at least in the direct line leading down to Maxim, are noted for their uncanny family resemblance. Chloe can peg a man as Maxim’s cousin or uncle at first sight. Maxim’s father, King Urban, discovered and rescued a small, lost population of similar long-lived people. this brought an infusion of new blood into the community, but even that wasn’t enough.

The math is brutal: marry other Stormcrows, and watch their bloodlines fade through failed pregnancies and stillbirths. Marry mundane humans, and watch the Stormcrow gifts dilute and disappear within a few generations, reemerging only in rare cases where a child has multiple Stormcrow grandparents. Either way, the Stormcrows as they are today will come to an end.

Maxim takes a common sense approach to the problem. He believes the Stormcrows should marry where their hearts take them, with a clear-eyed understanding of what might happen, and let future generations take care of themselves. The Stormcrows and the mundanes should mutually assimilate, with the mundanes gaining the ancient knowledge the Stormcrows have preserved from Thule, and the Stormcrows gaining humility and respect for the mundanes. His partnership with Chloe might just offer him a chance to lead by example.

A Cycle of Power and Corruption

The Stormcrows also face discrimination from the Continentals. Some of it is simple envy of what the Stormcrows possess: long lives, secret knowledge salvaged from Thule, abilities ordinary humans can never possess. But those advantages have also allowed the Stormcrows to rise to power over and over again, only to become corrupted by power as thoroughly as any mundane would.

The most recent example was the Empress Inquisitor, a Stormcrow who became obsessed with hunting down monsters, and the sorcerers who created them, after her children were killed by such a creature. What started as grief-driven justice became paranoid persecution. She began accusing ordinary people of conspiring with monsters, and executing anyone she suspected of sorcery based on the flimsiest evidence. Some of those acting in her name did worse: they extracted confessions by torture and killed entire families if a single member was accused of sorcery.

Eventually, a faction of rebels backed by several Stormcrows, including a kinsman of the Empress who was one of Maxim’s ancestors, successfully deposed her. But the damage was done. The mundanes were left with a general feeling that this monster-hunting business was paranoid, superstitious nonsense, and that Stormcrow people were dangerous fanatics who couldn’t be trusted with power.

In the present day of the trilogy, that attitude is fading. The Stormcrows have taken an active hand in the Industrial Revolution, sharing some of their Thulean knowledge to help advance steamship technology, medicine, and engineering. They’ve worked to rebuild trust. But the shadow of the Empress Inquisitor still haunts them. It makes them leery of showing what they are too openly to the mundanes.

The Reluctant King

Maxim sees a different lesson in the story of the Empress Inquisitor: a warning that power over others is not a thing to be sought or desired. That belief underlies his reluctance when the crown of the Stormcrows, and eventually the Imperial throne itself, are offered to him.

He has seventy years of experience, the ability to talk to animals, and the skills to hunt the monsters that terrorize the Old World. He should be the perfect king. But he doesn’t see the kingship as something worth having. Until he meets a rancher’s daughter from the New World who carries a knife, wears men’s clothes, and refuses to be just another damsel in distress. Until he realizes that the kingship is the only way he can help her and others like her.

Want to meet the Stormcrows? Start with Wolf’s Trail, where Dr. Maxim os Storm meets Chloe Fortebat and begins a partnership that will change both their lives, and the future of his people.

Read the Hunter Healer King Trilogy today!