The Crow Girls
Maida & Zia
An odd-looking girl stood solemnly looking down at him from the patch of light that spilled out from the hall beyond the doorway. She was small in height and slight in build, a skinny child-like figure with coffee-coloured skin and sharp features set in a triangular-shaped face. Her eyes were large, bird-bright and dark, her hair an unruly lawn of blue-black spikes. Though the evening was cooling, she was barefoot, dressed only in black leggings and an oversized flannel shirt with the arms cut off. This is Maida. A second girl, the mirror image of the first, you suddenly notice, is perched behind you, her legs drawn up to her chin and slender arms wrapped around them.
Maida seems to be the older one, if ages can be put to their actions: if anything, she just seems more “here” and “now” than Zia. Maida is a more forceful fighter, coming straight at her foe. She was attacked by something carried by Judd. She has a small freckle on her right cheek.
Zia is more eccentric than her counterpart, but handles public better. Case in point: Zia created a distraction in a large crowd allowing Maida to find the secret entrance unnoticed. Zia has a spatula from Kumarbi. They are not sisters.
A kid. Skinny and monochrome and not much to her: raggedy blue-black hair, dark complexion, black clothes, and combat boots. There seemed to be a cape fluttering up behind her like a sudden spread of black wings, there one moment, gone the next, and then she really was just a kid, standing there, her weight on one leg, a switchblade held casually in a dark hand.
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 Known Character Information
This is how it was in the long ago: Everyone respected the crow girls. Didn’t matter where you were, walking the medicine lands or right here in this world with the roots and dirt underfoot. You could look up and call their names, and there they’d be looking back down at you, two pieces of magic perched high up in a forever tree, black feathers shining, dark eyes watching, heads cocked, listening.
Some people say Raven was older, and wiser, too, but the crow girls were kinder. Any mischief they got into never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it. Knew all the questions and most of the answers, always did. Never had rules, never told you what to do, but they would teach you how to find your own answers, if you asked nicely enough.
Now no one remembers them. Not that way.
[Back in the beginning, when we would tell stories about how it all began] everybody would take a turn, make up how they thought it was. Except for Raven and the crow girls. They didn’t have to speak. They didn’t have to make up stories. Because they knew. They were there, right from the beginning when the medicine lands came up out of the long ago and this world began.
Only the corbae remember that first story. But Raven and the crow girls never needed to tell it and no one ever really listens [anyway].
-Charles de Lint, Someplace To Be Flying
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