The Auguri
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Medium: Midjourney AI + Lightroom + Procreate
The Auguri are an avian species known for their frequent migrations using massive flocks of interstellar ships, as well as their inscrutable social norms.
To be an Augur is to be constantly looking to your neighbors for signals and queues. The most obvious example of this can be seen during Auguri migrations, in which hundreds of millions of small ships (carrying one to two Auguri) form a vast murmuration. Each ship moves in relation to the ones closest to it, without any one ship leading the flock.
While this approach is far less efficient than a centrally-guided migration would be, the Auguri are renowned for their ability to evade threats and adapt on-the-fly to changing conditions, so much so that raiders have learned to leave the flocks alone.
This habit of looking to one’s neighbors for queues extends to every aspect of Augurian culture. Social norms are developed, propagated, and enforced in a decentralized way. If one fails to follow the queues of those around them, they quickly become outcasts, just as they would be left behind in a migration if they went in the opposite direction.
This doesn’t mean that Augurian society never changes, and when it does so, it transforms as rapidly as a flock changing direction at the sight of a predator. Behaviors that would have led to ostracization just a few years ago may be mandatory today.
This makes diplomacy with the Auguri an infamously tricky business. Their alliances are known to shift based who shares their social mores at a given time, and they have been known to abruptly cut ties with allies simply because they were greeted the wrong way.
This difficulty has led many species to welcome a few Auguri into their society to serve as diplomats. These Auguri are outcasts themselves, preferring to live outside the flock so they can live their taboo lifestyle, while remaining sensitive enough to the queues of their former society to serve as liaisons. Two such diplomats (who trimmed their plumes after leaving the flock) posed for the third and sixth portraits in this series.
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