Although she is shaped like any bird in outline, she is a naked hollow metal armature, all coarse with rust and rough with corrosion. Those iron bones are stripes backlit by the fires always roaring within her frame, feeding off the various poisonous gases abundant in the land of entropy in which she dwells. She is untouchable, burning and sensationless. She is a recluse. She needs noone else to mate with or to speak to- although she is sought out on occasion, and on occasion she herself seeks out other places to expand her wisdom, for the quest of wisdom is what drives her on.

Every forty-nine hours, the pheonix's chemical flames have finally damaged her body beyond repair, and she crumbles into ashes. All that is left is a blackened metallic sphere from her core, which had cooked and incubated in that fire during those hours. It is her heart, and it is her egg. It opens along narrow seams, unfolds, hinges out, constructions based on a Hoberman sphere, illuminated by a little pilot-light; and then it is her new body, an origami of ash-black and bright newborn silver. She reboots her memories. After a few moments she has absorbed enough ambient pollution to bring her fire to full strength again, and continues on as normal.

Character created for use in PuzzleBox MUCK, although at this point I'm not sure whether she'll end up being role-played or not. The entropic setting is from there, as is the concept of rust shaman.

Character and image copyright Orion Sandstorrm, 2004. Do not use without permission.

"The Lumerpa. Fame.

This is born in Asia Magna and shines so brightly that it absorbs its shadows. And in dying it does not lose this light, and the feathers never fall out. And the feather which is detached ceases to shine."
- from "The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci" chapter XLIII, A Bestiary, page 1080


(I was using an out-of-print English-translation publication of this, but you can find it online as well- although it's still in Italian there, you can Babelfish it and find the entry to which I refer. http://www.museoscienza.org/leonardo/animali/bestiario.htm )


That is the only place I can find in which the Lumerpa is mentioned. I wonder where Leonardo got that story from, since all the other entries in his bestiary are standard. He did not provide an illustration for us, so I based its shape on its cousin firebirds.


Asia Magna, by the way, is a fictitious land bridge connecting Asia to North America. It was theorized to exist by cartographers in Leonardo's time, since it was all Terra Incognita out there anyway. A fantasy land for a fantasy bird... very appropriate.


For this image, I referred to a starchart. These are the constellations you would see in late Winter, in the Northern Hemisphere, looking North. The trees are... hemlock, I think they're called. If there really was an Asia Magna, and if there really were lumerpae living in it, this is how it would look.


Image and text copyright Orion Sandstorrm, 2004.