Walking Hawk

Walking Hawk was a Seneca medicine man and the Dreamspeakers' representative in the First Cabal.

Overview

Walking Hawk's parents were killed in an attack on their village when he was sixteen. He became a skilled warrior in response. After an ambush left him badly wounded and near death, a spirit appeared to him and promised to save his life if he laid aside his weapons and became a healer. Walking Hawk agreed, and Awakened.

He was extremely skilled in the Spheres of Spirit and Life, and often had prophetic visions in dreams or while meditating. One of these visions lead him to construct an outrigger canoe, which he sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to attend the Grand Convocation. There he joined the bloc of non-Western spirit workers who became the Dreamspeakers. As a member of the First Cabal, he got along poorly with most of his colleagues, who could not overlook their own biases regarding his "savage" appearance and foreign culture. Eloine and Akrites Salonikas, however, did bond with him. His relationship to Fall Breeze was very paternal. As for Heylel Teomim, Walking Hawk regarded his fused nature as unnatural and never grew to trust him.

The March of Nine took Walking Hawk through lands foreign to him, and he was horrified at the way of life most Europeans lead: the polluted land, the exploitation of the poor, and the ravages of the Inquisition.

Two weeks after Heylel Teomim abandoned the First Cabal, Walking Hawk had a vision that presaged the Great Betrayal; the following morning, Teomim arrived back at camp with the Cabal of Pure Thought. Walking Hawk was taken captive along with Eloine, Bernadette and Cygnus Moro, and subjected to torture by the Inquisition. Eventually, they were rescued by Salonikas. When Teomim was put on trial, Walking Hawk asked for permission to personally execute him for his betrayal, but was denied. The Council offered Walking Hawk various rewards for his service, but he asked only to return to his people, which Star-of-Eagles granted.

Upon returning to Seneca land, Walking Hawk related all he had experienced in a speech that was memorized and passed down orally for centuries afterward. He warned his people and many of their allied tribes of the threat posed by the Order of Reason which would soon arrive in their lands, and promised that Ascension would save them. This gathering may have laid the seed of the Iroquois Confederacy that would later form in the 1600s.