The raven spread its wings and began its decent from the branch of the dead tree it had been observing the two from. Mid-air, it began to lose its feathers and change; its legs grew taller and more human, wings turned to arms, and its beak withdrew into a face that was no longer that of a bird but of a man, light of hair and beautiful of face, dressed in silken robes that seemed as if made by the best tailors of the faraway lands. As his feet gracefully touched the ground, he looked at the boy with a bored expression. "Your way of thinking of the problem is far too complicated," he said. "You're thinking of far too many solutions, it kills your magic before it's even born."
Shapeshifters are a rare, mysterious race that rarely makes its presence known. None know how their original form looks like, or if they even have one, and just as much of a question is how they are born: parents of such individuals never come forth with the knowledge in fear of what might happen to their child, and the shifters themselves keep the secret like if their lives depend on it. Because of this, there isn't a lot of information on them, only educated guesses, despite some researchers dedicating their lives to learning more of their kind. No one knows how long they live, how long it takes them to mature, or even if they have their shifting ability from birth, leaving scholars with plenty to discover.
Physical Desciption
By their very nature, shapeshifters do not have a physical form that they are chained to like the rest of the races, and no magic that would force them into an original form doesn't work on them, implicating that whatever face they choose to wear is the real one at any given time. Many shifters have a preferred form they spend most of their time in, often that of an animal. There are no known bounds to the form they can take, and scholars believe some dragons found in the pages of history are actually shapeshifters, rather than dragons taking a human form.
They are not bound to one sex, and those that choose to take to traveling often imitate the ethnicity of the region they spend time in in order to blend in.
Ties to Magic
One of the few things concerning the shifters that is hardly debated at all is that they are magical by nature. There are those that theorise that they are born of magic itself, possibly in places where the currents momentarily spike in strenght, or to people close to a location at such time. There are also thories on magical rituals involved in either making one a shapeshifter or ensuring that a child is born as one; some also believe that being under a magical effect at the time of conception might affect the child. There is also a theory involving differently affected
lycantrophies procreating, a condition that is also magical in origin.
This connection to magic is believed to allow the shapeshifters to so easily change their true form into whatever they choose. Despite this, not many shapeshifters are mages, and they rarely have the inborn potential to be gifted in the subject.
