The Grave Beast

The Gravebeast has the head and wings of a vulture and the body of a bear. Supposedly it takes care of the travellers that the Guide bird does not find in time, stripping away and eating the flesh then burying the intact skeletons of the deceased in the clothes that they were wearing and leaving behind unmarked stones as grave markers. It is also said to return significant items that the dead traveller may have had on them back to family or places of residence. It is capable of flight but is very slow and relies on thermals to reach any sort of height and can soar for days as it searches for the dead. It is said that seeing the Gravebeast is an ill sign because either there are deceased travelers nearby who may have died violently or that you are about to die. There is no real explanation for the chain that it wears, some claim that it uses it as some sort of compass, others that it was a gift from a king whose lost child the Gravebeast laid to rest, yet others a token of passage that grants the Gravebeast travel through any place in order to do its duty.

Either way vigilance is warned. Its existence is highly doubted among skeptics and scholars who mostly think that it was made up to explain graveyards from long lost settlements that were rediscovered and that and also to console friends and family of lost travelers who were assumed dead that their loved one had been given a decent burial. As for reappearing momentos it was probably left at home to begin with and rediscovered later on.