The Deathbirds are the oldest funerary order in the Lands Between. In the time when there was no Erdtree, death was burned in ghostflame, the cold blue fire that consumes a corpse without freeing its soul ; the Deathbirds were the keepers of those kilns. Their bodies are blackened, beaked, and feathered, their heads bound to long-poled rakes with which they stir the ash of the dead. They are sworn, at least in legend, to a distant resurrection : the Death Ritual Spear's description names them guardians 'through the rite of Death, which also serves as an oath sworn to their distant resurrection.'

When the Erdtree's grace prevailed, the cult was driven underground or to the snowfields where its old graveyards lie. The Death Rite Birds, seen at twilight on the Mountaintops and the Consecrated Snowfield, are the order's last and greatest members ; each is itself half a god, summoned from a kiln that has never quite gone cold. The assassins of Ravenmount imitate them with talon-claws and black-feather robes, hoping to inherit a share of their authority over the dead. Even the Mausoleum Knights, headless and wing-emblemmed, draw their iconography from the same pre-Erdtree faith.