Iziakagrack

Body

The black scale takes heat faster than any hide in the class and holds it in a layer of dark fat beneath, so a Fire Scale runs ten degrees above the country it is standing in and cannot shed that heat except through the ear fins.

The fins flush red and are the strain's tell. A Fire Scale with pale ears is either cold or lying about how angry it is, and everyone who deals with them has learned to look at the ears before the face.

Country

Harsh hot-humid rocky country, bare stone terraces that hold the sun through the middle of the day and give it back all evening. It is the one climate in which the strain is at full strength for the longest, and it is why they have never spread.

The whole species halves the working day around the long basking. The Iziakagrack do not bask so much as charge, and a ground that holds them keeps its business before dawn.

Society

The carved runes destroy the scale they are cut into, permanently, so a heavily worked Iziakagrack has given up its own rank to hold the fire. The strain's peculiar contempt for the scale law is entirely earned, and no reader has an answer to it.

The magic they carve for turns them manic, which is stated rather than argued. A Fire Scale at noon, fully recharged and fully carved, is not a person anybody bargains with, and the negotiating is done in the dark.

Faith

Hyton in his burning face, Grak'hyt the Sun That Punishes. The Fire Scales hold that the star-father's light is a judgement poured on the world, and they carve the runes so as to hold a little of the judgement in the skin and give it back. Every other strain takes the sun as a hardening. This one takes it as a sentence and passes it on.