Iziakarine

Body

The salt is a gland behind the eye that takes brine out of the blood so they can drink the sea, and it is the reason they can live where no well is. A tide ground needs no fresh water at all, which is why Iziakarine settlements sit on rocks that nobody else has ever been able to hold.

In a hungry year they shrink, bone and all, losing an inch of length and taking it back when the weed returns. A shrunken Iziakarine is not read down for it, and that is the one exemption in the whole scale law: everywhere else in the species a body that softens is a body that falls, and on the coast a body that shrinks is simply waiting for the weed.

Country

Rocky tidal coast. The clutch shingle lies below the high-water line, so the sea covers the eggs twice a day and the hatchlings' first act is to swim, and the tide grounds are kept by the Salt Scales, who are Iziakarine chosen at the First Shedding and taken to live below the water mark.

They brew a brine-beer in the coastal quarters that no other people can keep down, and they trade the Wind Lady spider through the coastal markets to anyone who will buy a preserved one for an instrument or a live one for its venom.

Society

They are welcoming and unenthusiastic at the same time, which every trading partner remarks on and none of them minds twice. They keep to themselves, they answer questions, they do not follow the answer with another question, and a bargain with an Iziakarine takes as long as it takes.

Their hide grades firm and makes coats and saddlery, so they are worth skinning and not worth hunting, which on a coast that anybody can reach by boat has been the difference between the strain and the Iziakbor.

Faith

Orton in his cold face, Oru'tahk the Cold Swell, who takes the clutch twice a day beneath the tide and gives it back. His priests are the Iziaksal, drawn out of the strain itself and kept below the high-water line for life, and they are the only Iziakan clergy other strains send for.