Iziakeen

Body

The frill is run out by cartilage rods hinged at the jaw and is opened by the same movement that opens the mouth, so an Iziakeen physically cannot bite without flaring. That removes surprise from their entire repertoire, and it is why the strain fights by intimidation and ambushes by proxy.

Flared, the skin is thin enough to glow through in sunlight, and the painted symbols show as shadow from the far side, so a clan's mark is legible from in front and behind, which is the point. To touch an Iziakeen's frill uninvited is taboo across the whole species.

Society

The painting attaches to bandit groups and clans, and a camp of them can be identified at distance by the marks alone. It is a signature in the exact sense: the display says who is doing this, and is meant to be remembered afterwards by whoever is left to remember it.

They are in every realm because nothing about their bodies requires a particular one, which makes them the strain most likely to be met outside the hot country doing something a local lord would rather they did not.

Harvest

Iziakeen frill-skin, painted, is sold as banners. It is one of the smaller lines in the Iziakan trade and one of the more pointed, since a frill is a clan's name and a banner made of one is a name hung on somebody else's wall.

Among the Iziaka the sale is theft from a hide-book, and an Iziakan tanner who sells to outsiders is peeled at the throat.

Faith

Irus in his hunter face under a name of their own, Keen'irsh the Open Mouth. The frill snapped open is the god's jaw, and a painted frill is a prayer that the god eat whoever is looking at it. It is the only Iziakan devotion performed at strangers rather than over children or over the dead.