Iziakinie

Origin

They are the proof that a Crimson strain can stabilise across generations, second-hand, through mutated ash and soil rather than through the molten touch that binds a creature to the hive. Nothing about them is hive-held and nothing about them is spreading. What the Crimson did to this line, it did once, a long time ago, and the line has bred true ever since.

That is the whole of their claim to be counted as an Iziakan strain rather than a horror, and the species counts them, and puts them at the top of its ladder for the hardness of the result.

Body

The smoothness comes of scales that have no separate seed at all; the whole hide mineralises as one continuous sheet, which turns a blade and which cannot regrow. An Iziakinie who loses a hand gets a hand back covered in ordinary soft Iziakan scale, and it never matches, and it is visible across a field, and the strain would rather die than come home with one.

That single fact accounts for their reputation for heroism more honestly than any of the songs do. A people whose armour is one piece and whose regrowth is a public disfigurement does not retreat wounded, and the world has read three thousand years of courage into an arithmetic problem.

Regard

They avoid cities because of the staring, which is the only recorded case of an Iziakan strain organising its whole life around being admired rather than despised. It has not improved matters. A hold set well away from any road is what a Knight Scale wants and what a Knight Scale generally gets.

Their hide is near metal and is sold once in a generation and starts a war when it is. The scale law puts them at the top and the market puts them out of reach, and the two facts between them have kept the strain both rare and alive.

Faith

Zuella in her cooling face, the Cool Light. The Knight Scales believe that the good moon quieted the crimson in their blood long ago and keeps it quiet, and they will not fight under the dark moon. It is the only Iziakan faith that is a truce rather than a test, and the strain does not pretend otherwise.

The stabilised strain

The exception, and the important one. The Iziakinie are an old Crimson mutation that settled: vibrant red with blue limbs, "silky smooth scales that are near metal in strength," "the most Nu'umanoid of all their species," shy and rare. They are treated as a noble strain rather than a horror, and they are treated correctly. No hive mind, no rot, no spread, and no way back to what the line was before.

The scale is the two thousand years showing: the blight's mineral habit, inherited as ordinary growth, laying down a plate harder than anything the parent people ever grew.

They are the proof that the Crimson is not only degenerative, and they are the only such proof. Four conditions have to hold together for a strain to settle, and it is the conjunction that makes it rare rather than any one of them being hard. The exposure must be second-hand: ash or soil, never molten and never fresh blight, because a population bound into the hive mind is finished while a population living on mutated ground has generations to work with. The exposure must be continuous and level, since a single red summer produces a burst of variation that mostly dies out and a valley that has taken ash every few years for two thousand years produces a breeding pool in which the mutation is no longer an event. The population must be closed, because isolation is what lets a variation become a people instead of being diluted back into the parent stock. And the lineage must be long-lived, which is the condition that rules out most peoples: a stabilising strain needs the same individuals to carry the change through many cycles of exposure, and the Iziaka live for centuries where a people that turns over three generations a century burns through the variation before it can settle.

What those two thousand years looked like is worth setting down, because the finished Iziakinie are admired by people who have no idea what they are looking at. The intermediate generations were not beautiful. They were soft-scaled, which in a scaled people is a death sentence in the first cold season, and they came out red in patches on a body that was still the parent colour, and a great many of them could not hold a clutch.

The Iziaka culled them. Not the Alverians and not the Do'urssan: the Iziaka, quietly, clutch by clutch, for twenty centuries, drowning what came out wrong and keeping what came out red and whole, in valleys they closed to visitors for the purpose. Nobody ordered it and nobody wrote it down, and it is the longest sustained programme of anything in the history of this world.

The shyness and the rarity recorded as their character are the residue of it. So is the fertility, which is poor, and which is the last unpaid cost of a line that spent two thousand years being narrowed. Nobody in the world has drawn the obvious conclusion about what the other seven strains might become in ten thousand years, and the Do'urssan have every reason not to draw it aloud.