Iziakmar

Body

The translucency is a fault of the scale that the strain has turned into a doctrine. Their plates never fully opacify, which leaves them thinner-hided than any strain that is not a caste, and a Tree Kin in a fight is relying on speed and the water.

They cross open water at a run for thirty yards on the flat of the back foot, and cannot do it twice without resting. The long fingers are reach and grip both, and the head fins are the first thing anyone describes about them after the colour.

Frailty

Peeling a scale to write beneath it costs them a reading, since a peeled patch regrows soft and without rings. An old Iziakmar's back is unreadable by any reader alive, which the strain considers a prayer and the readers consider a scandal.

It is also a demotion taken on purpose in a people who rank by nothing else, and the strain is perfectly clear about what it is doing. Their peeled scales, carrying the written runes, are sold across the kingdoms as charms, so a Tree Kin's devotion has a market price attached to it that the Tree Kin did not set.

Society

They are scholars in habit without being the scholar caste, which the Iziakaen are. What the Iziakmar keep is not a book but a body: star names and runes cut into bare skin, added to over a life, until an old one is a map of the night sky worn by a person who can no longer be graded.

Other strains treat the practice as somewhere between holiness and vandalism, and treat the Iziakmar accordingly: consulted, avoided, and never put in charge of anything.

Faith

The Constellation Court, whom they call the Written Sky. Every star name peeled into an Iziakmar's skin is a prayer to the star it names, and an old Iziakmar is a map of the night. Where every other strain gives its scale to a god that tests it, the Tree Kin give the scale away to make room for the writing.