Iziakodo

Body

The split tongue is the instrument. The two forks sample the air a hand's breadth apart and the difference between them gives a direction, so a Sand Sage tracks a scent the way a sailor takes a bearing and can hold a course for four days across dunes that changed shape overnight.

Their bite carries a venom engineered for the slow kill: a wounded enemy who escapes the field dies three days later, a quality the Alverians considered a feature. It is made in glands along the lower jaw, not in the throat, so a Sand Sage bites with poison in its mouth every hour of its life, cannot lick a wound, cannot kiss and must be fed from a bowl of its own. Their hide grades hard, which is armour worth a warhorse a panel.

Country

The drier provinces, and the dunes beyond them where nothing stands still long enough to be a landmark. Sand mapping is what a caravan hires, and a Sand Sage at the head of one is the only reason certain routes exist at all.

It is also where the species is weakest. The Iziaka hear through stone and are ambushed only on sand, which carries nothing, and every one of their great defeats happened on it. The strain that lives there has made its whole reputation out of the one sense that still works.

Harvest

The venom is milked from the living Sand Sage and sold in clay. The milking is done by the Iziakodo themselves, and no Sand Sage will sell to a buyer who will not say who it is for; they say the venom carries the seller's name with it.

A Sand Sage who has bitten a man tells him the day he will die and then walks away, which is why no desert people will fight one to the finish.

Faith

Zaona in her lantern face, Za'odo the Lantern of the Wastes, the dark moon by which the Iziakodo cross the dunes at night. They say the waste moon shows the way and takes a life every third night for the showing, and a Sand Sage counts a bitten man against that debt.