Iziakotiel
The Iziakotiel are white-green and spotted orange, with rounded, decently sized scales and eyes that are "buggy in every way colorful." They are hyperactive sprinters who "have taken to the messenger professions, belonging to many holds and empires as just that." They are very vocal. "They travel during the day only because at night they can be rather annoying."
Four feet, sixty pounds, the lightest of the strains, and the only Iziaka most cold-country peoples have ever spoken to, since the message arrives whatever the border says.
Body
The hands and feet carry pads of a million fine hairs that hold to smooth stone, glass and wet wall, so a Wide Eyes goes up the outside of a tower without rope and into an upper window that had no business being a door. A third of the message trade is legitimate and the rest of it is why every treasury in the hot country puts sand on its walls, because the pads fail on dust and on ice.
Their voice carries a mile and they cannot make it quieter, which is the whole of the night complaint. They are gecko stock and see in the dark in a flat grey. Their hide grades soft and makes cheap leather.
They live forty to sixty years, which is the shortest span of any Iziaka kin and the reason a message-house is run by people in their twenties. The road takes them early and the houses have built every custom they have around the fact that a courier is old at forty.
Country
No country is fixed for the strain and the road stands in for one. They run the news of a Counting to every hold within four days on foot, and the message-houses of the Iziakan quarters are theirs to keep, standing at crossroads with the lamps lit early.
Because the message crosses borders the strain does, and an Iziakotiel is frequently the only Iziaka a cold kingdom has met. Whatever that kingdom thinks of the species, it thinks it about a four-foot sprinter with a sealed case strapped flat to its back.
Society
They are soft-scaled and they hold no rank, and they are trusted with things no hard-scaled person is asked to carry. A Wide Eyes messenger swears the message on the sky and will die before opening it, and the holds and empires that employ them have built their correspondence on that.
They are hyperactive, very vocal, and universally described as annoying by people who go on hiring them.
Faith
Vaeyar in her road face, Vaeyot the Long Road Overhead, the sky as the one road that runs everywhere. The oath is sworn on the sky rather than on the scale, which is the only Iziakan oath that is not sworn on the body, and it is kept.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Which holds and empires keep standing Iziakotiel message-houses
- Whether a sworn message has ever been opened, and what was done about it