Iziak'xak

Body

The mechanism is a ring of muscle that shuts the veins draining the head until the pressure bursts a thin place in the eyelid, and it is a controlled stroke performed on purpose. Each shot costs the Blood Eye a measure of sight, so the oldest of them are nearly blind on one side and navigate by the tongue.

Their blood carries something from the eye that scars whatever it touches, and it will not wash out of scale, cloth, plaster or bone, which is why a room where an Iziak'xak has worked is generally pulled down. They live two hundred years and use most of them.

Life

They lay their clutches in the killing ground, on soil fed with blood, and no one who is not a Blood Eye has seen a Counting there. Many of them are never counted at all, and a Blood Eye of no ground is a recognised thing in a species where the first question asked at a meeting is what ground and what morning.

The staining is a life's record kept on the outside, in the way the hide-books keep it on the inside. Every other Iziaka is read by the rings in its scale. An Iziak'xak is read by how much of its head has gone black.

Regard

These are not sought after creatures, and the record says so in those words. Every other Iziakan strain has an employer somewhere, an office, a trade or a country. The Blood Eyes have the cults and their own killing grounds, and the rest of the species deals with them at arm's length and not often.

Their blood is bought by those cults, which is the one line of the Iziakan trade in which the seller is not being robbed.

Faith

Xak, the void power of opened veins, in whom the Blood Eyes see the only god who pays in the coin they carry. The cults of Xak are theirs and they bring other peoples into them as meat and as knife. Whether Xak stands outside the Court as a lesser void god or wears the face of a Void Prince is a thing the cults have never agreed among themselves.