Izieeak

Body

The camouflage is a fringe of skin along the jaw, the flank and the outside of every limb which, pressed to bark, kills the shadow line that gives a body away. An Izieeak flat against a trunk is invisible from eight feet in daylight.

It works on bark and on nothing else, so the strain is useless in a town and knows it. They are gecko stock and see in the dark, and with the Iziakelesh and the Iziakotiel they hold the night shift of any ground that has all three.

Country

Forest, with the clutch bedded in warm rotting leaf rather than sand or shingle. Many Izieeak became forest thieves after the wars and a forest road in their country is priced for the risk; the rest went into ordinary society and stayed there.

Life

They take any strain to bed, and their children are read soft, and their children are loved. Over three thousand years that arrangement has made them the warmest and least ambitious people in the species, and it has put Izieeak blood in a very large share of the crossed clutches of every quarter in the world.

The species treats a crossed child as a proven soft reading and a permanent disappointment. The Izieeak are the demonstration that the arrangement can be lived in for three thousand years without anyone being much bothered, which is not an argument the hard-scaled strains have ever agreed to hear.

Faith

Irus in his hunter face, Ee'rhus the Hunter Who Is Not Seen. The Leaf Thieves hold that the god takes what is not watched, and that a thing left unguarded has already been offered. It is a creed that makes thieves of the ones who want to be thieves and comforts the rest, and it tests the scale as every Iziakan faith does.