Scan'vael
The rarest Scan'uun lineage and the slowest, carrying under the scales of the brow a third eye-spot, pale and lidless, that sees no image and feels the light. Scan'vael are grey-green, crested, and cold to the touch; they move seldom, eat seldom, and live to a hundred and fifty.
They are the seers of the Scan'uun, and the seeing has no magic in it: it is a long, cold attention that notices what everyone else is too warm to notice.
Body
The cold is literal and is the whole of them. The Scan'vael bank almost nothing and burn almost nothing, running at the temperature of the room, which is why they cannot go near a forge and why a century and a half is available to them. Where a smith's day is divided into the heat and the cooling, a Scan'vael has neither, and a hearth in a Kesh Vaddren hut is laid and left unlit.
The brow-spot is the mark of the line: pale, lidless, set under the scales of the brow, seeing no image and feeling light. It measures the light of a day and the length of a season, and a Scan'vael knows the turning of the year to within an hour without counting, which is a great deal of what the townsfolk are actually paying for.
Society
They keep Kesh Vaddren and places like it, hill camps of stone huts and cold fires above the towns. Townsfolk climb to them with questions and are answered in their own time, which is never soon, and pay to be told the answer slowly. It is the one Scan'uun trade conducted above a Nu'uman rather than beneath him, and the whole of its authority comes from the fact that a Scan'vael cannot be hurried.
Teshka Ninefold was of this line: asked by a Nu'uman lord how long his house would stand, she took nine days to answer, and was right.
Faith
Their faith is older than the forge-faith. Where the rows keep the First Heat and hold that the dead return to the ore, the Scan'vael hold that the brow-eye is the mark of a first making that predates the Alverians' lizards, and that the Scan'vael are the memory of it.
It is a claim about ancestry rather than about an afterlife, and it makes no promise of one. Whatever the brow-eye remembers, the Scan'vael dead go where every other soul goes, to the auction of the star gods.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Whether the brow-spot is in fact older than the Alverians' lizards, or only held to be
- What the Scan'vael are paid in, and who decides the price
- Whether a Scan'vael has ever been born into a forge-row and had to leave it