The Pelarians are an anomaly, aquatic beings with fire attunement, and other Kendor find them deeply unsettling. Their scales trend toward darker reds, oranges, and smoky blacks, and they literally steam when agitated.
What the fire changed in the Pelarians is cultural as much as physical. They keep the Kendor appreciation for social grace, and they hold a martial tradition that horrifies traditionalists. They distinguish between "aggression" (attacking the unwilling, which remains shameful) and "contest" (combat between consenting parties, which is honorable). This semantic distinction allows them to maintain armies, conduct duels, and wage defensive war while technically adhering to Kendor values.
Northern Kendor consider the Pelarians borderline heretics. The Pelarians consider the northern Kendor naive about survival in a dangerous world. Both are probably right.
The making
The Pelarians are Kendor, made for warm water, and fire should have no place in them. Their oral tradition is right about how they reached the vents: their ancestors were a Glador house exiled south for holding their homes when the nobility counseled retreat, and the only warm water left open to exiles was the volcanic shelf of southern Pelaria. What the tradition leaves out is what waited there. One of those vents stood over a thin place in the world's floor where the Fire Elemental Plane pressed close, and at some point the boundary gave. The plane's current came up through the vent and into the house living above it in a single surge, the way fire once set into the Verucan dwarves who cut into a burning core, except that these were water-people and it took in them all the same. It fixed fire under their scales, the red and smoke-black coloring, the steam they vent when their blood runs hot, and the line has carried all of it since. A Kendor carrying fire must rule it or be ruled by it, and the Pelarian answer is the line they draw between contest, fire spent by consent, and aggression, fire let loose. The whole martial creed the northern courts call heresy is one people learning to hold the thing that was poured into them.
Aspects
- Forged in fire, tempered by water
- Violence has its place