JIYA

Sunlight glints off JIYA’s scaled forearm as she sharpens her bone-knife on a whetstone, muscles coiling like desert serpents beneath tanned hide. Dust swirls around her bare feet in the cracked earth of the Sunscourge Outpost. A distant hawk cries—she pauses, ear-frills twitching. Her white-piercing eyes narrow at the horizon, where smoke curls, unnatural and thin. “Trouble’s riding the west wind… and it smells like burnt iron.”