Cindergnaw Kobold Archer

The Cindergnaw

The Cindergnaw live where nothing should: slag fields, fumaroles, black country where even the water tastes of dead iron. Unlike their kobold cousins from kinder lands, the harshness of their home has made them scavengers. They eat what falls, what rots, what is left behind. This is why drinking their water or tasting their food is a dangerous gamble: what feeds them poisons everyone else.
Their bite, in itself, is nothing to fear. The danger lives in their mouths. They carry germs out of another age, bacteria their carrion keeps alive, and the smallest wound calls for swift cauterization or a healing spell before the infection takes hold.
They are no great craftsmen. They gather a little of everything and anything, scrap, bone, hardened leather, forge debris, and cobble it into armor with neither logic nor grace. They are the chief enemies of the Emberwardens, and the hatred between the two clans flares hottest in the season of the Tylkalan, a thing both dwarves and kobolds crave alike.
The Cindergnaw are no great danger in themselves. But the place where you meet them will never play in your favor.

The archer

His bows are so small that only a halfling could hold one comfortably, and they do not carry far. The Cindergnaw archer makes do, because he shoots close: he dips his scrap-iron heads in lava, and at short range the arrow has no time to cool. It arrives glowing. The wound burns as much as it pierces, with an agonizing pain, and any cloth it touches may catch fire. Far from the lava flows, he falls back on the venoms of his land, less spectacular, just as patient.