Cindergnaw Warrior

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 warrior

Born in the furnace, the Cindergnaw warrior walks unflinching over embers that would make any human scream, his skin tanned by years of sulfur fumes. His weapons are sharpened scrap and improvised maces, poorly balanced, often giving out before the enemy does. Against the Emberwardens, whose blades come from forges mastered across generations, his only serious weapon is time: he holds ground no one else can hold, and waits for the enemy to give way first.