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The Cursed Blue Rose
They are pale and smooth-scaled in an almost luminous white, slender and elongated, with long serpentine necks and narrow heads. Their eyes are large and amber-orange and hold light strangely. Their mouths are lipless. They have no hair, and faint ash-grey traceries run across the scale like markings under frost.
Nothing about how they travel suggests a war-band. They wear simple worn leather harnesses, cross-body sashes, cloth wraps; they carry travelling satchels, glass lanterns, walking staves, rune-bound tomes older than the roads they are being carried along, and rune-stones that hold a steady blue light. They are scholars and pilgrims, and the going itself appears to be part of the discipline.
Their ancestor is the Ashen Serpent — one of the great ancient Eidolons of Kworgale, the demigod of a race of lizardfolk that is otherwise entirely extinct. The Serpent is its last and greatest remnant, and these travellers are its line.
That is a heavier inheritance than it first sounds. An entire people is gone. What walks the roads now, carrying lanterns and books, is what remains of them — which may explain a great deal about a race that has organised its whole existence around not letting things be forgotten.
The Serpent's true name is not written down, and those who know it do not offer it.
They turn up on roads far from anywhere and are gone by the next season. Processions of them have been reported in places that ought not to admit travellers at all — including, if the accounts are to be credited, a long line of them moving through the violet country beyond the Veil, lanterns lit, in no apparent hurry, while far-off shapes moved in the distance and did not approach.
What they were doing there, nobody who tells the story can say.