No one in Mercer's Peck sets dough to rise against a wall shared with a tiefling household. Loaves come out flat as saucers, or balloon overnight and sag, and a baker who has lost three batches in a week does not forgive a party wall. The cause is the skin. A tiefling runs a few degrees warmer than the people around it, a dry, even heat like a brick left in the sun, and the warmth passes through plaster and lath to the other side. Neighbors hang a wet sack on their half of the wall and rewet it each evening, and by midnight it steams. The skin is madder red, dusty plum, or a blue so dark it reads black indoors. It does not flush or blanch, which makes a tiefling hard to read at cards and unpopular for it.
The horns vary more than anything else. Some sweep back flat along the skull like a ram's, some rise short and straight as tent pegs, and a few curl forward over the brow so that no hat will sit. They are bone under a ridged sheath and keep growing slowly through adulthood, one ring per winter, so a patient observer can count a tiefling's age from the base up. Tieflings file the tips on a whetstone to keep them from catching in doorframes. The dust is gray and smells of singed hair. Hatters in Gaugers' Rood stock crowns with the tops cut out and charge extra for the missing cloth, a policy that has never once been explained to a customer's satisfaction.
The tail runs three to four feet, thin as a plow line, ending in a spade or a tuft of coarse hair. It is strong enough to hold a ladle and is used to steady the owner on ladders. It also reports mood before the face does: wrapped around a chair leg means the conversation is over, and lashing against the floorboards means it ended some time ago. Edric Vane, who sells salt from a cart at Mercer's Peck, says he names his price only after the tail has gone slack.
The eyes have no whites. They are solid gold, silver, or garnet, and in a dark room they hold the light of one candle and return a little more of it than they were given. Cats leave the room. Dogs do not, which has caused its own trouble. Every point above has an exception in Mercer's Peck, where Edda Moorcroft lives with skin as cool as river stone, two blunt knobs where horns should be, a tail the length of a bootlace, and plain brown eyes. Her wall stays cold. Two bakers have bid against each other for the lease next door since spring, and neither has asked her a single thing about herself.
- Classification
- Horned, warm-skinned humanoid
- Habitat
- Market towns, trade roads, back streets
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 5 to 6.5 ft tall
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Human cities and trade roads
- Binomial
- Pyrogena cornuta
- Diet
- Omnivore; favors peppered, charred food
- Temperament
- Guarded, dry-humored, loyal once trusted