Kishka the Runepainted

Who is Kishka the Runepainted?

Another of the merchants who travels with Choave the Caravan Leader, Kishka is not a freepact merchant, but rather works directly as a procurer for Choave, helping to negotiate the steady stream of minor contracts that keep the wagons laden. A constant restless traveller, Kishka flies the caravan route ahead of the caravan season, and helps make sure that Choave's arrivals are never surprising to his business partners. He also works the cross-corridor route, the Pan-Tachamund Trade Corridor, with a different caravan that works in a different season. When the north is too deep in winter to be passable and most of Choave's affiliated merchants are at work on other jobs, Kishka is travelling on the east-west route instead.

How did Kishka the Runepainted get his surname?

Kishka is at base a bland-colored beige vashael of a very similar color to that of Denziu the Clayseller. He didn't like having that color and no pattern elements. To get away from it, Kishka ground in blue pigments so stubbornly across his body that they stained his scales permanently. The pattern is so complex and persistent at this point that onlookers often suspect that a geomantic blessing was involved in some point. This suspicion is incorrect. As necromancy is the spellkind of altering flesh, it was a necromancer who at length completed Kishka's paints so that they would become waterfast and no longer so laborious to keep applied, thus at last averting Kishka's Fate of being blandly colored and unpatterned forever.

Now, Kishka is covered in lines of meaningless letter-like shapes that suggest arcane powers he hasn't really got. He does, however, tell people that if they want to change their colors forever, they should try to pay a necromancer for the service rather than begging the land gods in any form.