Firetail

A firetail is a mischievous, fey-seeming streak of fire that loops and darts through the air so brilliantly that watchers are spellbound. Stories credit all firetails with magic, but only the greater firetail, the tshala, can cast spells. The two look exactly alike; someone who has met both may spot the tshala by its finer flying. Firetails speak by shifting their blaze from orange to blue-white and playing with brightness, hue, heat and color patterns.

Firetails readily pick a side in any quarrel and can do great harm or great good. Salamanders they hate, and they fall on any they see, while they and fire elementals simply ignore each other, neither having given the other any cause for hatred.

Touching a firetail burns for 1-6 (lesser) or 1-12 (tshala) and sets parchment, cloth and other flammables alight. Every third round it can flare white-hot for a few segments, adding 1-12 damage to one attack that round while anything within 5 feet must make a saving throw or be seared. A tshala that flares five times in one day loses one of its spells for that day.

A tshala casts as a 14th-level caster: fire trap, heal, maze, feeblemind, remove curse and plane shift, each once a day, plus fireball once per turn. While casting it can do nothing else, since its whole being pours into the spell.

Heat and fire cannot hurt firetails, but water and cold deal +3 damage per die. A sudden strong wind, such as a gust of wind spell, scatters their fiery bodies and stops them from casting.

Their native home is the Elemental Plane of Fire, and there lesser ones are uncommon and tshala rare. Some have been carried to other places by various means and others wandered off on a whim, since a tshala can plane shift itself and 1-6 lesser firetails once a day. Such troupes rarely last, given how fickle and independent firetails are, and the lesser ones are often left stranded wherever the tshala tires of them.

Mostly they live alone, though they prefer their own kind to anyone else. Now and then one adopts a companion of nearly any type; firetails have traveled with pegasi, sylphs, elves, humans and each other. They never forget a friend and will not let one come to harm in their presence, yet they may abruptly ignore that friend, vanish for a while and return for no clear reason. They remember enemies just as well and do everything possible to see a foe go down in flames. Their flightiness means few can count on one in a crisis.

Nobody knows how the first firetail came to be, but sages have studied their life cycle closely. Only 1 in 10 begins life as a tshala; the rest may earn that status with age. At 200 years a lesser firetail withdraws from all other beings to some place of fierce heat, a sleeping volcano or a lava pool, and spends a week soaking up so much heat that the surroundings often go cold. It emerges a tshala in full command of its powers.

Soon after reaching ancient age, around 400 years, a firetail starts piling flammable material in its cave. Once it has enough for 1-4 heaps to burn for several hours, it bursts apart and sets every pile blazing. An hour later each heap gives rise to one new firetail, with a 10% chance that it is a tshala.