The problem with the point that 'Fog doesn't lend itself to protection' is that one of the Lizardmen's most famous temple-cities, Xlanhuapec, literally has an impenetrable wall of fog as it's primary defense. In the context of regular Lizardmen understanding and psyche, fog can absolutely be presented as an absolute in means of creating solid defense.
Again, just because it can be connected does not mean it should be. My opinion is that emphatically we should not. You'll notice in the quote that you're responding to I specifically call out Xlanhuapex, I am well aware of the potential relations we could draw on, but critically the way in which those things relate are not ways that I find particularly useful in terms of 'protection.' Fog is not a solid barrier, it is a porous one. It confuses, waylays, misdirects, and obfuscates.
I don't necessarily oppose concept Protection and Fog on principle, but I do strongly oppose connecting them both with Death. Neither is, I think, a very useful concept to tie to it, but both together seem to me very much misguided and, again, frankly boring. Protection is, to start with, something that any afterlife is going to do by default because that's what an afterlife is for. So why try and double down on that? Death is such a potent concept that it feels like a massive under use to just go for such a passive concept and then add to that passivity by introducing Fog. All of my preferred combinations have the underlying aim of having something active and vital coming out of a Death god, something where our blanket afterlife isn't just something where the souls of our Saurus, Skinks, and Kroxigors go and sit for all eternity but where they become a new part of our culture and society.
Maybe they're reborn into new bodies at spawning pools. Or maybe they come back as construct of Obsinite. Or they can be summoned as spectral warriors. Or maybe, if the shit has truly gone down, they can be ritually incorporated en masse as an army. Something beyond just souls in a place.
This is true....well, kinda sort of true, if you have read novel like the buring shore or the temple of the serpent which it have lizardman POV, is intersting, they have feeling and individuality to some extent but they dont see aware of that, like in the novel a slaan actually is annoying with another one for what he see a sloppy job or dislike the reverence the other lizardman feel for him as mistake but never seen caught aware he is saying that, so they have awarness but not self awareness, if you get what im saying, which is why death represent so little for them.
Death is a fact of life. Lizardmen are alive. They can and do understand that things around them that they themselves, and things they value, can and will die.
It is not in precisely in the same way that you or I relate to Death, but that does not mean that Death means little to them. To us, Death is the cessation of the individual. The loss of connection, the terrible dark unknown into which we go alone and lonely. So we build stories of afterlives in which our loved ones also come, where the things we did in life have meaning and give reward even if they did not when our hearts beat, where pains cease and the safety is assured. We fill our afterlives with the things we perpetually lack in life.
Death is different for the Lizardmen. It is still the cessation of the individual. But it is also, sometimes, the necessary price paid for a higher purpose. A purpose which no Lizardmen ever doubts or questions. They have no need for surety or reward. No expectation or want of safety. Perhaps they love others as we do, or perhaps not, that is still too much up in the air at this point to say; for certain they at least value and form connections with things like mounts that last until death. So what stories are the Lizardmen likely to build their afterlives from? Purposes fulfilled. A chance at rebirth. New avenues of duty. Prices paid. Guardianship. Horizons uncharted. Depths unexplored.
The meanings are different, but the idea that Death is not meaningful to the Lizardmen is a complete nonstarter for me.
