Anvil Snails
Anvil Snails live on the hot ledges of the Forge Deep, and their shells are metal. Each snail lays its shell down a hair at a time, out of the metal it licks from the rock, over the long slow time of the zone, and the oldest shells are as fine as anything the Smiths of the Deep forge.
Appearance
An Anvil Snail is about the size of a fist, its body a dull, glowing orange-red like metal at forging heat, soft and slow. Its shell is a tight spiral of grey, bronze, and silver bands, smooth and burnished, ringing faintly when touched with a nail. An old shell is so heavy a person needs both hands to lift it. The snail moves at the pace of cooling metal, and a watcher sees it move only by coming back to it. It makes no sound but a faint hiss where its foot meets the hot stone. It smells of hot metal and sulphur.
Habitat and Range
They live on the obsidian ledges along the magma rivers and in the warm hollows of the Smiths' great forges, in scattered numbers, on rock that stays hot and does not flare.
Behaviour and Temperament
An Anvil Snail grazes metal. It creeps over the ledges licking the films of ore and molten metal that settle on them, and draws heat from the rock as it goes. It lays what it eats into its shell, band by band. It is untroubled by people, the heat, or anything else, and if lifted simply waits until it is put down.
Abilities
Its shell is forged, by the snail and by the zone’s slow time, so slowly and evenly that the metal is perfect: an alloy of whatever the snail has grazed, fused flawlessly band to band. Old shells do not rust, dull, or crack.
Life Cycle
They lay eggs in cracks of the hot rock that take, the Smiths say, longer to hatch than a mortal life. A snail grows its whole life long, and in the zone’s slow time that life is very long. When one dies its body burns away and leaves only the shell.
Uses and Dangers
The Smiths gather empty shells and some say they work them into their finest pieces, prizing the metal laid down by a creature with nothing to hurry for. They do not take living snails. Travellers who bring a shell home through a Magma-Gate find smiths on the Material Plane will pay well for it. A ledge thick with snails is a sign that the heat there is steady, and the Coolers are said to watch where the snails move.
Lore and Belief
The Smiths are said to teach that an apprentice should watch an Anvil Snail until they see it move, and that one who manages it is ready to begin; travellers report this as a joke that is not a joke. On the Material Plane, smiths' tales speak of a snail whose shell no hammer can dent, and a few forges keep a snail shell above the hearth for luck; most are ordinary snail shells, bronzed.