A Cinder-Moth is the size of a thumb, with soft grey wings that look dusted with ash and are rimmed with frost. A faint blue glow shows in its body, like a spark of the cold fire. It flies with the soft flutter of any moth, but its wings tick faintly as the frost on them cracks. A swarm rises from the cinder like a grey breath of snow, and the air in it turns bitter.

They rest on the cinder in their thousands, nearly invisible against it, and rise when warmth passes. They are found in every field of any size.

Cinder-Moths are drawn to body heat as other moths are drawn to light. A swarm settles on a warm body, thickest on the face, hands, and neck, and each moth drinks a little warmth. The traveller’s skin frosts over under them, and a swarm that is not shaken off can leave its victim numb, slow, and at last frozen. Torches and fires draw swarms from far off.

Each moth drains a little heat where it settles. Together they cool a body faster than the open air of the Fields would.

They lay their eggs in the cinder near the blue fires, and the grubs, small pale curls, feed on the warmth in the cinder before they take wing. They live a season and fall back into the cinder as grey dust.

Harvesters wrap their faces and hands and move steadily, because a still traveller gathers a swarm. Some alchemists gather the dust of dead moths for cooling powders.

People who live near the Fields say a single Cinder-Moth that drifts out of the zone and lands on a sleeper foretells a hard winter. Moths do drift out, and they die in the ordinary warmth within a night.

Harvesters of cold-fire tell of a swarm that rose over a camp at dusk and settled on the sleepers, and of the one man who woke under a rime of frost with his companions grey and still beside him.