A kiln newt is as long as a hand, slender, with a flattened tail, four short legs, and a broad flat head. Its skin is smooth and wet-looking, a deep dull orange above, brighter orange-red below, speckled with black, and it glows dully in lamplight like a coal. It has small black eyes, and frilled gills behind the head that it keeps all its life.

It crawls slowly along the warm stone of the pool edge and swims with a lazy wave of its tail. It makes no sound. Its slime smells faintly sharp, like hot metal.

Kiln newts live only in the hot, mineral-heavy seep pools and runnels of the Deeps' lowest levels, near the natural heat the forge levels use, and in a few warm pools below the maintained routes that no hold keeps. Cold water kills them.

A kiln newt eats the pale worms, shrimp, and insect larvae of the warm pools, and the eggs of other newts. It moves little and does not flee from people; it relies on its slime. A hand that grabs one goes numb, and a newt held tightly bites.

Females lay single eggs on the warm stone under the water’s edge, and the young hatch as small versions of the adults. They grow slowly and live many years.

Dwarven healers of the Deeps catch kiln newts with leather gloves and scrape the slime from their backs into a salve with fat and ash, which numbs a wound or a burn before it is cleaned and stitched, and dulls an aching tooth. The newts are put back in their pools afterwards; a healer who kills them for the slime is thought careless. The danger is small: a numbed hand that slips on hot stone, and a bite that festers if not cleaned.

Deep Dwarves say a pool with kiln newts in it is still warm enough to work beside, and a pool whose newts have gone is cooling; they are usually right. Kobold crews say the newts are born of the stone’s heat and that a crew which kills one will be burned. Some Dwarven healers say the newt’s numbing is a gift of the deep heat to those who keep the deep.