Part IX: Touched Beasts

Here stand the beasts of the world that something has changed: a wolf with frost in its coat at the edge of the Cinder Fields, a deer that stopped ageing below a spring where time stands still, a fox that slips half out of sight at a thin place, a hound bred bigger than any hound should be. They were born in Caeldon and they live in it; they are not natives of a plane or a zone and nobody’s host. Some of them breed true, and the herders and hunters who live beside them have long since stopped finding them strange.