Rimecoal Beetles
Rimecoal Beetles are the beetles of the Cinder Fields. Under each black, frosted shell burns a spark of the Fields' cold blue fire, and wherever they crawl they carry it, so that the blue flames spread where the beetles go. They are counted among the Fields' warmth-eaters with the Cold-Salamanders.
Appearance
A Rimecoal Beetle is the size of a thumb, round-backed and heavy, its wing-cases black as charcoal and furred with frost. When it lifts them, a pale blue flame shows beneath, flickering without heat, and the frost thickens around it. Its legs are short and spined, its head small. It crawls slowly through the grey cinder and leaves a track that frosts over behind it. In the Fields' silence its legs make a faint crackle, like ice cracking. It smells of cold metal and ozone.
Habitat and Range
They live in the cinder and among the frozen, blackened remains of trees and buildings, in great numbers wherever the blue fire burns, and are scarce where it has burned out.
Behaviour and Temperament
The beetles feed on the glass-like splinters that the cold fire leaves of wood and other things it consumes, grinding them in their jaws. They are drawn, like the fire, towards warmth, and crawl slowly towards a body, a campfire, a traveller’s sleeping place. Where a cluster gathers, its sparks catch, and a new patch of blue fire springs up in the cinder.
Abilities
The spark under their shells is the Fields' fire in small: it consumes heat rather than giving it. A beetle held in the hand burns with cold, and the skin under it goes white and blistered as if frostbitten. A cluster can light cold fire where there was none, and the beetles spread the Fields' edge outwards a little every year.
Life Cycle
They lay their eggs in the cinder beside the blue flames, and the larvae live in the flames themselves. A beetle that is carried out of the Fields and warmed loses its spark and dies, leaving a shell of black glass.
Uses and Dangers
The Frost-Burned keep a beetle or two in a clay cup as a lamp, since their light does not stir the blue flames as warmer light would. Alchemists and smiths who come for cold fire buy beetles in sealed jars, as the easiest way to carry the fire home, and use it as a cooling agent; most die on the road. To travellers they are a hazard underfoot and in the bedroll.
Lore and Belief
Travellers call them "ice-coals" and say a handful in a pack will keep meat fresh for a month; it will, if they survive the journey, which they seldom do. The Frost-Burned are said to believe the beetles carry the Fields' fire from the Blue-Flame itself, the sentient fire of the zone, and do not harm them.