They share the look of the plane: grey, ash-dusted hides or shells, slow and thrifty movement, and large dark eyes or none at all. Most are lean, because nothing in the Wastes allows fat. They are quiet animals in a quiet world, and their calls, when they make them, come muffled and short.

They range over the ash plains, the cracked earth, and the edges of the slow rivers, and gather wherever warmth or movement appears: a dying fire, a traveller’s track, the body heat of a sleeping Ash-Walker group.

What unites them is how they feed. Ordinary food gives little in the Wastes, because digestion crawls, so they feed on the leftovers of energy instead: residual warmth, the faint motion of air, the last heat of a corpse. They follow anything warm, wait, and close in as it weakens. Few of them hunt by strength; most hunt by patience.

The beasts' hides are among the insulation the Wastes' peoples value, and a pelt that has kept a beast alive there keeps a traveller alive too. Their danger is that a warm traveller is the richest meal the plane offers.

Travellers' tales tend to lump every beast of the Wastes together as cold-wolves, which the Cold-Stalkers are and the Dust-Striders are not. The schools' accounts call them scavengers because they eat what is spent, not what is alive, though a traveller stalked across the ash finds the difference small.