Ash-Walkers

Overview

The Ash-Walkers are the people of the Ashen Wastes, a plane where energy itself is dying. They live by keeping what little warmth they can find, and everything about them, their bodies, their slowness, and their creed, serves that one end. They matter to the peoples of Caeldon as the hosts, or the robbers, of whoever crosses into the Wastes carrying fire.

Appearance

An Ash-Walker stands a head or more taller than a tall Human and is thin to the point of looking starved: long shins, narrow shoulders, wrists like bundled sticks. Its skin is pale grey and crazed with fine cracks, like an old porcelain jug, and the cracks darken where the skin folds at elbow and knee. Its eyes are large, dark, and wet, made for the dusk of a sun that gives no warmth, and they blink seldom.

They wrap themselves in every layer they can gather, ash-grey cloth, old hides, scraps taken from the dead, and carry their hoard close to the body in pouches and padded cases. They move with a slow, deliberate economy, never lifting a foot higher than they must, and a group of them crossing a plain looks from afar like grey stones drifting. Their voices are low and short, and in the muffled air of the Wastes they sound like whispers even when spoken aloud. They smell of ash and cold dust.

Habitat and Range

Ash-Walkers live across the ash plains and the worn-down mountain skeletons of the Ashen Wastes, in small groups that gather wherever a little stored warmth can be kept: under rock overhangs, in pits lined with ash, beside the slow sludge rivers. They are the commonest thinking beings of the plane, though their numbers are thin, as everything there is.

Behaviour and Temperament

Their creed is preservation. Any source of warmth, a warm stone, a spark, a coal carried for days, is hoarded with the fervour of a relic, and waste is the gravest sin they know. A fire is never lit for comfort, only for need, and a group shares heat by huddling, never by spending it.

They are not aggressive by nature and will let a stranger pass if the stranger carries nothing worth taking. A stranger who does carry heat or fuel is another matter: they kill at once, without anger and without hesitation, and take it. They regard the Material Plane as a wasteful paradise where warmth is thrown away, and a traveller's open fire strikes them as an obscenity.

Abilities

An Ash-Walker lives on almost nothing. Its body burns so little that it can go without food for long spans, and instead of sleeping it sinks into torpor for days at a time, lying still as the ash around it. It sees well in the gloom and can feel a warm thing at a distance, the way a hungry man smells bread.

Life Cycle

The Wastes age bodies fast, and Ash-Walkers do not live long by the reckoning of the long-lived peoples. Their dead are not wasted: whatever warmth or use is left in a body is taken, and the rest is left to the ash.

Uses and Dangers

Ash-Walkers trade, when they trade at all, in stored heat: a hot stone or a warm core can buy years of survival in the Wastes, and they will part with knowledge of paths and Cold Gates for one. To a traveller they are the plane's first danger, because the warmth a traveller must carry to survive is the one thing they cannot let pass.

Lore and Belief

The Wastes open onto Caeldon at Cold Gates, volcanic vents gone cold and deep caves, and those who have come back out of them tell of grey watchers on the ash who followed them for days without coming closer. Some cold-country tales make the Ash-Walkers the ghosts of those who froze, which they are not; they are a living people, born to the plane. Others say they climb out of cold vents to steal hearth fires, though no such habit is known. What travellers do agree on is the warning: carry heat hidden, and never light a fire where an Ash-Walker can see it.

The Crucible's Ash-Turned, beings slowly turning to ash, have nothing in common with them.

Where It Appears

• The Ashen Wastes
• Writers' Guide: The Planes, Glossary