Cold-Salamanders

Overview

Cold-Salamanders are the predators of the Cinder Fields, creatures made of blue flame and frost that feed on the warmth of living things. Travellers who come to the Fields for cold fire meet them more often than anything else there. Their larger and smaller kin, the Frost-Wyrms and the Cinder-Moths, hunt the same way.

Appearance

A Cold-Salamander is long and low, from forearm length to the length of a man, with a lizard's flat head and four short splayed legs it hardly uses. Its body is half flame and half rime: a core of translucent blue fire inside a skin of frost that flakes and re-forms as it moves. It casts a cold, spectral light on the cinder around it and leaves a trail of frost-glazed grey behind.

It slithers more than walks, in quick bursts, and freezes motionless between them. It makes the zone's sound, a faint crackling hiss like ice cracking on a lake. It smells of ozone and burnt metal, and the air around it is bitterly cold.

Habitat and Range

They live across the cinder flats and among the frozen silhouettes of what the fire has taken, burrowing in the cinder to lie still. They are common wherever the blue fire burns, and gather fastest around a source of heat.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Cold-Salamander hunts heat as other hunters follow scent. It turns towards a warm body from far off and comes on in bursts, faster the warmer its prey. It does not bite to kill; it wraps itself around a limb or lies against the body and drinks the warmth until the prey numbs, slows, and freezes. A campfire draws them like a beacon, which is why the first rule of the Fields is to light no fire.

They have no more mind than a lizard. They do not hunt the Frost-Burned, who give off no warmth.

Abilities

It draws heat from whatever it touches and from the air close around it, leaving frost and frostbite behind. It cannot be burned in the ordinary sense, and ordinary fire set against it feeds it.

Life Cycle

Nothing about their birth is known for certain. Harvesters report small ones near the heart of the largest blue fires and believe they are kindled there. A Cold-Salamander that is starved of warmth dims and goes out, leaving a glassy rime in the shape of its body.

Uses and Dangers

A dead Cold-Salamander's rime is sometimes gathered by alchemists with the cold fire, and it is said to keep things cold longer. They are dangerous to anyone who lingers, sleeps, or warms themselves in the Fields, and they find the wounded first.

Lore and Belief

Harvesters believe a Cold-Salamander can smell fear, because the frightened are the first it finds; what it finds is the warmth of a body that has stopped moving. Ignis-aligned folk tell children that a Cold-Salamander is what becomes of a hearth that was never shared.

Salamander hides are worth a fortune to armourers who want a cloak that will not burn, and the hunters who take them go in pairs, one to kill and one to keep the other moving.

Where It Appears

• The Cinder Fields
• Overview: Resonant Zones
• the Writers' Guide chapter The Resonant Zones