Coldcoat Wolves

Overview

Coldcoat Wolves are wolves of the Material Plane that have taken the edges of the Cinder Fields for their range. Generations of hunting where the zone's cold fire bleeds outward have changed them: their coats carry frost the year round, and their bite drinks the warmth from a wound. They are not natives of the zone and do not go into the blue flame, but they live closer to it than any other beast of the world.

Appearance

A coldcoat is the size of a large grey wolf, long-legged and lean. Its coat is thick and pale grey shading to white along the back, and every guard hair is tipped with a fine crust of rime, so that the wolf glitters in low light and leaves a dusting of frost where it lies. Its eyes are a very pale blue, its breath shows even on a warm day, and its muzzle and paws are often rimed. It runs with a wolf's easy lope, near silent; its howl is thin and high and carries a cold crackle. It smells of snow and cold iron.

Habitat and Range

Packs hold the frost-bitten margins around a field, a belt of grey cinder, frozen grass, and blackened trees where the zone's cold has crept out. They hunt out into the ordinary country around it and always return to the edge. Wherever a Cinder Field lies, such packs are said to be found; how many fields there are is not known.

Behaviour and Temperament

They hunt like wolves, in family packs, running down deer and stock in the country round the field's edge, and they are bolder than grey wolves in winter, when the cold favours them. They draw prey towards the edge, where the cold slows it. They keep away from the blue flame itself, and a pack's den is dug just beyond its reach.

Abilities

A bite from a coldcoat chills the flesh around it, numbing and whitening the wound as frostbite does, and a beast bitten several times slows and stiffens. The pack bears cold that would kill an ordinary wolf, and lies out on frozen ground through the deepest winter. Their frosted coats keep them hidden on cinder and snow.

Life Cycle

They breed as wolves do, a litter in spring in a den near the field's margin. The cubs are born dark grey and frost over as their adult coats come in. Taken far from a field, coldcoats are said to lose their frost within a season, which would make their change something the zone renews in them rather than something they inherit; nobody has tested it.

Uses and Dangers

They are dangerous to herds and travellers near a Cinder Field, the more so because a bitten traveller is slowed near a zone that drains the warmth of the living. Their pelts stay cold and glittering after death and are prized by those who trade in the zone's curiosities, though a hood of coldcoat fur is said to chill the wearer. The Frost-Burned of the zone, who view all warm things as disruptive, are said to leave the coldcoats alone.

Lore and Belief

Those who live near a field say the coldcoats are the wolves of the blue flame and that the fire calls them; travellers say they are wolves the fire caught and could not finish. Both stories are told of the same packs. They are right that the zone has changed them, and wrong, so far as anyone knows, that the flame commands them.

Cold-fire harvesters hire beast-hunters to ride escort against them, and a coldcoat pelt, which never warms, is the boast of every hunter who has taken one; the village still keeps the winter when a pack ran out of the Fields and down on a village, and the hunters who held its gate with torches until the pack turned back to the blue.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Touched Beasts