Fire-Stalkers

Overview

Fire-Stalkers are the hunters among the Burners of the Crucible: predatory flames that seek out cold spots and put them out. In the Crucible, a traveller is a cold spot.

Appearance

A Fire-Stalker is a low, fast flame, the length of a big hound, running close to the ground on something like legs that flicker in and out of being. It is deep orange at the edges and blue-white at the core, and leaves a trail of glazed, smoking rock. Its head, if it has one, is a brighter knot of flame that swings from side to side as it searches. It moves in silent bursts, then stops and flares, and when it finds what it seeks it gives a sharp, whistling hiss, like water flung on a hearth. It smells of hot ash.

Habitat and Range

They hunt across the Crucible, especially around its cool spots, the islands of solidified rock where travellers take refuge.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Fire-Stalker cannot bear the cold. It senses any place cooler than the fire around it and runs to it, flares over it, and burns it until it is as hot as the rest. A traveller, carrying cool skin, water, or a cooling agent, draws them from far off.

Abilities

It senses cold as a hound senses scent, and burns with a heat that drives off any coolness. It can run across lava and through fire without harm.

Uses and Dangers

They give nothing. Their danger is that the cool spots that keep a traveller alive in the Crucible are exactly what they hunt.

Lore and Belief

Travellers' advice is to rest in the largest cool spot one can find, because a Fire-Stalker gives up on the cold it cannot burn away. Some in volcano country on Caeldon say a running flame on a lava field is a Fire-Stalker loose from the other side, and nothing has proved them wrong.

Beast-hunters of the volcano country tell of a running flame that burned out a shepherd's valley and was killed at last with water drawn from a glacier and carried up in skins by a whole village.

Where It Appears

• The Crucible