The Freeze

Overview

The Freeze is the cold that kills on the planes of lack. In the Ashen Wastes it turns a traveller into a statue of ice and ash; in the Frost-Bound into a statue of ice still aware inside; at the Cinder Fields the blue fire drinks the heat away. It is ordinary cold made bottomless. What reaches a healer is the traveller pulled out half-frozen, who must be brought back from it slowly.

Cause

These places take warmth rather than merely lacking it. The Wastes let all energy run down, so a body there cannot make heat fast enough to stay alive and cannot mend; the Frost-Bound is the absence of warmth; the Cinder Fields' cold fire consumes it and is drawn to it. Cold-Salamanders, Frost-Wyrms, and Cinder-Moths drink the heat of a living body directly.

Who It Strikes

Anyone without fuel. The still and the sleeping go first, since a body that stops moving stops warming; then the thin, the old, and the wounded. Ogres, built for cold, hold out longest, and Kavari carry fat against it. Kobolds feel cold badly and fail early. The Wrought, who neither eat nor breathe, are not known to take it.

Signs and Course

It runs as winter cold does, only faster and further: shivering, white and then grey fingers, slurred speech, a sleepy calm, and the shivering stopping. In the Frost-Bound frostbite comes within hours; in the Wastes the skin dulls as if dusted with ash. Past that, the body stiffens and sets.

Pulled out in time, a sufferer is cold to the core for days, with a slow pulse and blue lips that will not pink however close the fire. Frostbitten flesh blisters, then blackens over a week or two. Fire is a danger now: sudden heat can scald numb skin and shock the heart, as the Frost-Bound's travellers learn. For weeks after, the sufferer cannot get warm, wakes with cold feet in a warm bed, and dreads the dark. Some come home with a strange longing for the cold fire's glow, which they stared at too long.

Contagion

It does not pass between people. A frozen companion carried out does chill those who carry them.

Treatment and Its Limits

Warm slowly. The old remedy is a living body: the sufferer stripped of wet clothes and wrapped in dry wool against a companion's skin, by a banked fire, not a roaring one. Warm broth goes in only once they can swallow. Winter Coat slows the heat leaving a body or a sickroom, at the caster's cost. Healing magic is hard in the Wastes and the Fields, where the body has no warmth to spend, and works best once the sufferer is home and fed. Dead fingers and toes are cut away by a surgeon once the line between live and dead flesh is clear. A body frozen through is beyond warming; in the Cinder Fields a few are revived if warmed very quickly, most are not.

Mortality

Those who freeze through die, and on the planes their bodies stay as statues. Most who are pulled out and rewarmed slowly live; those warmed too fast sometimes die by the fire. Survivors keep lost fingers, toes, or ears, numb patches, and a lifelong feeling of the cold.

Lore and Belief

Cold-country folk say the Freeze is a hunger, and that the cold remembers a body it has tasted. Ignis-aligned households tell children that a Cold-Salamander is what becomes of a hearth that was never shared, and set an extra brand on the fire for a sufferer. Ogre families call on Ghessa the Hearth-Mother to drive out the chill. Travellers prize a Hot Stone or Warm Core above coin.

Delvers who brave the cold planes for their relics carry a sealed pot of coals as their most precious treasure, and they tell of one who gave her last coal to a frozen stranger and was found the next morning beside him, both of them alive.

In the Medieval Era

The Freeze is met mostly among the harvesters of cold fire and cinder glass at the Cinder Fields, who know it as their trade's hazard, and among the rare travellers back through the Cold Gates and Ice Gates. Volcanic and glacier country nurses it as it nurses ordinary frostbite (see Cold-Bite), with the same wool, broth, and patience, and with a surgeon for the blackened toes.

Where It Appears

• The Ashen Wastes (the Chill)
• The Frost-Bound (the Freeze, Heat Sickness)
• The Cinder Fields (the Drain, the Rimed)
• Cold-Salamanders
• Frost-Wyrms
• Frost-Burned
• Frost-Born
• the Writers' Guide chapter The Planes