Frost-Born

Overview

The Frost-Born are the people of the Frost-Bound, a plane where cold is not a temperature but a force that holds everything still. They live alone, speak little, and hunt the ice better than anything else that lives there. To the peoples of Caeldon they are the silent figures of travellers' tales, met rarely and remembered for their stillness.

Appearance

A Frost-Born is tall and slender, taller than most Humans, with long limbs and a narrow, fine-boned face. The skin is pale and so translucent that the blue veins show beneath it, at the temples, the throat, and the backs of the hands, and in the blue light of the plane the whole body can look faintly lit from within. The eyes are solid white or silver, with no visible pupil, and do not seem to blink. Hair, where they have it, is white and fine.

They dress in layers of thick, pale fur and in armour of hide made from the Ice-Beasts they hunt, with hoods drawn close. Their breath leaves them as a small cloud that freezes and falls as glitter. They move little and smoothly, and can stand so still on the ice that a traveller walks past without seeing them. Their voices are low and dry, and they smell of nothing at all.

Habitat and Range

They live across the glaciers, ice spires, and frozen seas of the Frost-Bound, each alone or in a pair over a wide stretch of ice, in hollows cut into the glacier or under overhangs of frozen waterfalls. Their homes are bare: a hide, a store of food, a hunting spear.

Behaviour and Temperament

The Frost-Born are solitary and stoic by conviction. They hold that closeness leads to weakness and to the loss of heat, and so they keep apart, meet seldom, and speak rarely, since speech spends warmth. Endurance, silence, and the keeping of the self are their virtues, and a Frost-Born who talks freely is thought a little mad.

They are not aggressive unless provoked, but they look on strangers as heat thieves who upset the balance of the ice, and will drive them off a hunting ground without explanation. As hunters they have no equal on the plane: they track prey by the faintest disturbance in the snow, and can follow a trail days old.

Abilities

A Frost-Born makes its own warmth slowly and keeps it well. It does not sweat; its breath freezes the moment it leaves the mouth. It can go weeks without food, sinking into a hibernating sleep in which it barely breathes, and wake with its strength intact.

Life Cycle

The plane keeps bodies unchanged, and the Frost-Born age slowly. Their dead are laid out on the open ice, where nothing decays, and are kept there exactly as they were.

Uses and Dangers

They are the best guides on the ice for anyone who can win their trust, which is almost no one. They trade rarely, and only for heat sources and things the cold has kept perfectly. Their danger is mostly to trespassers on their hunting grounds.

Lore and Belief

Travellers who have come back through the Ice Gates, glaciers that melt open into the Veil and frozen lakes, describe tall white-eyed hunters who watched without speaking, and some swear they were statues until they moved. A common tale holds that the Frost-Born are the frozen dead of the Material Plane, walking again; they are not, but the tale is told because the Freeze on the Frost-Bound does make statues of travellers, and travellers cannot always tell the two apart.

Thieves who go through the Ice Gates to rob the Frost-Born's caches of warmth are hunted back across the ice, and the cold country tells of one who escaped and spent the rest of his life unable to get warm.

Where It Appears

• The Frost-Bound
• Writers' Guide: The Planes, Glossary