Frost-Burned

Overview

The Frost-Burned are the natives of the Cinder Fields, humanoids who draw their strength from the cold blue fire that drains everyone else. They hold the Fields sacred as the place where fire and ice are one, and they keep them as hermit-guardians against those who come to strip or snuff them. They cannot leave: outside the zone they freeze solid.

Appearance

A Frost-Burned is of ordinary height and spare build, and looks at first like someone in the last stage of frostbite. The skin is cracked in a fine web, like a glaze, and tinged a pale blue that deepens to slate at the fingers, lips, and ears. Frost gathers in the cracks and in the hair, which is white or grey and stiff. The eyes are pale blue and never blink. Their breath shows always, a thin plume even when they are still, and it does not warm the air.

They move slowly and carefully, as though over ice, and their steps crunch in the cinder. They wear little against the cold, since they do not feel it, and often a mantle of grey cinder-cloth. Close to, they smell of frost and ozone.

Habitat and Range

They live in ones and twos across the flat grey cinder, among the blackened, frozen silhouettes of trees and buildings the fire has taken, and never near the zone's edge. A large field may hold a small scattered community that rarely gathers.

Behaviour and Temperament

The Frost-Burned are quiet, slow-moving, and contemplative. They speak only in whispers, because loud sounds stir the blue flames, and they ask the same of visitors. They think of outsiders as warm and disruptive, both words carrying the weight of a danger: a warm body draws the fire, and the fire's spreading is exactly what they keep watch against. They turn away harvesters who take too much and anyone who comes to put the Fields out, first by warning and then by leading the fire towards them.

To a visitor who comes quietly and asks, a Frost-Burned may give advice in a sentence: keep moving, light nothing, do not look into the flames.

Abilities

They feed on the blue fire, drawing sustenance from it as others draw it from food. They are immune to its draining and do not feel the cold. They can stand among the flames without drawing them and seem able to steer the fire's creeping a little by stillness and voice. Leaving is their limit: away from the fire they freeze where they stand.

Life Cycle

How Frost-Burned come to be is not recorded. Some are said to have been travellers the fire took who did not die, a slow thawing into something else; others are thought to be born in the Fields. They change little across long lives, and when one dies its body stays in the cinder, preserved by the cold like everything else there.

Uses and Dangers

They are the best guides to the Fields and the most reluctant, and harvesters of cold fire and cinder glass who keep their goodwill come home more often. Their danger is that of a guard who commands the hazard: a company of harvesters that offends them may find the blue flames coming its way.

Lore and Belief

Those who tell of the Frost-Burned often call them the frozen dead walking, which they are not: they are alive, and in the only place they can be. Ignis-aligned mortals point to them as what comes of drawing on fire without giving back. Some say the Frost-Burned speak with the fire itself, which a few hold to be aware; the Frost-Burned do not say.

Where It Appears

• The Cinder Fields
• the Writers' Guide chapter The Resonant Zones and its glossary