Ice-Beasts

Overview

The Ice-Beasts are the great grazing animals of the Frost-Bound: the prey of its hunters and the source of the fur and hide armour the Frost-Born wear. Without them the plane's hunters would have little to hunt.

Appearance

An Ice-Beast is as large as an ox or larger, a high-shouldered, heavy-headed animal hung all over with a long, coarse coat of white and blue-grey that reaches almost to the ice. Beneath the outer coat is a dense underwool as fine as down. Its head is low and broad, with a wide, hard upper lip and short, flat tusks for breaking ice. Its feet are wide and furred between the toes. It moves at a slow, rolling walk, and a herd on the move sounds like ice being ground in a mill. It lows rarely, a long, hollow note that rings in the brittle air. It smells faintly of wet wool.

Habitat and Range

They live in herds across the ice fields and frozen seas of the Frost-Bound, moving slowly over wide ranges in search of food.

Behaviour and Temperament

Nothing grows on the Frost-Bound, but nothing decays there either, and the Ice-Beasts live on what the cold has kept: the bodies of things long dead, held perfectly in the ice. They break the surface with their tusks and lips and eat what lies beneath, and a herd will spend days at one rich patch. They are placid and slow, and they bunch together when Frost-Wolves come, the strongest facing out.

Abilities

Their coat keeps their trapped warmth so well that snow lies unmelted on their backs. They can go long spans without feeding.

Life Cycle

Calves are born in the herd's centre and walk within the hour. An Ice-Beast lives long, as everything on the Frost-Bound does, and when it dies the cold keeps it whole, so that its own herd may one day graze on it.

Uses and Dangers

Their hides are the plane's warmest clothing and its best armour: the Frost-Born wear them as fur and as layered, insulated plates, and travellers buy them when they can. Their meat keeps forever on the ice. A cornered Ice-Beast can trample or gore a hunter, and the Frost-Born count it the most dangerous thing they kill alone.

Lore and Belief

Travellers rarely see an Ice-Beast alive and know it by its hide, which they call ice-wool. Some tales say the beasts dig up the dead of the Material Plane, frozen and carried across; whatever they dig up is old and kept by the cold, and no one has shown where it came from.

Where It Appears

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