Ice-Shards

Overview

Ice-Shards are crystalline constructs of the Frost-Bound, the Deficit Plane of absolute cold, where warmth is a myth and the cold itself resists change. They lie as ice among ice until something disturbs them; then they animate and attack anything that generates heat. The Frost-Born count them among the plane's Ice-Stalkers, with the Frost-Wolves and the Glacier-Drakes, though no one has seen an Ice-Shard eat.

Appearance

At rest an Ice-Shard is a cluster of long, clear crystals jutting from the ice at angles, from knee-high to twice a man's height, indistinguishable from the jagged spires of the plane except by an expert's eye: its crystals are a shade too blue at the core and too clean at the edges, and snow does not settle on them. Awake, the cluster pulls itself free of the ice and stands on a spray of its own blades, a shape like a broken chandelier turned upright, with no head and no face. Its colours are the plane's, stark white and deep blue fading to translucent grey, and the plane's cold light runs along its edges in sharp lines.

Habitat and Range

Ice-Shards are found across the Frost-Bound's glaciers, ice spires, and frozen seas, most often where the ground is broken and its spires stand thick. They occur singly or in fields, and a field of them looks like any other stretch of jagged ice. They are not known outside the plane.

Behaviour and Temperament

An Ice-Shard wakes when disturbed: a footstep on its crystals, a blow, a hand laid on it, sometimes only a warm body passing close. It turns at once towards the strongest heat near it and goes at it. It does not hunt beyond that heat, does not flee, and shows no fear or anger; when the warmth is gone, whether fled, sheltered, or cold, it stops, and in time sinks back into the ice and is still.

Nothing suggests a mind in one. The Frost-Born treat Ice-Shards as part of the ground, a danger to read in the ice as they read thin ice or a hidden crevasse.

Abilities

An Ice-Shard senses heat, and senses it well; breath and a beating heart are enough. Its blades are as hard as the plane's permafrost, which can shatter steel, and they cut and pierce. What they touch, they chill: a wound from one freezes at the edges, and those hurt badly enough stand still in the cold, the first step of the Freeze that waits in the plane for everyone. A struck Shard breaks, but only into smaller crystals; a broken field is not always a dead one.

Uses and Dangers

The Shards give nothing a traveller can take: their crystals melt like ordinary ice once they are carried into warmth, or so most accounts say. Their danger is that they cannot be told from the ice they lie in, on a plane where warm-blooded travellers are the only heat for days. Heat sources, the Frost-Bound's most valuable things, also draw them. The Frost-Born cross Shard fields slowly, cold and quiet, and travellers who learned from them do the same.

Lore and Belief

On the Material Plane Ice-Shards are a traveller's tale, often confused with the plane's statues of ice that are still aware within. Some believe the Shards are the frozen dead woken by warmth and longing for it; others that they are the plane's own hatred of heat in crystal. The Frost-Born are said to call them the plane keeping itself clean. Which of these is so, no one has proved (see Knowledge of the Cosmos). Fireside stories in cold country warn children not to kick the icicles, and some tell it of the Shards.

Where It Appears

• The Frost-Bound