Ice-Stalkers

Overview

Ice-Stalkers is the name the Frost-Bound gives to its hunters as a kind: predatory beasts adapted to a cold that preserves everything and lets nothing grow. The best known are the pack-hunting Frost-Wolves and the burrowing Glacier-Drakes; the crystalline Ice-Shards that wake and attack anything warm are counted with them, though they are made things rather than beasts.

Appearance

They share the colours of the plane, white, deep blue, and translucent grey, and most are thick-furred or thick-scaled against the cold. They hunt in a world where sound carries far and brittle, so the best of them are silent.

Habitat and Range

They range over the glaciers, ice spires, and frozen seas of the Frost-Bound, wherever the Ice-Beasts and other warm prey are found.

Behaviour and Temperament

What unites them is warmth. Heat in the Frost-Bound does not escape a body but is trapped in it, so a living creature is a lit lamp to anything that can sense it, and the Ice-Stalkers hunt by that sense more than by sight. They kill by cold as often as by tooth.

Uses and Dangers

Their hides and scales are worn by the Frost-Born and prized by travellers. Their danger is that a warm visitor is the brightest thing on the ice.

Lore and Belief

Travellers rarely tell the kinds apart and speak of ice-wolves, ice-worms, and walking ice, three names for what they met. The tale that the ice itself hunts on the Frost-Bound is told of the Ice-Shards, and is nearer the truth than most.

Delvers who brave the Ice Gates for the plane's preserved relics say the Stalkers find a camp by its breath, and they sleep in snow-holes with their faces to the ice.

Where It Appears

• The Frost-Bound