Slag Eels

Overview

Slag Eels are the eels of the Crucible's molten rivers. They are made of slag, the dross that the plane's fire burns out of all matter, and they swim in liquid rock as eels swim in water. Anything that wades the shallows of a lava river risks them.

Appearance

A Slag Eel is as long as a man is tall, sometimes twice that, and as thick as a forearm. Its back is crusted with a dark, cooling skin of black and dull purple that cracks as it bends and shows the glowing orange beneath; its belly is molten gold. It has no eyes, only a blunt head with a wide, soft mouth. It moves in slow, heavy waves through the lava and in sudden fast lunges near the surface. A surfacing eel hisses and spits, and the smell of it is sulphur and burning metal.

Habitat and Range

They live in the rivers of lava across the plane, gathering where the rivers shallow and slow and around the floating islands of cooling rock, and in greatest numbers downstream of the Forgers' workings.

Behaviour and Temperament

Slag Eels feed on impurity. The Crucible's fire burns the dross out of everything, and the eels take it in, swimming through the slag that gathers on the rivers and growing from it. Anything that enters the shallows, a beast, a fallen rock, a traveller's boot, is seized and coiled around, and the eel holds it under until the fire has burnt away whatever it can take. They do not leave the lava.

Abilities

They live inside molten rock and are not harmed by it. An eel's coil is as hot as the river, and it does not let go once it has closed. Struck, it splashes apart and flows together again. Cooling is its one danger: an eel thrown onto stone stiffens, cracks, and dies as it hardens.

Life Cycle

They are said to begin as a skin of slag that gathers on a still bend of a river and begins, one day, to move. Large eels split into smaller ones. A dead eel cools into a long, glassy black stone, twisted like a rope.

Uses and Dangers

The Forgers catch eels with hooked rods, drag them onto cool rock, and use the black stone they harden into as a flux in their forging, saying it draws the impurity out of metal as the living eel draws it from the river. That stone, sometimes brought back through Fire-Gates, is prized by smiths on the Material Plane. To travellers the eels are a death in the shallows; the Crucible's advice to keep to the solid "cool spots" is advice against them.

Lore and Belief

Smiths on the Material Plane tell of eels that live in a forge's slag-pit and must be fed a nail at the year's turn; no eel has ever been found in one. Travellers' tales confuse them with the plane's wild flame-beings, the Burners; the eels are not flame but the leavings of it.

Smiths who went into the Crucible for its metal tell of a companion who stepped into the lava shallows to reach a glowing ingot and was pulled under by something that bit through his boot; the ingot is said to be at the bottom still.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Natives of the Planes