Stillhares

Overview

Stillhares are the white hares of the Frost-Bound, small grazers on the rime lichen of the ice faces and the commonest prey of the plane's hunters. Their defence is the plane's own nature: when danger comes they stop, let their warmth go, and stay as still as the ice around them, sometimes for days.

Appearance

A Stillhare is the size of a large hare of Caeldon, long in the hind leg and short in the ear, with a dense coat of white so pale it shows faintly blue in the shadows. The fur of its feet is thick and spreads like a snowshoe. Its eyes are dark and large, its whiskers rimed with frost. Moving, it is a quick, low, bounding thing that barely breaks the crust. Still, it is a lump of snow: its breath stops showing, frost forms on its coat, and nothing but its eyes would tell it from a drift. It is silent, and smells of nothing at all, as everything on the plane does.

Habitat and Range

They live across the snowfields wherever ice faces carry rime lichen, scattered thinly, since nothing on the plane lives close to anything else. They dig short runs into the snow under overhangs.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Stillhare feeds alone, scraping lichen from the ice in short bursts and then resting. At the first sign of a hunter it freezes. Its heart slows, its body lets its warmth go, and within moments it is as cold as the snow, so that a hunter that tracks by warmth, as the Frost-Wolves do, passes it by. It stays so until long after the danger has gone, for days if need be, and then wakes and moves on as though no time had passed.

Abilities

Going still, a Stillhare all but stops living. It needs no food, gives off no heat, and leaves no breath on the air, and the plane's cold, which preserves whatever it catches, keeps it unharmed until it wakes.

Life Cycle

They bear small litters in their snow runs, and the leverets are born white and practise going still before they can run. Nothing decays on the Frost-Bound, and a Stillhare that never wakes from its stillness lies where it froze until something finds it.

Uses and Dangers

The Frost-Born snare them for meat and for their soft white pelts, which line hoods and mittens, and a Frost-Born hunter can walk a snowfield and tell a frozen hare from a lump of snow by a glance. To travellers they are a rare easy meal on a plane that offers few.

Lore and Belief

Travellers say that a Stillhare can be woken only by warmth, and that one carried inside a coat will thaw and run. The Frost-Born say instead that it wakes when it chooses, and that a hare carried off frozen is a hare that will never wake. Their real enemy is the Hoar Owls, which hunt by the brittle sound that carries far in the cold air, and take a hare in the moment it moves.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Natives of the Planes