Strata Crabs

Overview

Strata Crabs live in the narrow gaps between the rock layers of the Iron Backbone, and their shells grow from the stone they live in, layer upon layer. They are the commonest small life of a plane that has little, and the most harmless.

Appearance

A Strata Crab is the size of a palm, flat-bodied to fit between layers of rock, with short, strong legs and broad, blunt claws for scraping. Its shell is banded like a cut cliff face, grey and brown with a vein of copper or a fleck of gold, each band laid down as it grew. Its eyes are small amber beads on short stalks that glow faintly, like the rock's own light. It moves sideways in quick, short scuttles and freezes when the rock shudders. Its claws tick softly on the stone. It smells of mineral and wet stone.

Habitat and Range

They live wherever the plane's strata part even a finger's width, in the cliffs of the floating islands and the walls of its spherical caves, in great numbers, and are seldom seen in the open.

Behaviour and Temperament

Strata Crabs eat grit: the fine dust that the plane's grinding plates make as they shift against each other. They scrape it from the gaps with their claws. They are shy and slip deeper into the rock at any touch. They feel the plane's slow movements before anything else does and go still before the rock shifts.

Abilities

Their shells grow from the minerals of the rock around them and are as hard as that rock. A Strata Crab can tell, through its feet, which way the rock will move next, and its going still is the first warning a traveller gets of a shift.

Life Cycle

They hatch from eggs laid in the gaps and grow their first band of shell from the stone they hatch on. They live very long and grow slowly, and a large crab's shell carries the history of the strata it lived in. A dead crab's shell becomes part of the rock.

Uses and Dangers

They are harmless and too small for food. Travellers learn to watch them: when every crab on a cliff stops moving, the rock is about to shift, and it is time to stand away from the walls. Their banded shells are carried home as curiosities, and some on the Material Plane hold that a shell's bands tell the history of the place it grew, as the plane's stone remembers what happened upon it.

Lore and Belief

The Stonewrights are said to read the crabs' shells as records. On the Material Plane, collectors pay for "strata-shells" and many sold are only banded agate, carved.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Natives of the Planes