Worlds to play, cards to import

A Pyrelands leech that drinks heat instead of blood — the cold spot in a warm bed, the frost-print on a sleeping man's chest.

A heavy pass-ram that starts rockslides on purpose — the engineer of half the 'natural' disasters on the Ferruhm roads.

A jointed, arm-thick predator that travels the coal and ore seams themselves, surfacing through worked faces — deep-mine fauna at its purest.

Soot-black swifts that nest by the thousand in dead mineshafts and mob anything that descends past the colony — beloved topside, feared below.

A tall flightless hunting bird of the wheat oceans, scythe-spurred and sprint-fast — the Granlands' own predator, harvest's other reaper.

The unseen thing of the deepest Deepworks levels that takes the tallow left at gallery-ends — old, singular, and paid on time by every crew that goes below the third deep.

The white-pelted hunter of the high passes above the Ferruhm Reaches — the one creature the caravans pay, and even Ondrel walk wide of.

A jay-sized Rootwild butcher-bird that impales its larder on blackthorn — including, in hard winters, things much bigger than it should manage.

Kettle-sized crabs colonising Pyrelands fumaroles, farming the vents and defending them with jets of boiling spray.

A high-pass cache-raider — part wolverine, part burglar — that breaks into stores, eats a winter's provisions in a night, and fouls the rest.

Feral war-lizards of the Veskarn lancer-lines, running the Pyrelands at dawn in wedge formation — still, after a century and a half, waiting to be mustered.

Moths bred in the Longwar to devour enemy standards, still swarming anything dyed in the old kingdom colours across the Granlands.

A sleek seal-bodied hunter of the fen channels, doglike in its curiosity, that follows night-boats for miles — credited by outsiders with the Grimwold's own gift for tasting lies.

Pontoon-bridge turtles of the Riverspine, grafted flat-shelled to carry army decking — which now surface beneath barges, answering a muster nobody sounds.

Incendiary war-birds gone feral in the Pyre Quarter, caching live coals in chimney nests — blamed for every fire in Glasshouse Row, guilty of few.

A picket-line molded that still walks a war border through the Saltmarches fens — so punctually that stilt-towns time their errands by it.

A living siege-piece of the Longwar, feral in the Ferruhm Reaches, that still fires on anything flying a banner above the treeline.

Riverspine floodplain horses descended from oath-wrenched cavalry — placid herds that charge in perfect formation when thunder sounds like trumpets.

Drifting swarms of cold-lit marsh insects that gather into a single steady flame-shape over the deep fen — beautiful, harmless in themselves, and responsible for more drownings than anything with teeth.

Incendiary eels of the Saltmarches, alchemically grafted for the Longwar's harbour-burnings — now a wild population, and a penned deterrent trade.

A siege-strangler vine of the Rootwild, bred to pull down walls, that feeds on lime mortar and cannot tell a climbing-rope from an escalade.

Kneeling heat-shadow figures of the Pyrelands glass fields, each fixed over one spot — the war's mourners, still at their graves.

A predatory canopy-drape of the wet Rootwild hollows that lowers strangling curtains onto warm bodies passing beneath.

War-messenger birds roosting on Songspire rooftops that scream fragments of hundred-fifty-year-old orders at dusk — orders taught chick to chick since the Longwar.