The Beast Fears Fire - Lonely Shades

Lonely Shades [Hardship 3]
Impulse - Seek out Life

Lonely shades aren't spirits. We're not exactly sure what they are, though there are a handful of hypotheses on the subject, but we are quite certain they aren't spirits. They have some superficial similarities, but they are fully... well, mostly physical. Things that work on spirits don't seem to work the same way on them - you need to bring spiritual power to work magic against them, for instance. At the same time, in accounts of the coming of the Queen, there's a consistency in the reports that these shades rose from the bodies of the dead on the battlefield, and, in the early days, they ranged out to the family and friends of the war dead to spread their chilling, awful touch.

Lonely shades are dark, sometimes translucent in bright light, though they tend to shy away from it (light does not seem to injure or deter them, so beware in thinking that light will save you, you aren't the first to do that). They are flat, nearly two-dimensional sheets of stretchy, semi-amorphous cold and color - dishwater black, swamp-soaked leaf brown, purple, all roiling in cloudy patterns. Their edges are sharp, they move like inchworms, occasionally somersaulting, and always stretching and bending. There are little claws at each or any of their corners, and opaque, white eye-symbols open on their forms in lines and patterns. They are utterly silent. Cold, loneliness and need roll off them, perceptible to even the most hardened and closed-off person.

Harm - 3/Peril [Cold] Lonely shades are cold and want to get warm. The only thing that registers as warm to them is the living, particularly living creatures that speak. You can see where this is going. The touch of a lonely shade steals warmth from the body and affects the mind as well, infecting it with loneliness and the sensation of infinite cold (hypothermia from physical contact with the creature notwithstanding.) Simply being brushed by the shades is enough to cause injury, but a lonely shade prefers to wrap itself around its victim, clutching with its claws, until there is no warmth left.

Cold Finger
When a lonely shade touches you (and it will), face Hardship
On a Hit, it's cold, it hurts, Suffer 1 Harm,but it's not latched on and you can respond to it as you see fit.
On a Hard Hit, your warmth actually burns the shade (it happens sometimes). The shade Suffers Harm, you do not, and the shade may attempt to flee.
On a Miss, the shade wraps itself around you, latching on, Suffer Harm as stated.

I can see your purple body swell and fall, swell and fall
It's likely that there were only a finite number of Lonely shades created by the Queen, which is less comfort than it probably could be, considering their spread and their persistence. When the Queen was active, they were impossible to kill, and so those who were dealt with were usually imprisoned in jars, cellars, or pinned in place with iron nails. All the customary charms of the region work quite well on lonely shades, particularly the nails, which paralyze them as well as pin them in place. Lonely shades are now vulnerable, though they can be deceptively tough to hurt with steel. When destroyed, they leave behind an intensely cold, translucent black-brown-purple jelly which degrades quickly in sunlight, but can be stored in an opaque container and broken on someone for the same sort of Harm a living... well, active shade would cause. Don't expect to win a lot of friends if you decide to use shade leavings as a weapon, but if your are considering it, then the friends ship has probably already sailed.