The first thing most people notice is the sound. A faint crystalline crack — like a fingernail drawn across window frost — coming from empty air a foot above the ground. Then the snow drifts upward, briefly, wrongly. Then the creature lands on your shoulder and its feet are cold no longer.
The Frost-Veined Coat
The lumwick is stoat-shaped: long-bodied, short-legged, quick. Its winter coat is white, threaded with frost-crystal veining — fine branching lines, unique to each individual, visible only when light catches the fur at the right angle. In blizzard conditions the coat shifts toward translucent, the animal becoming a faint silhouette within its own fur. Its eyes are deep layered blue, like looking through river ice into water still moving beneath. The tail tip carries fine clustered ice-crystal formations in place of plain fur — constantly shed and regrowing — that emit a cold pale light in darkness.
Icefoot
The pads of its feet can be brought below freezing at will. Stepping into open air with the cold active, moisture flash-freezes on contact — a disc of ice just wide enough to hold its weight, lasting a fraction of a second before shattering into drifting crystals. In the moisture-heavy air off the Niflheim Sea, the platforms are briefly glass-clear. In dry cold they are near-invisible, and the creature appears simply to float. Each step produces a faint crack. Below each crack, fine snow drifts downward and dissolves.
The cold is not constant. A lumwick switches it off instinctively around individuals it trusts, its paws settling to nothing more dangerous than a stone left in a cold room. This is not something that can be trained. It happens, or it does not. Young kits have not yet developed full control.
Habits
The lumwick does not pursue prey. It waits in exactly the right spot, as if it already knew the animal was coming. It is solitary and territorial outside breeding season. It dens in hollow roots, abandoned burrows, and with some regularity inside occupied homes — near heat sources, without invitation. Nothing raids a lumwick cache. Larger predators avoid the area of an established den without apparent cause. It lives eight to twelve years — long enough to be known by name, long enough for stories to accumulate around a single animal.
Among the Tribes
Goliath families have long observed that a lumwick denning near a homestead reduces encounters with Bonehowlers. The mechanism is not understood. The practice of leaving fish scraps at the threshold is common regardless. Alfar rangers consider a lumwick that chooses to follow a person an omen worth attending to, though they do not agree on whether it is good or ill. Some Alfar druids have bonded with them as companions. The Duergar value the frost-veined pelt in Midgard markets; the bioluminescence of the tail tip fades within hours of the animal's death and cannot be preserved.
A Goliath tradition holds that a lumwick sitting at the threshold on the night of a birth means good luck. The same animal at the threshold on the night of a death means the soul passed cleanly. No one can say where this began.
The frost impressions its paws leave on any surface are gone within minutes. No one has found a way to keep them.