Bone Harvester

"But the lazy son fell asleep when he was to be tending the hearth fire. While the embers grew dark the house grew cold. Soon after, from just outside, came the rattle of bones."
-excerpt from Eiranian cautionary fairy tale "The Bone Picker"


Classification: Entropic
Major Element: Cold
Minor Elements: 
Habitat: Tundra, Boreal, Arctic 

In the furthest tundras and icy foothills, where soil is frozen as solid as stone, where bare trees shimmer with a permanent coat of hoarfrost, where no living creature yet survives (at least not for long), the skeletal remains of those that once inhabited the land still shamble over the drifting snows. Wreathed in Cold, these monstrosities spend their tentative existence in search of corpses to replace the macabre scaffolding holding them together. The fresher the better.

Bone harvesters are one of the purest Cold elementals yet discovered, and as such are likely the most dangerous creatures ever known. Luckily their deep connection to Cold means they cannot survive long outside of the most extreme frigid environments.

No more than a bitter chill enshrouding a stolen skeletal framework (often taken from multiple sources or even species), bone harvesters are a gruesome sight to behold. Their entire existence seems to be spent searching for bones to replace their crumbling frames. While they will pick them from found corpses, the elementals seem to prefer the bones of the recently deceased, particularly those they have killed themselves.

Whether they are mindless or merely brutal, the harvester's hunting tactics usually revolve around ambushing and violently bludgeoning their prey to death. Once the victim has ceased moving the flesh is torn from their skeleton. Any unbroken bones that seem to suit the elemental's desires are taken, with the old bones, often brittle and splintering, discarded along with the rest of the corpse. Because of their barbaric hunting practices, however, bone harvester's are rarely so lucky to find a complete, unbroken skeleton within their victims. As a result most bone harvester's shamble along on incomplete or mismatched skeletons. Some have even been noted to have bones belonging to wildly disparate creatures, though they rarely seem hindered by this.

These chill monstrosities may well be the closest thing to a pure Cold elemental we will ever see. Why Cold is unable to manifest on its own is unclear, as all other elements are capable of this (even Fire, which is considered by some elementalists as not simply the opposite of Cold, but an inversion of it. As though Fire/Cold were two sides of a coin). But perhaps therein lies the answer. 

A pure elemental exhibits the truest characteristics of its form. Fire elementals are intense and volatile. Air elementals are playful and chaotic. Water elementals somber and inquisitive. Earth elementals stoic and steadfast. In that same vein, perhaps these parasitic, malicious tendencies are inherent properties of the element of Cold.