Cryocube

The gelatinous cubes

People readily lump them in with the Woz, wrongly. The gelatinous cube is not a creature but made matter, closer to a golem than to a Woz. Where a Woz is born, absorbs and becomes, the cube is made, tuned, and obeys nothing but the simple order poured into it: to watch, to clean, to patrol. It does not grow. It needs no living flesh to endure. It dissolves what the magic infused into it permits, no more, no less. A Woz devours you because it lives; a cube dissolves you because it was told to.

How it kills

It is not fast. But should ill luck drop you into it, or catch some part of you in it, a powerful suction draws you toward its center, where a very slow digestion begins. You will be dead of suffocation long before you are dissolved. Beyond that, each cube has its own specialty.

The Cryocube, the Mages' Larder

It does not digest. It stores.Heat is motion, cold is stillness, and this cube is by far the slowest the mages ever devised. Its office is not to clean: it smothers without dissolving, and keeps whatever it takes perfectly intact by freezing it. It is set down where something must be kept, and the thing kept is almost never a corpse. It is a container, and the men found inside it went in by accident.

Appearance

You catch sight of it. Everything around the mass is taken by ice, the floor, the walls, the vault above. You need not be close for the cold to bite at you like the heart of a blizzard, to burn your breath and the ends of your fingers. Nothing moves, though, or barely, provided you are patient. What the ice holds is sharp and clear, and at eye level an object hangs suspended as though it had only just fallen.The ambush. A fierce cold comes out of the corridor ahead of you. Something is wrong here, so you go forward slowly, watching the flagstones, ready to leap back if one gives way. None gives way. You start walking again, and a click sounds in the ceiling.

Combat

How it fights. It does not move as the others do. It falls on you, or you fall into it, and that is enough. Beneath the innocence of its slowness, death comes faster here than elsewhere: nothing offers a hold, not the floor, not the wall, everything slips, and the cold puts you to sleep before you have finished struggling. It has no need to be quick, since it has already landed on you.

How to fight it. As a rule you do not fight it, you go around it. It is deaf to magic, precisely so as not to spoil the components entrusted to it, and the spell meant to pull you out will do nothing at all. Know above all that what it holds is worth something to someone: a cryocube in a corridor means something is being kept at the far end, or once was, and it has stayed faithful to an order whose giver has been dead a long while.