The Winter's Oasis Wiki

Romps and Reconstruction in Loka: Steam, Magic, and Mysteries in the Frozen Wasteland.

The Whitemarch is a frozen desert known to distort and twist the creatures unfortunate enough to survive its katabatic gales. One animal known to roam the wastes is a breed of monster called the Marchbeast. There are no exact numbers of their kind, but the Atash Bagram estimates, published yearly in Shallock’s Land Guide, put their population at about 80–90 within two hundred miles of the outermost boundaries of the Territory of Loka, according to evidence from junkers and hunters, and the reports of royal border patrols.

The Marchbeast is a descendant of the Svargan bear, its lineage misshapen over the centuries by the vile atmosphere of the wastes into something far more terrible than its ancestors, occasionally reaching up to two tons and fifteen feet in length. Each behemoth is born blind, which through process of sensory elimination provides it with an unparalleled sense of smell and of hearing. Like the Druj, inbreeding and harsh conditions have crafted demented killing machines out of them. As an adult, they wander the earth in a berserker fury, killing and sometimes devouring everything they can catch, stopping to rest only out of exhaustion. There are anecdotes detailing a Marchbeast cub being captured and kept as a ‘pet’ (well, a ‘visitor disposal system’, to be specific) by the bandit lord Aegeon Del? for almost fifteen years, but in the wild, because of its violent nature, this creature has a sadly short lifespan of about 5–7 years.

Categories: Wildlife