While most sorts of ice beasts are quite rare, found today, as in those times most ancient, in the snow-moated palaces of arctic wizards, some have proven most well adapted to a feral life in the cold climes. Most infamous among these are the ice serpents, which SEE.
Ice beasts rarely propagate as do mundane creatures of flesh. When an ice beast receives a blow of great damage, sizable shards of its crystalline substance may be struck off. When it is able, the ice beast collects these shards and nurses them by licking them, thus infusing them with life. (This is similar to the manner in which normal bear mothers are known to lick their stillborn cubs to life.)
The shards' nurse and progenitor both influence the young thus produced. By this means the asexual ice beasts receive the benefits of cross-fertilization, at least when the progenitor and nurse are not one and the same beast.
Shard-eggs may be licked in to a form very like their adult form, being as cubs and so cared for by their parent(s). Smaller shards, however, are very likely to be animated not as well-formed beasts but rather as simple ice slugs, which SEE. Ice slugs may live for centuries, and are a significant source of the cold permeating many a vicinity.
On occasion, an ice beast reaches such colossal proportions than normal movement becomes an excessive exertion. These great beasts curl up and enter a death-like sleep. In their sleep they grow and undergo a strange metamorphosis; this is the origin of many a mundane glacier and also the origin of some of the vast demi-divine Glaciures, those goddesses of living ice.
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