Cold Sleep
Cold Sleep. Cold Sleep is the exile's gift from the winters they should not have survived. They may rest in snow, in freezing rain, in open field under a sky of iron, and take no harm from it. Four hours of such sleep restores them as fully as a night in a feather bed — wounds close a little, exhaustion lifts, the mind clears. The exile has slept in snowbanks that should have killed them, on bare stone in mountain passes, in the lee of walls with the wind cutting past. They wake warm, somehow, with the snow melted in a circle around them. The gift does not extend to others. The exile has slept beside companions who did not wake, and carries the weight of that asymmetry. They no longer sleep near people they care about, if they can help it.