Tirichik

Imagine a huge centipede with a dragon's head. White scales cover it, a bony crest runs from nape to stubby tail, and eight thick legs end in dish-shaped feet with a dozen hooked claws each, used only for gripping. Its sole color is a pair of sunken, dull pink eyes. Two short horns behind them curl up into cupped tips; they are its ears and useless as weapons.

Fangs jut past its lips even with jaws shut. From two 3-inch holes beside the mouth it can extend white tentacles up to 20 feet long, tough as steel cable and needle-tipped, which mainly sense movement, scent and body heat. It clings to cliffs and any solid face, scurries over ice, and tunnels through snow (never rock or frozen earth) at movement 3, all without a sound.

It waits in crevasses or drifts, feeling for prey up to 100 yards away, then bursts out. Being white and silent, a hidden tirichik gives foes -5 on surprise rolls. When food is scarce it hunts, snaking its tentacles into caves, under rocks and below house doors before lunging in or bashing the door down.

Elastic neck tendons let it unhook its skull and shoot its head 5 extra feet like a striking snake, gaining +2 to hit. The next round it can do nothing while it reconnects, so it lunges only every other round.

It may stab with tentacles instead of biting. They are AC 1 and their writhing gives attackers a further -2. Each is severed by 5 damage that does not count against its 13 Hit Dice, in effect 10 bonus hit points, and regrows in about a month. Cold never harms it; it is immune to cold spells and magical cold, white dragon breath included.

It has no lair, resting motionless on a crevasse wall. It lives about a century and needs no mate: at mid-life it digs far down into deep snow and bears 1-4 foot-long spawn that stay buried about a year until mature.

Human flesh is its great craving, and rumor claims one could eat a whole village at one sitting. It also takes young white dragons, kupuk and polar bears. The polar tribes of the vast ice sheet make waterproof boots from its hide.