When its not moving, the Strider at first looks like a cluster of mountains, their peaks lost in the frozen, overcast sky. Its skin looks like stone and earth, complete with its own flora and fauna, clinging desperately to the beast for fear of falling off and down onto the tundra. Until one of those mountains lifts itself up off the ground and vanishes into the clouds, only to descend miles away with a thunderous crash said to be felt across the whole of the White Wastes. The Strider takes these steps only rarely, one, two, three impossibly massive feet rising and falling until it seems that that cluster of mountains has shifted its location.
One must crest an actual mountain, or perhaps climb the Strider itself, to discover the truths. Those moving "mountains" have no peaks; they continue upwards beyond the blanket of gray clouds like improbably thick tree trunks, pock-marked with caves and crags, as a normal beast might be marked with scars. Here and there actual trees sprout from that rocky skin, perched precariously over nothing, hungry for the sun that the Wastes below so sorely lacks. It hurts ones eyes to look on it in its mass. The Strider is simply too big to properly comprehend, so huge that one's brain convinces itself that it's but a figment of the viewer's imagination.
The three colossal legs come to a joining just over three miles above the wastes, forming the tripod supports for the Strider itself. Its body is diamond shaped, with two sides long and two sides short, the corners rounded by the powerful winds. From front to back the Strider measures over a mile in length. Above the legs its skin appears less like earth and stone and more like that of a sea mammal--a huge brown whale, perhaps, fleshy and streamlined at the same time. Its two eyes, positioned on the underside of its front point, are relatively small--yet a man would need a hundred paces to cross one on foot. The Strider has no visible mouth, no nostrils, no means of intake or output. It needs no sustenance; it simply is, content to wander aimlessly from one end of the Wastes to the other.
Yet, the most curious part of the Strider isn't the beast itself, but the structure mounted precariously at the center of the rolling plain that crowns the creature's body. Nestled between two grass-covered hills, towering over the humps and bluffs, is a castle of gray stone, towers and minarets scrabbling to reach a sky that seems so close. The castle itself is uninhabited. No lights flicker in its windows, no servants tend to its now-wild garden, which every day spreads further and further out across the Strider's wide back.
