Basilisk

The Basilisk did not hunt with speed or strength. It did not need claws or

crushing jaws or elemental fury. It had only its eyes — ancient, unblinking,

filled with something that no living creature could withstand. To meet the

Basilisk's gaze was to feel every instinct in your body shut down at once.

Not from magic — the First Beasts had no need for such things. It was

something older: a terror so primal, so deeply woven into the fabric of life

itself, that the body simply surrendered. Muscles locked. Blood stilled.

Breath stopped. And in the space between one heartbeat and the next, flesh

became stone. The petrified forests and fields of strange stone figures found

in the oldest swamps of the world are the Basilisk's gallery — a silent

museum of everything that once looked into those eyes and could not look away.

It slithered from the swamps slowly, patiently, knowing it never needed to

rush. Nothing that saw it ever ran fast enough.