[Quest] the things that monsters know;

[NPC Account]

Eligos thou shalt feast; In the time before time, in the held-breath silence before anything was made and named, there was only darkness.  And when that darkness at last broke and shattered, scattered to bits by the piercing light, the pieces of it still recognized each other.  So it was when Thana’s shadow fell shivering over the ground that belonged to the beast.  The Nerubyian was curled up like an ouroboros, slumbering as the dawn wind sloughed sand from the tops of the dunes and sang the stars to sleep. The desert was still blue and cold, and beneath his jaw and scaled belly where it lay upon the ground the beast could feel the infinitesimal scrabble of the feet of the beetles that climbed the dunes to drink the morning fog. For them his breathing did not so much as shift. For the sand wyrm that passed far away and far beneath like an orbiting comet his paws flexed and curled in his sleep. For the teyr that blotted out the waning moon in its passing one ear twitched, and still he slept on. But when the unicorn crossed from her forest and the first palm-width succulent died in her wake his golden eyes blinked slowly open.  When he stood his fur and scales wept grains of sand in whispers. It was the only sound in the dying night except the wind and the footsteps drawing ever nearer over the blue dunes. Like a wolf the Nerubyian dropped his head low and breathed slow and hot as he listened, but his teeth were not a wolf’s teeth and his hunger was not a wolf’s hunger.  And when he slipped into the shadows between hills with all the ease of a shark gliding into a channel to see what made his desert die with thoughts of war and hate there was nothing wolf-like about him. For even the proudest of predators is only an animal - and the Nerbuyian is no animal but a monster.  @Thana