Overview
The Dark-Sight Basilisk is the thin, quick shape of the deep dark — small through the ridge, quick through the claw, the eye wide and pale, and the whole of it reading as one low line from crown to tail-tip, built to move where the light dies. It is the second of the Basilisks a stranger would meet in The Gaze Caverns, and the one the cavern keeps for the part of the dark the Cavern-Sense basilisk will not enter. Where the first basilisk listens to the stone, the Dark-Sight basilisk reads the dark itself: the dark is a page, and it has the page by heart.
Habitat
The Dark-Sight Basilisk keeps the deep ground of The Gaze Caverns, the chambers below the water-line where the springs run blind and the stone is black and wet. It needs three things: a dark that has never seen a light, a spring that runs cold and quiet, and a water-line clear enough to walk it without touching the turned. The young are born into the deepest chamber, where the dark is oldest, and they learn to read it before they learn to walk, because the dark is the only mother the cavern has.
Appearance
Males run 3.18 m from crown to tail-tip, 680 kg to 800 kg; females run 2.95 m, 560 kg to 660 kg, quicker still, with a longer memory of the dark. The base scale is a wet sea-black, the black of the deep stone, with pale cream bands along the belly that show in the dark like a seam of light, and the distinguishing mark is the eye: wide, pale, almost clear, with no visible pupil, set in a rim of true black scale that reads as a hole in the body. The young carry the dark-veil, a wash of true black over the whole scale, which fades from the belly up as the eye opens.
Behaviour
The Dark-Sight Basilisk moves fast and quiet, 7 m/s along the water-line, and it does not make a sound the stone cannot carry. It reads the dark before it moves in it: the shape of a body by the water it displaces, the heat of a stranger by the air that goes wrong around them, the fall of a drop of water that has hit something warm. It is patient in a different way from the Cavern-Sense basilisk, patient in the way a held breath is patient, and it will hold a look in the dark for hours before spending it, because a look spent in the dark is a look no one can see being spent.
Natural Weapons & Defenses
The weapon is the look, and the look is small: the Dark-Sight basilisk spends a whisper of a gaze, enough to turn a hand, an arm, a face, and the stranger is left standing in the dark with one limb of stone, and the stone is the warning that the rest is coming. The second weapon is the water, because the line lives on the water-line, and a stranger who stumbles in the dark stumbles into the spring, and the spring is the one place the dark is deep enough to fall in.
Magic Alignment
The Dark-Sight Basilisk stands in the service of Omnath, the Last Memory, the deity of the last looking, and its magic is the transmutation of the dark — the power to make the dark into a page and the page into a look. Dark-Sight is the primary gift: the eye opens where the light dies, and the dark arrives as reading, every shape in it a word in a language the basilisk learned before it had claws. The secondary gift is the smallness of the look itself, which the elders of the line call the whisper, and the whisper is the one thing the Queen's Word never has to spend, because the whisper does the work the word is too big for.
Society
A Dark-Sight basilisk lives in a deep chamber of four to eight, and the chamber is run by the oldest eye, the one that has read the most dark. The hierarchy is by the width of the reading: the one whose dark goes farthest eats the fish first, and the one whose dark is widest keeps the spring-mouth. The young keep their own water-lines in the deepest chamber, and the sharing of the water-lines is the pairing, and the pairing is the slow, long reading of one another in the dark, which lasts a season, and the season is the whole of the courtship.
Culture & Lore
The Dark-Sight Basilisk keeps its lore in the dark itself, and the dark keeps it better than the stone does. Every shape the dark has read is a page in a library that has no walls, and the library is the only book in the world that gets longer when it is not being read. The old say the first Dark-Sight basilisk was a drop of spring water that learned to look, and the dark gave it a body because the dark had no other way to keep the looking. They call the blind fish of the springs "the ones who were given the eye twice," and they take only what the fish give, which is the one rule the line keeps with the water.
Home
Its home is The Gaze Caverns, the part of it that is below the water and older than the looking. The Dark-Sight Basilisk is the cavern's second voice, and the voice is quiet in the way the deep is quiet, and the quiet is the one thing the cavern cannot lose, because the looking needs the dark the way the word needs the silence. The springs run cold and are tended, the water-lines are kept clear by the young, and the turned of the deep are left on the water where the water takes them, which is the one law the deep does not break.
Relations
The Dark-Sight Basilisk keeps an exact, water-divided peace with the Cavern-Sense line of The Gaze Caverns, a peace of the turned by the water that has held since the first stranger fell. To Vessurax, the Veiled Eye, the veiled god of the hidden looking, the Dark-Sight basilisk is the eye the veil was made for, and the line keeps a single true-black scale at the far wall for the god, which is the one offering the veiled eye asks for and never takes.
In the Story
In the story of the six who arrived, the Dark-Sight Basilisk is the second test, the whisper that asks which of them the dark can keep and which of them the dark must spend. It is the figure that reads the warrens from below while the oaths are made above, and the figure whose reading will be the map the war is fought by, because the dark has seen every approach, and the dark has kept them, and the dark is the one page in the world the war cannot burn. The cavern will be read before the war is over, and the Dark-Sight basilisk is the reader, and the reader does not lie, and the reader does not blink.