[i]A damp thud sounded behind Edrik, and were he to turn he would find...

That it was eating its own severed tail, which was wriggling like that of a lizard's. It sucked the large appendage right down its wide mouth like a giant noodle, throat bulging grotesquely. A shiver ran through its body, like a jolt of electricity, and then it got better. Just like that. It had regrown what had been lost in a few seconds. A brand new tail slipped from the stump and slid across the ground, coiling like the body of a great serpent, tip lashing at the damp grass. Of course for the wizard to see this, he'd need to look towards the lurid, melancholic fog lamps that were the beast's eyes. Doing so wouldn't seem very harmful at first, aside from evoking a deep sense of violation. The Magna Pater knew already what would happen though. If he looked, it would flee into the woods, and there would be no chance in hell of him catching or finding it again. It was so quick, it was so quiet. Such victims would not likely meet with it again until the next time they laid themselves to bed. Then they always awakened somewhere else. Out on the sidewalk below a flickering lamppost, perhaps lost in the woods during the early, misty hours, or on some lonely country highway in the middle of the night. Sometimes even in an unplumbed place below the ground, composed of sheer darkness, far and away from the comforts of home and the familiarity of civilization, where the floor was crunchy and the walls felt like skin. They would as vulnerable and confused as a baby bird out of its nest, whose only company was the one that watched and waited with ever so much patience.[/i]

[i]But a brief reprieve would be in order. The Magna Pater did not like keeping its sight for long. It couldn't hear, it couldn't smell, it couldn't feel. Worst of all, it saw everything as if it were brighter than day. It despised daylight. It would turn off the peepers shortly after regenerating, in order to better detect what its prey was up to.[/i]