If you see it, you are already dying. The seeing is just how it tells you. Collected sayings of the Nafud caravaneers; recorder unknown
There is a rule in the deep desert that older travelers teach younger ones on the first night out, when the fire is still high and the lesson can still be received as wisdom rather than warning. The rule is this: if something is standing very still at the edge of the dark, do not look at it a second time. The first look is instinct. The second look is invitation.
The creature they are describing has no agreed-upon name. To name it is to practice for the moment you will need to speak it aloud, and that moment should never come. The scholars of the Hollow Codex have recorded it as Al-Wāhish, the beast, the wild, the wrongness, though the word sits uneasily in the mouth, like a stone you cannot swallow and cannot spit out.
There are not many survivors. Of those who exist, almost none will speak of it twice. The accounts that follow were extracted over years of careful work by the Codex archivist known only as the Lame Scholar, who spent his last decade traveling between desert settlements with a lamp, a writing kit, and the patient willingness to sit in silence until the silence became words.
It was the size of the dark between two torches. I mean that precisely not large or small, but whatever size the gap was, it filled it. When we moved the torches apart, it grew. When Hasim held them close together it seemed to compress, and we thought that was good, we thought that meant we had power over it, and that was when Hasim stopped making noise. Merchant of the Mā’rib route; name withheld at subject’s request
It smelled like the inside of an animal that had been dead for three days in the heat. But underneath that, underneath, there was something else. Something I recognized. I did not know from where. I have thought about it every day since. I think it was the smell of my own fear from a long time ago, preserved somehow, carried back to me. I think it keeps things. Soldier of the Basqian border garrison, recorded in the third year after the Cataclysm
The Lame Scholar noted, with characteristic understatement, that most of his subjects aged visibly between the beginning of their account and its end.
It is large. All accounts agree on this, and nothing else. The shape changes, or rather, the shape is different each time, and it is unclear whether the creature changes or whether the eye simply cannot hold it steady. What the eye can hold: too many joints. The suggestion of a neck that bends in a direction necks do not bend. Skin the color of things that have been dry for a very long time, old leather, old bone, old riverbed. The mouth, when it opens, opens downward. Witnesses describe a sound when this happens. No two of them agree on what the sound is, but all of them flinch when asked.
The creature does not appear to have eyes in any location where eyes belong. It finds things anyway.
One account, from a shepherd girl who was the sole survivor of a camp that vanished overnight near the eastern wastes, describes something no other testimony includes: when it moved through the camp, the shadows moved the wrong way. Not with the creature. Toward it. As though the dark recognized something in it and wanted to return home.
It does not chase. This is the fact that makes it worse.
It arrives, no one hears it arrive, and it stands at a distance and it waits. It is waiting for someone in your party to die. It is patient in the way that geological formations are patient, in the way that debt is patient. If everyone in the party remains alive, it will follow at a fixed distance, never closer, never farther, until someone doesn’t.
When a death happens, it moves with a speed entirely inconsistent with its apparent weight, and it takes the body. Not violently. The Lame Scholar’s subjects searched for a better word than takes and could not find one. The body goes. The creature is larger, slightly. The gap it leaves in the sand is warm for a long time afterward.
One caravan master described watching it absorb the body of his oldest friend and then turn, slowly, the way a building might turn if buildings could, and look at the rest of them. He could not explain how he knew it was looking, given the absence of visible eyes. He said: it was counting us. It was deciding how long it could afford to wait.
The oldest protection is water. Moving water, a stream, a channel, a skin bag squeezed so a trickle runs over stone. The creature will not cross it and will not remain near it. No one knows why. Theories exist; none of them are comforting.
The stranger protection is grief. A body that has been openly mourned, wept over, named aloud, lamented, the creature will not take. It approaches, and then it stops, and then it waits longer, and then, in every recorded account, it eventually turns and moves back into the dark without collecting what it came for. The caravaneers of the old Nafud routes hired bakkā’īn for this purpose: professional mourners, traveling with them not to grieve the already dead, but to stand ready to grieve the living the instant they became dead, before the creature could reach them. A gap of even a few seconds, it is said, is too long.
What this implies about the creature, that it understands something of grief, enough to be repelled by it, but not enough to anticipate it, is a question the Lame Scholar recorded in his final entry, written in a hand the Codex archivists described as extremely unsteady, with no answer appended. His lamp was found still burning. He was not found at all.
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