Stone Circle bring strife and discord with you wherever you may travel.

gibbering like a madman iliksis threw himself against the woman that had been his undoing. no, no, no came the fearful shine of his wide eyes, rimmed in panic-white. blood gurgled thickly from his rattling throat, which now loosened like a slackened ribbon. his vision began to spot, darken -- and every sucking breath yielded nothing save for an obscene noise of wet and loose membrane.

iliksis did not see life flash before his eyes as his muscles tightened and his mind unreeled. he did not think back on fond memories, or see scenes of bygone eras. there was no canopy of inner thoughts unleashed, or shuttering phases as his synapses fired once, failed, and fired again into the swallowing dark. like distant stars they climbed and rose and flared and then fell into an incomprehensible void beyond reckoning. blackness was all the man saw as he fell to the ground, teeth tearing into him that he did not feel.

his last thought was of fear: banal, inescapable fear -- for evil did not discern between right and wrong, good-doer and evil-doer. evil was insensate, indiscriminate -- it cut through all like a scythe, indifferent to the hand that created it, and apathetic to its summoner. that was its nature, calloused and unbecoming -- and like so many evil things, iliksis met a violent end as he choked and spluttered on his own blood.

the judgment of his final act upon him, iliksis drew his final breath - his head thudding, his muscles and body on fire -- and then he sank to the ground as the wolves around him pulled him apart and bloodied the earth with his remnants.

when they were done he did not resemble the basilisk he had been mere seconds before. he was matted, bedraggled, his fur stripped and coagulated with bloodied matter and viscera. his yellow eyes stared back unseeing, half-rolled up into his skull -- and a gruesome, silent shriek of pain had permanently affixed itself to his stilled jaws, which grimaced back in the dogged way death grins to all.

and so ended iliksis' atrocious chapter, drawn to a close by his own iniquity.

if only it were that simple to vanquish the world of such depravity. iliksis' mortal soul was gone, but the world still produced monsters capable of unthinkable evil. evil was the many-headed hydra, and like many verminous things, nearly impossible to eradicate. cut one head, and three more snarling faces appeared in its stead.