Fauna
The Glasswyrm coils through the Drysea dunes of Originis' largest desert as five meters of living quartz. Each scale is true silica, polished to a clear or smoke-banded glass that throws prismatic shards across the sand whenever Pale Sister rises and the heat-haze recedes. Rose tints flush the joints where scales overlap, and the underbelly is paler, ground frosted by constant friction with grit. Two garnet eyes sit dorsolateral on a wedge head whose forked tongue is an opaque chalcedony, tasting heat and chord on the wind. Vestigial limb spurs press through the hide every meter, marking lost ancestry. The wyrm's body refracts sunlight so completely that at noon it appears as a moving heat-mirage, the only tell a faint chord-hum at 220 Hz when scales rasp. By night the body cools translucent and stars seem to pass through the coil, and Dren tribes will not strike a campfire within sight of a fresh Glasswyrm trail for fear of waking it from its slow sand-sleep.
The crystalline Dren Veyari of the Drysea hunt shed Glasswyrm scales for ritual blades that sing on the draw, and elders teach that the wyrm is the desert's own chord made flesh. To meet one and live is to be granted a true-name by the dunes; to kill one without the dune-priest's blessing is to invite a season of mirages that lead clan-children astray. Dren glassblowers grind worn scales into the heart-bead of every coming-of-age pendant.
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