A Calamity is not a rank. It is a decision the world makes about a thing that shouldn't exist.
The ridge above Duskline Pass split open. Stone peeled back like damp paper, fell sideways, and settled into coils that weren't coils. A head rose from the tear, crowned in jagged horn-knives. It blinked once, and the color drained from the sky.
Basilisk.
Not the cave kind in old hunting stories. This one was fortress-tall, its plates grown from ore and night, each seam leaking slow curtains of miasma. Wherever the haze touched, rock bruised. Metal dulled. The fence's Aetherite crystals spidered with hairline fractures that healed and cracked again.
Every drone above the ridge lost sync and dived. The ward lights flickered and steadied only because the choir on the floor below forced them to. Thirty elder women with dragon rings tightened their hands on the pews and sang the low, warm note the lattice needed to remember what it was.
Marcus Viserion stepped onto the road.
