Stone Her Eyes and Green Her Heart

Flash Fiction, 400 words. For IAM's May 15 prompt.

IAM’s May 15 prompt. https://ironage.media/prompt/the-basilisk.html. Courtesy of Iron Age Media.

She perched atop the cliff and studied the works of man. She who with a glance could render stony any creature, though it be made of wood or fur or skin, bone or bark, marveled at the granite towers.

What she made, was less.

What they made, was more.

She wanted it. She wanted them. But if she had them, their works would stop. In past ages, she considered that to turn a creature to stone was to save it, forever. A boon to creation. But she knew now that the wind would wear the statues until their lined faces lay smooth; the rain would etch new lines until the original creation was forgotten.

And so she admired these men from afar. At a safe distance, where the stone would remain their stone and would not become her stone through the power of her green, green eyes. Green eyes that could behold, from a distance, a flower that her green nose could never smell. Green ears, hidden by smooth green scales, that could hear an owl but never meet its gaze twice.

These same ears now heard murmuring behind her.

“Hark! ‘Tis the basilisk!”

“Shh, be wary, for if she turns to you, ‘tis your doom.”

“Even the grass, it is as if the finest sculpture.”

“Prithee do not snap it, she shall hear!”

How often, on moonless nights, had she crept beneath the towers, slithered in the moats, before wending through the darkest alleys of the town. How grateful she had been to feel that handworked stone beneath her talons, against her flanks. How wonderfully they shaped the formless earth. It smelled delicious, but she would never.

Never take it from them. From this world.

But how she longed to see it, not from afar, not through sound and smell, but with her eyes, her green eyes that could differentiate two hundred types of stone in the blink before her gaze made it all her own, fit for eating.

Nature had cursed her to eat a single meal, but blessed her with the ability to find it at any moment. Her stone, hers to keep. Hers to eat.

She knew their voices by now, the ones called carpenters and masons and wrights and smiths. If she heard their voices she would not turn. She would retreat and leave them to wonder. And to work.

But these were not they; these were the ones called knights. For them she would turn.

After all, she was a creature, too, and like all, desired to survive.

And she was hungry.