Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Between the great dragons of medieval legend and the lake monsters of the modern tabloid there exists a middle creature, and the Alps are its home. The Tatzelwurm —the "clawed worm"; also Stollenwurm , the tunnel-worm of the Bernese herdsmen, Bergstutz , Springwurm , and in the Romance valleys the arassas —is the mountain chain's resident mystery: a thick-bodied serpent two to six feet long , blunt and cylindrical "like a stove-pipe," with a cat-like head , large eyes, and—its defining anomaly— two clawed forelimbs (and, in stricter tellings, no hind limbs at all). It hisses and whistles; it leaps —witnesses across three centuries insist on the spring, several feet at a bound, and the older accounts add that it leaps at the intruder; its breath or bite was held poisonous, fatal to cattle and dangerous to men; and it dens in scree, haylofts of the high barns, and mountain crevices, emerging in the thundery weather of the high summer. It is not a fairy-tale bei...