The day is uneventful; there are a few more animal attacks, but then quiet, maybe the local wildlife is learning. 

Towards the evening, though, an awful smell starts to drift in on the wind. It's not coming from the remaining dead snake-greyhound-things. 

...Yeah she is going to go investigate that. In Large And Invisible mode.

A few hundred yards away, slowly lumbering through the undergrowth, she'll find an incredibly hideous animal. It's the colour of vomit, its toadlike face jammed without the junction of a neck onto a lizard-body, with a dull frill running unevenly down its spine. Its open mouth, full of half-rotted teeth, continually leaks greenish slime which leaves a glistening trail on the ground. 

It blinks stupidly at her. Smelling like something that died several months ago and has been sitting in the sun that entire time. 

Great. 

Those half-rotted teeth are definitely not herbivore teeth. She doesn't suppose if she sort of tries to gently shoo it it will shoo.

It walks at her. Slowly. Still blinking stupidly and tilting its wide ugly head to one side, then the other. It looks confused. And like it's not especially planning to stop, and probably wants to eat her. (Good luck). 

Well, She Tried. 

She bites its head off. It probably tastes even worse than the pack-hunters but fortunately she is not a kind of thing that throws up. 

...It tastes a level of bad that it's sort of hard to believe exists, and the body keeps sort of incompetently trying to walk for a while before it finally keels over, but it does, eventually, seem to be properly dead. 

Wow this tastes gross. She makes herself swallow it anyway. She will not kill something and then just let it go to waste. 

She can still only make herself take another couple of bites from various places on the creature's body (in case any part of it tastes less vile than the rest) before deciding that really, she doesn't have to eat the whole thing now. 

She also pries a handful of bones from various places she bit through, mostly a handful of ribs and some vertebrae. Just because she isn't letting it go to waste doesn't mean she needs to eat the whole thing, and bone is useful for stuff. 

She takes her prizes and then hurries off to the campsite to chase the taste out of her mouth with roast bear. 

Meanwhile, still half a mile distant, a party of six (well, four people, taking turns walking versus riding double on the two sentient magic horses) is slowly following the basilisk's trail. 

A tall slender man with long white hair, wearing robes that blend in with the foliage, is walking ahead right now, and freezes dead. "What." Pause. "Moondance. Everyone. Come see this." 

"This" is an extremely dismembered basilisk corpse. 

The head is missing entirely; there are what could plausibly be enormous toothmarks defining the edge of the stump. Even more obvious are the enormous yet unmistakable bites gouged out of various locations on the creature's body. The one on the side of the creature's torso and the one on the creature's hind leg are especially messy, as though someone or something had reached in and yanked the bones out. 

"...Gods, and I thought they smelled bad on the outside." A white-haired woman slips down from the white stallion she's riding, and attempts to cover her mouth and nose with her sleeve. "Gah. Van, ke'chara, maybe don't come any closer. Let's try to at least get upwind, shall we?" 

"...Look, everyone," a younger man who also has waist-length white hair points out. "There's a trail that keeps going." It...doesn't look like the basilisk's trail. It looks like it was made by something a hell of a lot bigger. "Um, should we..." 

It takes the group a while to decide whether it's safe to follow, but they eventually do, carefully and while working in concert to hold a shield of magical energies all around them. 

What they eventually find is a campsite. 

The contents of the campsite are: 

1) A campfire 

2) Some kind of makeshift tent composed of basilisk ribs and bearhide 

3) A small pile of dead wyrsa 

4) A young woman with the locally-ubiquitous elsewhere-uncommon white hair, holding a single basilisk vertebra. As they watch, she brings it to her mouth, and shaves off a curling fragment against her teeth. She makes a pleased noise and adds it to a string of feathers and other such curls. 

She doesn't seem to have noticed them. 

Freeze. Orient. A silent conversation happens via shielded Mindspeech.

Starwind, as the most experienced combat mage, reaches out very cautiously to probe the area – and the woman in particular – with his mage-senses, while all four of them ready themselves for an instantaneous response. 

Well, she is magic. Not a kind of magic he would have ever seen before, though. There is at least one other source of her weird magic, though, inside the tent. 

Her magic is deeply weird. It doesn't operate along any kind of channel, like human Gifts do. She simply is it, as much as she is flesh and blood. Possibly more. 

When she doesn't respond, there's another brief Mindspeech conference, and then Starwind steps forward, while the other three hang back and ready every shield they can bear to fling over him if needed. 

He clears his throat.

She startles, dropping the end of the string with the needle attached to it that she had been using to add another feather. She sees him, pales, looks down at the tooth-scraped vertebra, tries to hide it behind her, realizes this is a stupid idea and puts it down where it had been again. She stands up and dusts off her dress and says something in a completely unfamiliar language and nervous tone of voice. 

"I apologize, but I cannot understand you," Starwind says in Tayledras. She looks foreign. What kind of foreign is hard to tell. 

He glances at Savil, who steps forward and starts attempting basic greetings in every single tongue she can think of. She's only fluent in four languages but she's got the "basic greetings" part down for over a dozen. 

Why do these people also have white hair???

She shakes her head apologetically. Can't understand a one. Not surprising, she only speaks English and some Aklo, and if these people spoke Aklo she would have different questions. 

Eventually Savil, very tentatively, lifts a hand to warn her that something is about to happen and then tries reaching out with a Mindtouch. :Hello?:

:Hi???:

Her mental "voice" is strange, like someone shouting from above water to someone underneath it. It is, though--if perhaps only barely--intelligible. 

Savil grins, partly from pride at establishing sort-of-communication and partly just from relief and suppressed nerves, communication happened and the response wasn't hostile! 

Mindspeech isn't actually language-independent, unfortunately – a concept like 'hello' is easy to convey, more complex concepts are harder without shared words – but it's a hell of a lot better than shouting spoken words at the stranger. 

:I am sorry to interrupt: she sends. (Always a good idea to be polite, to a stranger who might have a beast at her beck and call that just ate a basilisk.) :We were following the basilisk's trail. Do you...know anything...about that?: She gestures vaguely back in the direction they came.