The Lorekeeper's Tome

The Mirage Stalker is one of the subtlest horrors of the Desert of Glass: a predator that hunts from within illusion, its body bending the desert light around itself so that it appears as nothing more than the shimmer of heat-haze rising off the glass-sands. It stalks travellers through the dunes unseen, its outline dissolving into false images - a distant oasis, a phantom caravan, a heat-mirror of the party's own number - and strikes only when it has herded its prey to confusion and exhaustion. By the time a victim is sure the shimmer ahead is a living thing, the Mirage Stalker is usually already behind them.