Deodand (fictional creature)

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In Jack Vance's Dying Earth fiction, the Deodand is a recurring creature.

It is carnivorous, malicious, and sentient, and is described by Vance as "formed and featured like a handsome man, finely muscled, but with a dead black lusterless skin and long slit eyes". Within the books the wizard Follinense, in "his bizarre systemology," classifies it as a hybrid of "wolverine, basilisk, man."