RARITY: ★★★☆☆ | THREAT: ★★★★☆
SIZE: Twice as large and muscular as a typical bull moose.
Almost exclusively in thick wooded areas, including ones at higher altitude in the mountains. Most of the time, they prefer staying in the deeper forests and do not seek out populated areas. But as humans encroach on their habitats, altercations are becoming more common.
These brutish, moose-like monsters originally described in Slavic folklore are not to be messed with. Older individuals can reach 15 feet long, and even young ones are fully capable of flipping over a car with their massive, pointy antlers (which female bies also possess). They have a third eye in the center of their forehead, which they can use to stun or hypnotize anyone who even glances into it. They do not use this hypnosis to escape human presence, but rather use it to keep their victim from escaping. Plenty of hikers and even supernatural hunters have found death in the antlers of a bies.
While not as evil as some of the folklore would have people think, these are highly aggressive animals that don’t take kindly to anyone in their vast territories. Notably, there is a subspecies called the “czort” that looks almost identical, but lacks the third eye and differs in a couple of behaviors (see: VARIANTS). It’s not possible to tell the difference until face to face with the beast.
Biesy boast immense strength, and will make quick work of anything standing between themselves and a perceived intruder on their territory.
In addition to their strength, they are very agile, and tend to see red when they sense a human, their mind set only on killing.
The eye on their forehead presents another danger, as it’s difficult not to look at it. In fact, some bies are able to make people supernaturally drawn to do so.
When someone is hypnotized, the bies is able to control that person’s actions. Often, this results in the victim simply walking into the bies’s antlers, impaling themselves.
Biesy are afraid of loud noises, but you’ll have to do better than a shout. Explosions, weapons firing, and firecrackers all make effective weapons against biesy.
Holding a reflective surface up to the beast’s third eye as it’s attempting hypnosis can also briefly stun the creature, which could buy enough time to run away.
Biesy don’t have especially sharp senses, so while they’re perfectly capable of plowing down any tree in their way, they won’t if they can’t sniff you out.
Just as physically imposing as biesy, czorts look almost the same as their cousins except for the absence of a third eye. This difference means they can’t hypnotize anyone. However, they themselves are actually particularly vulnerable to any forms of hypnosis or being stunned. Rather than draw people into looking at them, they’re supernaturally repulsive, making it hard to look at it for more than a few seconds. This can make fighting them tricky. Rather than being afraid and scared off by loud noises, czorts are attracted to them, and will run down the source of any loud sound to impale them. Despite their murderous intent toward those making a ruckus, czorts actually fear silence and can be scared off by an eerie quiet. Czorts can be harder to track than biesy because their footprints are backwards, which leads hunters astray. There is no way to tell if one is looking at backward czort tracks or forward bies tracks.
