A 100 word Sci-fi explanation as to why Dwarves can never shave and why the beard truly is a matter of life and death.

100 word pest

Don't run blindly for the silver vein or you will never see that what you seek is pain.

..and from the heaps of the fallen burst a nightmarish creature, sinuous death, like a snake with legs, the dying fires of the battlefields reflecting in its glittering scales. Mounted on its back, in dark, light-absorbing armour and wielding a lightning-wreathed lance, sat a monstrous knight, the horns on his helmet marking him as a Knight of the Locastrian Heron Guard.

He and his mount fell on me and my unit and from that encounter; I was the only survivor....

Excerpt from A Soldier´s Tale by Sgt. Amonar Trask (ret) of the Home Guard of Akral Tel

The crystal dragons of Sogth VII are strange and sinuous beasts, be they stalking across the land on their four legs, and swimming through the ammonia seas.

What follows is an passage from the journal of the famous Beastiographer Laans Torier

'Many have said the Old Men of the mountain were mere myths, or had been wiped out by the Theosians many years ago, but I am staking my reputation on the fact that they do in fact still exist!'

In a sparse and hungry land, the kha-nyou have no problem finding food and flourishing.

Vog's Children, the Lava-Oil Symbiotes

When the great ice-sheets covered the north, life retreated before them, but some species stayed and endured. Whilst man huddled around fires in his caves, mighty beasts roamed the tundra: the Woolly Mammoth, the Woolly Rhinoceros...and the Woolly Wyvern.

The grisly anthropomorphisation of a rockfall...

There are seven or so types of lifeforms considered Gargoyles by the less informed. This is one.

Grolen are another semi-sentient creature which is called a Gargoyle in popular parlance.