The Umbrathril

A few years ago, I was listening to the Ghosts in the Burbs podcast by Liz Sower. Great podcast, by the way. If you like creepy things, check it out.

Anyway, I don’t remember which episode it was, but she was sharing a story she’d been told about a creature some children had found in the woods near her home. A creepy little thing with long arms and legs, black fur with brown rings around its eyes, scales (I think they were on its back, but it might have been the stomach!), flat ears, and a pig-like nose.

The story itself was terrifying - this creature could allegedly speak and tried to convince the children to drown one of their friends! - but my mind snagged on that description.

It didn’t match any cryptid I’d ever heard of.

I did some research and couldn’t find anything that matched it. Whatever those children had seen - it has no name.

Which made it the perfect inspiration for a little creature I needed for my books.

Book 2, Blood on the Ferns, opens with a prologue written from the perspective of a monster. This is one of the things I love about books - they allow you to get inside the head of something truly alien and see things from a perspective you may never have thought of before. That’s how you build empathy - look at what happened with Black Beauty by Anna Sewell!

I digress. I do that.

Point is, I needed the monster for that prologue to fill a very specific niche. It needed to be predatory enough that some evil piece of 💩 would think forcing it to fight another living creature would be an exciting thing to watch. But it also had to be capable of inspiring immediate empathy in someone who didn’t know what it was.

I’m talking characters there, not readers by the way!

When Norman and Donna stumbled across it, I wanted it to make sense why they approached it and why they immediately sympathised with it rather than being afraid of it.

Enter: the Umbrathril.

An umbra is the innermost, darkest part of a shadow. It comes from Latin and means “shadow” or “shade”.

The suffix “thril” just helped it sound a bit magical and spooky. 😏😉

But what exactly is an umbrathril?

Because of course I created a whole backstory for it!

First came the appearance: I took the description from Liz Sower’s story and tweaked it a bit, giving it iridescent scales, eyes that reflect light brightly, sharp teeth and claws that can cut through thick branches.

Then, I added a little biofluorescence - because why not? - and gave it multiple rows of teeth.

Once the appearance was settled, I needed to think about habitat, because habitat drives behaviour.

Long limbs and hooked claws suggested an arboreal lifestyle to me, so it lives in the deepest, thickest parts of ancient forests of North America, where its dark fur helps it vanish into the shadows. Its bioluminescence is normally kept dark, only appearing in brief flashes when communicating or attracting prey. It prefers secluded areas with abundant tree cover, naturally, because they are typically solitary and prefer avoiding unnecessary encounters. They create nests within the upper branches of trees to rest in and return to the same one every day.

Obviously, they’re nocturnal. I mean - come on, look at the description!
That creature would never go about in the daytime!

They move about slowly and deliberately, hiding in teh shadows while they hunt for birds, lizards, and frogs to eat, but they also eat fruits and ferns.

So far, so ordinary, but you know I have something up my sleeve here.

If you’ve read Ferns, you might remember that the umbrathril in the prologue recalls “flashing warning colours” when it was first confronted.

Yeah - they communicate using bioluminescence. They can also use it to attract prey!

I thought that was pretty cool and wanted to do more with it, but alas!

I never had the opportunity.

And that’s the story of the umbrathril, and why you’ve never heard of it before and why you’ll probably never hear of it again.

But I love that little guy. I literally wept while writing the prologue.

I guess that means I got exactly what I wanted out of it: something that could be frightening, but that you couldn’t help feeling sorry for.

Maybe, one day, I should write a story featuring them. What do you think?

Let me know if you’d read a story about umbrathrils!