Sometimes, you need a creature that doesn’t exist.
I know what you’re thinking: I write fantasy. Most of the creatures I write about don’t exist (probably).
But I mean, what do you do when you need a very specific kind of creature?
One that is terrifying and formidable, has a very specific skill set — and doesn’t appear to exist in any Lore?
Not that I could find, at least.
Well, that was exactly the problem I faced in Blood on the Ferns.
Something that would put Yip and Catch in even greater danger when they fled from Caspian Blackthorn’s Silentium Velamen.
What did it need to do?
I needed something that naturally hunted anything with supernatural power.
Something Caspian’s thugs could use to hunt down new victims for their fight club.
Something that could track anything, or anyone, that escaped.
No matter how hard I searched the Lore, I couldn’t find anything that fit the niche I was looking for.
Which left me with only one choice:
Create one.
Enter the Xylothorax: a nightmarish creature the size of the largest tigers, and covered in both shining scales and fur. It has an elongated, horned head and claws sharp enough to rend stone.
Like a manticore, it has a stinger on the end of its tail, so if it caught you, escaping wouldn’t be easy.
Of course, it’s one thing to make a creature that looks scary. Understanding how it behaves means understanding its lore.
So I created a backstory: how it lived, where it lived, how it hunted.
And that raised two important questions.
Why could it hunt magic? Why didn’t it hunt non-magical beings?
The answer, of course, was self-defence.
Look at how large predators tend to be treated on this planet. They are often on the endangered species lists. Some were driven to extinction (or at least helped along) — globally or locally — by human misunderstandings of their place in the ecosystem, among other things.
Thylacines in Tasmania.
Wolves in Britain.
The Barbary lion.
Yes, I know — there was much more to their extinction than humans hunting them down. Don’t come at me for that. 😏
But think about it: if they had the choice to avoid humans entirely by living somewhere humans don’t dominate, don’t you think they would stay there?
I think they might.
And if they did, they would have to adapt their methods of hunting.
If they were a magical creature to begin with, then perhaps their hunting methods would adapt along those lines: they might learn to track other magical creatures the way wolves use scent.
And that’s the thing about the Xylothorax.
It’s scary.
It’s hunting Catch.
But… is it evil?
No.
It’s no more malevolent than any predator — right?
It was only following its instincts.
Don’t monsters deserve a second chance too?