Menaces of Otherlore: The Trow

"The shape manifest of every mistaken movement spotted beyond the lantern’s light, of every fang-curved glint of moonlight, of every strange scratching heard at the window in the small hours.”

We tell our children that we come home when the sun comes down, because in the woods and mountains lurk things of tooth and claw that would like little more than to make a meal of a little one. We tell them this because perhaps we think making a bedtime story out of wolf and jaguar and hyena attacks will lessen their terrible reality. Perhaps better to make a taboo made out of childhood fears than expose our innocent to their mortality before we fear it too soon.

Except that from this we make vague terrors, things that are made from all the nothings-that-weren’t-nothings, that in the strange space of dreams grow hair and claws and fangs. For this is the nature of monsters: that a fear common enough finds ways to become flesh, and stop being so irrational. Even one so vague and base as the trow.

Trow come in a number of shapes and sizes, but always with the same qualities of being raggedly hairy and with jagged teeth and nails. Some of them are ape-like, agile and strong climbers, smaller than a man, but some not much smaller. Others are larger and stockier, more similar in shape to the Bugani or other such giants, whose massive size and strength is concealed only by sleepy stillness. Still some are more bestial, at home on four legs more than two, but still with a similar irritable intellect to their more hominid forms. Indeed, there appears to be two motivating factors to the trow- spite and hunger. Indeed, the most dangerous trow are those with a vast hunger or a particular ken for mayhem. Creatures that are only active during twilight and nighttime hours, trow shield themselves from daylight by burrowing into knowes, temporary dens that resemble cairns from a distance. Once emerged, trow will band together in loose, chaotic mobs that stalk the shadows of rural and remotely settled areas, in pursuit of food and mayhem. In areas where a well-stocked larder means the difference between feasting at the Winter Solstice and starving before the cold can finish you, a mob of trow can easily reap both at once. While they may appear animalistic, they have a degree of malicious intellect, more or less enough to grasp concepts such as doorknobs and window latches, flammable materials and the fact that locks mean doors with important things behind them. All the worse then that sharp claws and powerful jaws come as a part of this package.

Though the trow have one powerful weakness, and that is daylight. With the crest of the rising sun, should any of its light fall upon a trow, the trow will in an instant flash to dead stone, quite often crumbling in the process from the sudden shift in weight and brittleness. It’s the nature of what makes them a Monster that also unmakes them- the children come home at night to hide from the trow, so it’s only even trade that they too would have to hide from the day or be similarly swallowed. That’s even considering that steel works just fine on them, let alone elemental forces conjured by magic or sciences.