Typhlotic
Typhlotic Others are eyeless creatures that exist in the darkest corners of the darkest places, or the brightest spots of bright places. Slow moving, existing in places with little to sustain them, they've evolved slow metabolisms. They are awakened by movement, light, life, Self and patterns.<ref>They all trudged, or crawled, or remained anchored in place, letting the environment hide them. They lived in a place where meals were scarce, so their metabolisms were glacial, in effect- not that they had actual metabolisms. Movement stirred them awake, so did light, life, Self, and patterns. They were more reactive than active, but that was in no way suggestive of the idea that they were less dangerous than the average Other.
They lurked here, in the darkest corners of the darkest layers of the world. Or, in the rarer instances, in the brightest spots of bright places, bleached forms hidden in the glare. And they went after loose spirit, echo, fading incarnation, animus, scraps of Soul or Self. Anything without hard form that couldn’t sustain its own metaphorical metabolism, anything slow, or mired in the darkness. Anything weak enough. - Excerpt from Let Slip 20.b</ref> These things clean up after echoes, not psychopomps that escort but predators that hunt and devour.
More of a category than anything and a typhlotic entity can take on an astonishing variety of forms and approaches. Common wildlife in the Ruins. <ref>Eyeless, which made Lucy think of the wildlife of the Ruins, but little else jibed with that. - Excerpt from Crossed with Silver 19.2</ref> There is of course other wildlife in the ruins but those are not explicitly Typhlotic but may be somewhere higher or lower on the same food chain.<ref name=":0">The black thing’s feet sloshed in the ankle-deep water, crunched through trash, stirring up more smells, more bugs, more fetid revulsion that worked its way into her and made her very aware of how much of the trouble she ran from was locked in the deepest recesses of her chest, her stomach, her mind. From herself to herself. Couldn’t get away, could only-
She reached for her pocket, and found tatters and smoke instead of anything, the tatters snarling at fingers and smoke creeping up her arm.
It drew closer. The lights of nearby buildings dimmed more; they had been dimming for a long time. Little by little.
There were others. The second one she saw after the one in the park was sleek, black, and panther-like, muscles rolling beneath skin so thin she could see strands and bands of muscle. Its head held a prominent position, overlarge and lacking in any apparent eyes, hair, ears, nose, or mouth, and its tail was impossibly long, stretching down the length of the city block behind it as it crept closer.
A third was man-shaped, with normal length legs, but long arms that let it lift and hoist itself onto a nearby streetlight, then reach out to the next streetlight to transfer its body over. It poised above her, arms wrapping around the streetlight, choking out the light, so it dimmed further. This one had a mouth, lips barely able to pull closed to hide white teeth, the mouth reaching a point that was close to the corners of the jaw, before traveling down the sides of its neck and part of its chest.
[...]
Cradling an armful of the candles, she turned toward the way she’d come, and she could see the stalking predators in the gloom, waiting and following. - excerpt from One After Another 10.z</ref>
Known examples
- Puppet Maker<ref>Off in the distance, an eyeless thing, pale, humanoid, and as tall as a one-storey house, snatched up an echo. It held carved wood in the other hand, and pressed echo to wood. To a carved head and torso. Once the echo’s head and torso were stuck inside, it began attaching a multi-jointed arm.
Making a puppet. - Excerpt from Vanishing Points 8.3</ref> - Hunters of the Girl by Candlelight<ref>The dark, eyeless shape slipped out through a gap in the half-circle of candles. It was one of the older, stronger, slower ones. It could reach out and it could find things in the dark that reflected Cole and Bailey. Neither of them were physical. They’d left bodies behind to come here, voluntarily for Cole and involuntarily for Bailey. Their shapes being what they were let this thing snatch at the edges of them. Gathering up the half-formed images and almost forgotten moments.
[...]
Dark things loomed, too. The stalking predators who waited for her to dim and die a little so they could have their meals. Oblivion things, faceless or eyeless or both. They yawned large in frame or in maw, wanting her in a very different way than that hole in the ground had wanted things.- Excerpt from One After another 10.z</ref> - Bat thing<ref>And there was a more dangerous typhlotic lurking nearby. It looked like a human, with arms like a bat’s, the glossy black ‘wing’ skin loose and pinned to its body at various points. It trudged out of the shadows of the trees, its head beaked, with a weight to skull and beak that seemed to have broken its own neck.
Freeman identified it as a scavenger by the way it was built. A very strong scavenger. How did it get good enough meals to eat reliably and stand that upright? A kind of cooperation with something bigger?
[...]
Except the shout stirred the bat-winged figure into action. It tore one of its wings free of the piercings that attached them to its body. In the process, it unleashed its payload. Echoes, partially eaten, crudely fashioned, that had been trapped between wing and body. They were released as a loose storm, and for a moment, it was like it had just fired off a thousand fireworks.
Except these fireworks dimmed the lights. These fireworks drew other typhlotic things in, making them surge in strength and motivation. These fireworks were an emotional payload, blinding in the same sense that someone could see red, or be too startled to see what was right in front of them. Numbing in the same way that grief could let someone go days without eating. Deafening in-
Deafening like Adrian’s panic had deafened him.
It screeched, and the screech only added to the chaos- echoing, signaling more typhlotic.
Not cooperation with something bigger. It finds juicy prey, debilitates them while signaling literally everything in the area, and then eats the scraps.
- Excerpt from Let Slip 20.b</ref>
See Also
References
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