Some More Monsters

Pelt Saint

There's a ritual performed in the depaganized reaches when the times grow lean and hard: a strong young man is fed sour mushroom-wine and flayed - it is reckoned a good thing if he makes no human sounds while this is done - and the hide of a great beast is laid upon him. No longer a man but a pelt saint it is paraded into the forest with much merriment.

What god or spirit or power this is meant to appease has been forgotten, but the ritual still works. The game animals return, the fish multiply, and the birds flock and fatten. The people will not starve, but some must still die, for a pelt saint stalks and howls.

Godmask Abalone

Masks are sometimes worn to let the wearer become a medium for the divine. Sometimes what is channeled is too much for the wearer to bear, and they are crushed beneath its spiritual weight. This leaves behind a compressed grain of personhood in the creature, an irritant around which divine energy congeals and crystallizes. They are capable of performing a limited set of brittle, aberrant miracles, and are often followed by cults which brutally repress identity and distinction among themselves.

Scurrine

An undead creature born from someone killed by rat torture. The risen corpse fuses with the rats and the other implements of their torture, and become obsessed with the line of inquiry they were tortured over - uncovering hidden treasure, or spies, or blackmail, or whatever else.

They fear owls tremendously, and arrows fletched with owl feathers are as poison to them.

Crick

Also called coleoptera sicariae by natural philosophers, and guillotine bugs by travelers. They are the origin of the phrase "a crick in the neck", and the smaller and much less lethal crickets are reckoned to be their lesser cousins.

Cricks are flying insects of terrible size with terrible jaws, able to snip a cow's head off as easily as a man trims a rose. Despite this, as adults they are completely vegetarian - they do not eat their prey, but with surgical precision remove their heads with just enough of the brainstem left to preserve life and autonomic functions. These hapless sacks they take to their lairs and bury with just the stumps of their necks exposed, into which vegetable matter can be regurgitated and then slurped up again after digestion.

Crick lay their larvae in the necks of headless bodies, which the larvae are able to puppet about. They are laid in clutches and move in packs to find a new territory. When they do so some metamorphose within their bodies into adult cricks, while the rest remain as guards and eventually perish.

Lochleannan

Lurkers in bogs and dark lakes. They sing with a heart-wrenching sadness, beautifully miserable, and draw those sensitive to such things to their feeding grounds. With a kiss they steal away their admirers' souls, and drive them to suicidal despair. Should they drown themselves in the lochleannan's body of water it adds their heads to one of its necks. If they drown themselves elsewhere it's believed a new lochleannan will grow from their corpse.

They keep an air-filled lair in their body of water (and each body of water only ever has one lochleannan) - lined with shelves of glass bottles. They do not need the air to breath, but they do need it to sing. The lochleannan will trade with nefarious sorts for these bottles - hags and ne'er-do-wells and suchlike - and regurgitate their stolen souls into them, that they might be its audience eternally. You could command a lochleannan if you stole the bottle holding its favourite soul.

Its stolen heads are another weapon of the lochleannan, though it's loath to use them. It can accelerate their decomposition to turn them into corpse-gas bombs. The unexploded heads of a lochleannan are filled with what seems to be vegetable matter, and are a delicacy to certain discerning gourmands.