These anthropomorphic beings first came to me in a dream. They were eccentric and fascinating, yet dangerous in a concentrated, stubborn, hive-mind sort of way, and they were galloping after me upon tiny, prehistoric horses, trying to catch me. They looked like the Leptictidiums from the non-fiction TV series “Walking with Beasts” – like kangaroo deer-rabbits, or aardvarks that behaved like rabbits.
I first put them into a children’s novel I was writing when I was fifteen, named Atheande (which has not seen the light of day yet). Their specialty lies in ambush and kidnap, so after many years of forgetting about them, I found myself putting them into “A Dark Heritage…” There were already talking tortoises in it, and other bizarre creatures, so “Why not?” I asked myself, and they fit right in as if they were born there.
Because of the amount of magic that has been used in the Empire of Dal-Rhiatah and Ossyan (before it was forbidden), its atmosphere is polluted with a kind of radiation called spell-effluvia. It causes some people, plants, and animals to mutate – and in the Griny-Plinths’ case, gifted them with sentience and the ability to speak and form a culture like that of humans. Led by a talking, homicidal cat who used to be human and his lieutenant, Captain Rossa, the Griny-Plinth believe that magic should be theirs and not humans’. Any human straying onto the wrong side of the river Eridanus in Thosea are ambushed and abducted by them, brought into their underground warren, and feasted on by their cat-general, Plintheus Morticum.
Logan and his fellow adventurers almost meet the same unpleasant fate, but once underground, the Griny-Plinth recognise Logan’s sword, Athannor, as something that was once held by a knight’s effigy upon a tomb in a barrow further below their warren, and various revelations are made.
Nightwalks 