BYAKHEE

BYAKHEE

"There flapped rhythmically a horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things ... not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor decomposed human beings, but something I cannot and must not recall." 

H.P. Lovecraft, The Festival

I have two types of Lovecraftian monsters that I love to draw. One is an amorphous, free form blob that's barely described. I can let my imagination run wild and it's almost like automatic writing. Just let whatever happens happen; ie flying polyp, Ghatanothoa, Nug & Yeb.

The other is a bizarre, disparate and vague amalgamation of creatures that I have to figure out how to combine. The byakhee is a perfect example. HPL just throws creatures into the mix, crows, moles, buzzards, ants and decomposed humans. He doesn't say which parts correlate to which part of the bykhee. It's up to your imagination to figure out how much of which part goes where! 

Much like the mi-go, I have actually been pretty happy with this design from the start. This redrawing is simply a way to tighten up linework, color and rendering. I also pushed the wings back to make it cleaner. My thought process for this was: raven - beak, ant - six arms & antennae, mole - wrinkled skin, buzzard - also beak & longer neck, decomposed human beings - wrinkled skin & humanoid arms. It's also got a worm-ish tail that I associated with larval ants.

These things are a bit more obscure than most of the other guys from this series. They're never actually named by HPL (according to this excellent Lovecraftian Science article: "the byakhee were first described in Derleth’s tale “The House on Curwen Street;” however, the word byakhee is first used in the chapter-story “The Watcher From the Sky.” ). They do show up in, like all the others, in Petersen's Field Guide To Cthulhu Monsters with an illustration by Tom Sullivan AND in the hard to attribute Call Of Cthulhu RPG rulebook. Both of these are pretty similar: humanoid body (2 arms, 2 legs, torso, wings, ant-like carapace for a tail). The heads differ but they still seem pretty tame. Cool but tame. 

Honstly though, I do enjoy both those interpretations. It's interesting to me that an unnamed  creature has become such a staple of Lovecraftiana. HPL himself didn't ever return to these guys. I think the description really helps. It's detailed yet vague. Here's a long list of things it resembles but we won't tell you how it resembles those things. It really leaves it up to each artists imagination.

Tomorrow will be a true weirdo that, much like the byakhee, became a stable Lovecraftian monster despite being so obscure.