Favouite Mythical Creatures Thread

What is your favouite mythical creature?

I personally love the concept of the Phoenix. A stunning combination of interesting, majeatic, and dangerous if used right.

Yes, phoenixes are great. I also like griffons, an likewise majestic creature that you can actually pet.

you can't go too far wrong with a well done dragon

I prefer mine medium-well or medium-rare personally.

Love me some Minotaur.

Manticores. There's just something about them that screams "this thing exists to fuck someone up".

...

I hope you are a girl.

powerful/unique demons, like the Lucavi from Final Fantasy tactics. Hard to do right though.

Manticores fucking rock, especially when people remember they are more than just lions with bat wings and scorpion tails.

I know about their musical voices from the magic of xanth series but do they have anything else going for them?

Not mythical but Liches are the best things

I'm not sure if they quite count, but I've always loved the idea of huge, primal elementals. Not little things that might be a minor threat, but enormous embodiments of nature and the world itself, great and majestic and terrible.

>liches
>not mythical

found the cultist

Majestic as fuck.

The A Bao A Qu

On the stairway of the Tower of Victory there has lived since the beginning of time a being sensitive to the many shades of the human soul and known as the A Bao A Qu. It lies dormant, for the most part on the first step, until at the approach of a person some secret life is touched off in it, and deep within the creature an inner light begins to glow. At the same time, its body and almost translucent skin begin to stir. But only when someone starts up the spiralling stairs is the A Bao A Qu brought to consciousness, and then it sticks close to the visitor’s heels, keeping to the outside of the turning steps, where they are most worn by the generations of pilgrims. At each level the creature’s colour becomes more intense, its shape approaches perfection, and the bluish form it gives off is more brilliant. But it achieves its ultimate form only at the topmost step, when the climber is a person who has attained Nirvana and whose acts cast no shadows. Otherwise, the A Bao A Qu hangs back before reaching the top, as if paralysed, its body incomplete, its blue growing paler, and its glow hesitant. The creature suffers when it cannot come to completion, and its moan is a barely audible sound, something like the rustling of silk. Its span of life is brief, since as soon as the traveller climbs down, the A Bao A Qu wheels and tumbles to the first steps, where, worn out and almost shapeless, it waits for the next visitor. People say that its tentacles are visible only when it reaches the middle of the staircase. It is also said that it can see with its whole body and that to the touch it is like the skin of a peach.

In the course of centuries, the A Bao A Qu has reached the terrace only once.

I always like sea monsters, like leviathans and krakens

My wife and I have been looking for one for a couple years now.

That sounds like one of those retarded creatures someone invented way back when during a particularly strong trip.

>lesbians don't know unicorns are fake

Silly scissors.

>unicorns are fake

It's a Brazilian legend, Boitatá.
Giant fire snakes that live in rivers and fucks anyone dumb enough to disrespect the jungle, like killing without need or starting a campfire near sacred trees. Then this huge flaming motherfucker rises up from the river and he's coming to get your ass ablaze.

Originally in myth they didn't have wings but an incredible leaping ability so that no four walls could hold them.

Grootslang.

Wow, fuck that thing.

Cockatrice are nice.

why the hell are fire snakes in a river?

That's a rhinoceros, user.

Wurms.

Revenants are hands down my favorite of any type of undead creature.

Most metaphors do user

>no four walls could hold them
what if the walls were arranged as a triangle-based pyramid, surely they couldn't jump out of that

Being dutch, I can never take these things seriously, given that their name simply means: Big Snake.

Jumping to the moon and back again.
Flying Manticores are a relatively new invention
They used to jump good

Not him, but that's because in the original legends they are as much light snakes as they are fire snakes. Also because before becoming a fire snake it was a water snake.
The boitata (fiery snake, sometimes refeared as mbatata, fiery thing) was a boiuna (black snake) alternatively know as boiguaçu (big snake) that got addicted to eating eyes.
You are what you eat, or so did the native brazilian people believed and thus the snake became filled with the light from all those eyes.
It's skin became translucid and it's body is filled with eyes, glowing with an inner fire/light.
It can fly by coiling in a ball, teleport, become invisible (by turning off it's inner fire/light) and breath fire.
While those days they are refeared as forest protectors (most brazilian critters became forest protectors those days) if you take a look at Jose de Anchieta's letters detailing the customs of the natives you will see references to the fact that the natives refused to go out in full moon nights out of fear of the boitata and atribuited forest fires and village fires to it.

Big Snakes that the gods mistakenly created when they were still new at making things.
The gods tried to correct their mistake, splitting the monsters into elephants and snakes but one escaped from which all other spawn.
They dwell in the deepest hole, sometimes described as bottomless, in the earth and lure elephants into their caves to devour.
Their caves are also filled with diamonds and precious gems and victims may be able to bargain for their lives with sufficient tribute of such treasures.

They're pretty perfetly set-up for an adventure plot hook, kinda like dragons.