Perytons

[steorra]

I just came across the Wikipedia article about perytons, which introduces them like this:

The peryton is a mythological hybrid animal combining the physical features of a stag and a bird. The peryton was created and described by Jorge Luis Borges in his 1957 Book of Imaginary Beings, using a supposedly long-lost medieval manuscript as a source.

This was a surprise, because the only perytons I'd read about before (well, aside from the radio astronomy kind) were the ones in So You Want to Be a Wizard, which seem totally different. I wonder if Diane Duane's are related to any others, or if they're completely her own thing.


All quotes from the New Millennium edition.

Here's our first introduction to perytons:

Shapes were pouring out of the little glass shelter building, which had been empty, and was still somehow empty even as Nita looked. She got a first impression of grizzled coats, red tongues that lolled and slavered, fangs that gleamed in the sunlight, and she thought, Wolves!

But their eyes changed her mind as ten or twelve of the creatures loped across the roof toward the transparent walkway, giving tongue in an awful mindless cacophony of snarls and barks and shuddering howls. The eyes. People’s eyes, blue, brown, green, but with almost all the intelligence gone out of them, nothing left but a hot deadly cunning and an awful desire for the taste of blood—
From her reading in the wizards’ manual, she knew what they were: perytons. Wolves would have been way more preferable. Wolves were sociable creatures. These had been people once, people so used to hating that at the end of life they’d found a way to keep doing it, by hunting the souls of others through their nightmares. And once a peryton caught you…

Nita started to hitch herself along backward in total panic and then froze, realizing that there was nowhere to go. She and Kit were trapped. Another second and the perytons would be on the bridge, and at their throats, for eternity.
(Chapter: “Temporospatial Claudications: Use and Abuse”)

From this we get:

• They look wolflike but with human eyes


• They were people who were consumed by hatred, and still are


• They somehow "[hunt] the souls of others through their nightmares"


• Something terrible happens if they catch you. The last sentence makes it sound like you experience them catching you forever, but I'm not sure about that


• They make sounds like snarls and barks and howls (a number of other passages also refer to them howling)

Someone is apparently in charge of them:

“He’s playing it close to the chest,” that angry voice floated down the hall to them. “I don’t know what’s going on. The Eldest still has it safe?— Good, then see that guards are mounted at the usual accesses. And have Garm send a pack of his people backtime to the most recent gate opening. I want to know which universe these agents are coming from.”

In the elevator, Kit whipped out the antenna and rapped the control panel with it. “Down!”

Doors closed, and down it went. Nita leaned back against one wall of the elevator, panting. Now she knew why that first crowd of perytons had come howling after them on top of the Pan Am Building, but the solution of that small mystery made her feel no better at all.
(Chapter: "Entropics: Detection and Avoidance")

They come in multiple colours, but apparently all normal mammal coat colours:

Six perytons—black-coated, brown-coated, one a steely gray—were sitting or standing around the middle elevator with their tongues hanging out and looks of anticipation and hunger in their too-human eyes.
(Chapter: "Entropics: Detection and Avoidance")

An even more explicit description of one as wolflike:

All she saw clearly was the peryton that jumped at her, a huge, blue-eyed, brindled she-wolf, as the rowan wand spat silver moonfire and the peryton fell away screaming.
(Chapter: "Entropics: Detection and Avoidance")

The Lone Power is (ultimately) their master and they're intimdated by him:

About the feet of his mount the perytons milled, not quite daring to look in their master’s face, but staring and slavering at the sight of Kit and Nita, waiting the command to course their prey.
(Chapter: "Major Wizardries: Termination and Recovery")

More about why they hunt and kill:

The howls of perytons floated down to them like the voices of lost souls, hungry for the blood and pain they needed to feel alive again.
(Chapter: "Major Wizardries: Termination and Recovery")

There are more references, but they seemed to me rather to confirm the picture than to add to it. The only place outside the first book I could find perytons mentioned is a spot in chapter 12 of The Wizard's Dilemma where Nita briefly refers back to the events of the first book.


Corrections, additions, differing interpretations, comments, context - all welcome.

Comments

[polyfrazzlemented]

I'd seen this too, and thought it was interesting. Wikipedia says that "A peryton casts the shadow of a man until it kills one during its lifetime, at which time it starts to cast its own shadow," so that is a vague connection between Borges's concept and Duane's...

[steorra]

Yeah, that was the only link I could make too. Even there, it's pretty tenuous.

[independence1776]

DD actually answered a similar question on Tumblr, ooh, nearly six years ago. (I didn't think it was six years ago!) Here's the link to what she said.

[steorra]

Thanks! It really helps that she quotes Borges.