World Building Challenge - Day 21 - Monsters

This is part of Faranesque's World Building Challenge from r/WorldBuilding. Check out my hub post for details.  

Preface: Most of my posts from this point on will likely focus on the crew of the Rōnni and the refugees with them, now I've done some of the cosmic establishment from Day 1. 

In today's installment, some discussion of the fantastical creatures in the Firmament...

XXI MONSTERS

Every World has its great beasts, ones which the savvy avoid and which the brave hunt. Animals that stalk in long grasses or the ocean depths, and so on. Some become notorious enough to be the subject of tales of their own, whose infamy lives on long after they've been found and put down.

Every living thing on the Worlds was put there by the Stars, it is said. Their reasons are myriad and mysterious, but this is an accepted truth in the Firmament. The Stars made all things.

This includes the creatues that live out in the black. From the nebuleads, nymphs which cavort and dance among the clouds of stardust in nebulae, to the comet-birds which play with space rocks and send them flying into atmosphere to watch them burn, and other fantastic creatures. None know why the Stars created these beings, but the Star-Born look on them as lesser members of an extended family or at worst as pets they can tame.

But just as there are things born of the Stars, there are others out there which come from a less benevolent source.

Remember: As in light, so in dark.

Some of these beasts plague Worlds, cunning predators that stalk settlements with active malignity. Twisted mockeries of other beasts, misshapen and deformed, as with an imprecise hand. Their presence can invoke panic and despair as they hunt, leading to the common term for such beasts: Chaos-kin.

There are chaos-kin also that stalk the black. From the vanta ray, whose sting corrodes ships and poisons their crew, to the demons that make their lairs in black holes, waiting for the unwary passerby to neglect their calculations, to lure them past the event horizon, or tempt them with the great energies and amalgamations of matter in their accretion discs, so valuable if brought back to civilization.