7 Taxidery Tableauxs

1. The Troika

Most commonly seen in the Hall of Gifts, the Troika is a huge taxidermy display, three fantastic equines pulling an Imperial Pattern war chariot complete with two taxidermied riders, the driver, and a javelin thrower. The display is made even more fantastic by the amount of chaos it contains, as the troika is depicted as being out of control, and the three equines are not working together. The right-most equine is a Nightmare rearing, its face pulled into a snarling rictus, hooves slashing out violently. Its taxidermy is not the best, and its flaming breath and mane and tail of fire have been replaced with red and yellow dyed stiff hair. The central equine is a pegasus that is in full panic, spreading its wings as it prepares to hurl itself into the air to escape whatever the troika is approaching, its legs and one wing snared in the harness. The left-most equine is a unicorn, twisting and ducking away from the flaring wing of the pegasus, its glassy eyes and other features reflect nothing of the chaos, a jarring detail to notice.

The riders are often what startles most visitors the most. The driver of the chariot is an elfin man. Technically he is an oried, also known as high elves or stone elves, with marble-like features and haughty arrogance being their most commonly given attributes. He face is done in such a poor fashion in contrast with the rest of the work that it is deliberately a slight against him and his kind. Rather than proud or noble, his expression is placid and his eyes cow-like in their lack of wit or guile. He looks like a very poorly preserved moron, completely unaware of the disaster he is in the midst of. Equally disturbing is his javelin-throwing companion, a human helot with faint elfin features, her face twisted in pain and horror. The helot is wearing bracers and anklets of bondage, marking her as the driver's property, and he has left her almost completely unarmored, with a single javelin left in her hand, and she has been struck with two arrows. There is no blood, but it is obvious that the wounds would be fatal if not treated quickly.

The Troika is a cutting satire aimed at the high elven people. You will notice that despite the violence surrounding the driver, he is serene and unworried. His helot is mortally wounded, he has lost control of his fantastic steeds, and they are seconds away from death. The pegasus is snared and will break its wing and its leg. The Nightmare likewise will be pulled down in the collapsing tangle of equine flesh. The unicorn has lost its foot and will slip, to be run down by the chariot it formerly drew behind it. How is this a satire? An excellent question, the driver is responsible for all of this, and he is unaware and uncaring. During the time of the Elfin Kings, they cared little for the things of Cridhedun, the world was theirs to exploit and use. Most are familiar with specific incidences, perhaps the best known being the Damascena Cascades Massacre, easily laying all the blame for the near extinction of the unicorns on the Land of Shadows. What is overlooked is how things reached the point that almost the entire unicorn population of the world lived in a single forest in the corner of one region. The forces of evil didn't campaign to eradicate them, they didn't make a special effort to hunt them down and slaughter them in a systematic organized fashion. Yes, they did kill them, but no more or no less than any other magical creature, and most knew them to be fast and magically protected and seldom worth the risk and effort.

Do you know who did? The high elves. They captured and tamed large numbers of unicorns, bringing them into their domestication. They were prized as war mounts, and beasts of burden. What person today would consider putting a unicorn in a harness to pull a wagon or a chariot? They saw them as animals, special, but still just animals. The elves would eat them, make things from their hides, their bones, and collected their horns to make wands. Then they did what elves do, they changed their minds. Elves discovered the 4751|Great Aves], like the timberwing eagles, and other creatures. Those who had access to these great beasts suddenly replaced their unicorn stables with giant coteries, and they were able to fly astride their new mounts. They did the same with wyverns, dragons, and pegasi. Many of these species are extinct, against, because of piss-poor elfin husbandry and management. The great aves are incredibly rare, but still seen at times. Pegasi are rare, and the other fantastic equines are likewise ghosts of what they once were. Can you imagine, nightmares once roamed the plains of the Land of Shadow, flaming manes and tails in their wake. They were not evil, they were just creatures of that land. The skies once helf pegasi and great birds, and the lesser wyverns and drakes were once common as leaves in fall.

The elves destroy everything they touch with their hubris. They even have a phrase for it, vloz mzil abbanen, or the Blood of Many Allies.

And somehow they endure.

2. The Thief in Shadows

The Thief in Shadows is a large taxidermy display that many individuals find disturbing. The tableaux depicts a rooftop cat burglar plying her trade with a collection of night beasts. The burglar herself is a deminhuman species once known as tieflings. This species only recently went extinct in Cridhedun, the last few lingering in Scathanna and Nachratha before succumbing to age, despair, and the blades of their foes. She has curling horns protruding from her head, long black hair, and a digitplant leg shape more associated with goats and reptiles rather than the pediplant leg of humans and humanoids. Her gender is somewhat difficult to discern as most of her features are a strange combination of androgynous and unattractive. Stories tend to paint tieflings as highly attractive, sensual, almost succubus-like beings. She is wearing a long black cloak, a collection of chains and necklaces, and nothing else. One hand clutches a long bladed curved knife, the other holds a stolen embroidered purse, strings of pearls dangling from its partially opened clasps.

Her most obvious companion is a large displacer beast, a panther-like demifeline notable for its jet black coat and the pair of long prehensile tentacles sprouting from its back. The creature is snarling and looking towards the tiefling. Her second companion is a great bat known as a mobat. It is not large enough to ride, but certainly large enough to attack and hideously wound an unsuspecting foe, giving the thief time to escape. The more easily overlooked among her companions are a trio of cat-headed kobolds that lurk in her shadow and cloak. These Nyakobolds were once a common race in Cridhedun, but have been reduced to extremely endangered status and can only be found in a handful of places far from humanoid settlements where they have tiny felid villages deep in the fae regions. These nyakobolds are all burglars wearing black cowls.

The Theif in Shadows represents in many ways complete and total failure. The tieflings have been an extinct race for close to a century, with the last generation having been barely recognizable to the legends of their kind. They lacked a central culture, a common language, even a common history. As byblows of the infernal and mortal races, they were hybrids to begin with, giving them a lowered chance of reproductive fertility. They were almost completely infertile with their own kind, and the only way to produce offspring meant taking lovers from other races. This further diluted their tiefling heritage, and if they didn't try to stick to the race of their mortal half produced completely sterile hybrids. Compounding this already doomed biology was the fact that the least common tiefling orientation was heterosexual. Most preferred their own gender, some were completely asexual in orientation, and a large percentage were affected with gender and body dysphoria leading to genital mutilation, scarification, extreme body piercings, and tattoo-work.

The other thing that increased the black cloud over their race was that for whatever reason, the average tiefling was drawn to lifestyles and work that the average human and demihuman being loathed and actively worked to eliminate. They were very commonly thieves, witches, warlocks making soul pacts with horrors, humanoid traffickers, assassins, and social activists. They were known to steal infants, seduce the unwilling, and generally be abusive, abrasive, obnoxious narcissists who cried victim when locals got tired of their shit and ran them out of town.

The burglar was a stolen purse trailing pearls, the comparison to female reproductive organs and semen being a tad on the subtle side. Her companions are all also known for being untrustworthy. Displacer beasts are notoriously dangerous and it is not a matter of if they are going to turn on their handler, but when. The same applies to mobats, which could only be controlled with spells and magic items. Many a bat beastmaster has gone to sleep and never woken because their vampiric bat pets waited for them to sleep to drop down and give them the sweet kiss and drain their blood.

3.Goblin Assault

The largest of the seven tableaux, the Goblin Assault has as its centerpiece a massive bull catoblepas. This swamp omnivore/scavenger is commonly tamed by goblins for the same general use as war elephants. The goblins would put a howdah on the back of the beast and then pack it with goblin slingers, gobs equipped with slings and round bullets. Given their usual small to medium size, goblins seldom are proficient with bows, and avoid the complexity of crossbows. The catoblepas is no base beast with minimal bit and bridle. It has a goblin tower on its back, packed with four goblins, two are slingers with their arms raised to fire their shot, a third holds a javelin about to be thrown, and the last is the drover, holding the long reins of the beast. The beast itself is wearing a full war costume made of woven swamp reeds, decorated with feather and bone charms, and painted with different goblin glyphs and symbols. There are unmanned drums and a great curled horn dangling from the side of the howdah.

There is little to critique here, and the artist didn't have any great satire or lampooning for the goblins. There is almost a sense of admiration, which perhaps fits. Where the elves are almost always venerated above their worth, goblins are likewise shunned out of hand. The average goblin warrior is the subject of mockery and denigration, being smaller than the average human, and on par with halflings for size. What they lack in individual strength, they make up with numbers and organization that is easily overlooked since they are not socially invested in metalworking, stonecraft, or literature, they are not a building race.

During the Goblin Wars, they almost dominated the continent. In later goblin incursions, they proved themselves to be a worthy and competent foe. No force has ever risen in the Land of Shadow or the Land of Serpents that didn't gain the support of the goblins. Dread Lords who rejected goblins or fought against them never gained the resources they needed to be more of a local threat, and then became irrelevant when they were overrun by fellow dark overseers who did recruit the goblins.

4. The Aboleth and its Chorus

The Chorus is a deliberately provocative work, as it depicts a modest-sized aboleth holding a half dozen adolescents under its control. The aboleth itself is medium-sized for the species, just over fifteen feet long, its eyes particularly disturbing for the way they seem to follow anyone as they walk around the display. Its skin has lost its translucent quality after being preserved and it currently has a waxy crumbling appearance, and there is a noticeable but not overwhelming ammonia odor. Seeing such an alien and inhumanoid beast tends to inspire revulsion and disgust in viewers, almost a racial hatred against something so monstrous. The Choir is, as mentioned, composed of six adolescents. They are stripped naked, and the aboleth has a tentacle wrapped around a part of each child. Each has a tortured expression on their face, airs spread, mouths open as if they were singing. Or screaming in the same note.

There is not a lot to unpack here. Aboleths are rare and generally accorded as among the worst creatures to encounter, and almost any price is worth paying so long as it ends in the beast destroyed, its spawning pool broken, and any hint of sign of eggs or infestation met with relentless fire or thunder magics. Many people also find the display sickening. A few people are unsettled by taxidermy, and most consider it acceptable. This opinion changes when a subject used to be a sentient being, and the approval number drops to almost zero when a member of the viewer's race has been subjected to stuffing and preservation as a piece of art. This shock value is magnified tenfold when the subject is a juvenile of their race, or a female, of both. Four of the chorus are girls, two are boys. One boy has elfin features, the other is human. Two of the girls have elfin features, one has halfling features, and the last is a mundane human. This is shocking, seeing deceased children taxidermied, made into an art display, stripped naked, with an aboleth corpse attached to them.

What is worth noting is that this taxidermy is generally considered a warning and when it appears in the Hall of Gifts, the High Lords will close the Hall and call a cloistered meeting to have some serious discussions about the state of affairs in the city. The Aboleth and its Chorus usually pops up when there is an upswing in abuses of power and position in the city, or when there is a surge in abuse directed towards children. It is not common knowledge but the Gyre is very fond of children and considers the operation of orphanages and caring for children to be a virtue.

5. Moonshadow and Glimmer, Umbral demigods

Perhaps the best known of the Tableauxs, Moonshadow and Glimmer were a mated pair of monstrous killers. Moonshadow himself was a massive eleven foot tall were-cerberus, with three snarling and snapping heads. His body was a blend of giant, human, and timberwolf. Glimmer was his companion and was a normal werewolf. The two hunted the woods for years, Moonshadow increasing in strength and power, and was approaching the limit of becoming a beast god. He imparted some of this divine nature to his mate, and the two became a generational menace. Then they made a mistake, they began to prowl the boundary of Terrasquestone and the Gyre. The Gyre opened a cavernous passage for the two as a baited trap and they vanished into the depths. A year after the Wolfwood stopped being a place of sudden, violent, and and random death, they appeared in a taxidermy display in the preeminent inn in Terrasquestone.

The two beings were extended an invitation, and they took it. What is not known is just how far they made it into the Gyre before they were stopped and slain. Moonshadow made it to the Great Fissure and to the Deeps at its base before being felled. This greatly dissapointed the Gyre because it had already started the process of waking one of the Golden Gaurdians just to see a proper good melee scrap between monsters. Then Moonshadow was slain Alseme, the Emerald Riddle.

Who?

Oh, she is young yet, a sphinx. Lovely conversationalist, quite enthusiastic about herbal teas, doggerel poetry, and high arcana magic. May you never met her, she would ask you three riddles and when you failed, she would eat you, liver first.

Glimmer was able to evade her, but not avenge Moonshadow. She went deeper into the Gyre and made it to the Fortress at the Heart of the World. Beholding the Eternal Gate she despaired and the beasts allowed her to retreat back to where Moonshadow fell. She sat with her mate's corpse until she died, refusing to allow the dungeon scavengers to consume any. They were immortalized in several pieces of art in the Gyre, and this final display of their mortal remains. The scavengers were not allowed to touch either of them.

6. Gallery of the Grotesque

The Gallery of the Grotesque is not a cohesive exhibit, rather it is a collection of six dungeon fauna that are all but unknown on the surface and most who see the stuffed creatures think them to be great jokes or terrible attempts at creating new monsters from the mixed up parts of dead things. They are typically shown in a farcical manner doing very normal, very human things.

The Otyugh - a monstrous horror with three muscular legs, three thorn-covered tentacles, and a gaping needle-toothed maw right out of a nightmare, is depicted pouring itself a punch bowl sized cup of tea from an equally oversized but ornate silver teapot

The Roper - another monstrous horror, ropers appear as large stalactites or stalagmites, concealing their large central eye, whipping tentacles, or lamprey-like mouth until they attack. The gallery sample has a huge amber gem replacing its eye, and its tentacles are unrolling a scroll as if the beast were reading leisurely.

The Carrion Crawler - the monstrous fusion of a maggot and a caterpillar, the Carrion Crawler has the horrific audacity to be eight to ten feet long and weigh as much as an armored soldier. The creature glistens with painted on slime, in contrast to its very nice hat and cravat it is wearing.

The Darktentacle - a mass of tentacles is perched in a wingback chair, and the chair is barely able to contain its monstrous large size. There is no discernable central mass, no visible sense organs or mouth. It is still quite patiently packing a long-stemmed pipe with a neat wad of leaf.

The Deepspawn - a rugose, fleshy spherical body sprouting multiple tentacles, some ending in moray and wolf-toothed jaws, others with prehensile pads, and others ending in a profusion of small eyes, a profoundly disturbing creature. It is also using its dextrous tentacles to pluck at the strings of an oversized lyre.

The Beholder - Technically a runt, the beholder is the size of a beach ball and has rough, pebbly gray skin. Its central eye has been replaced with a fake glass eye that looks incredibly fake and poorly painted. The eye stalks are likewise in poor condition and only a few have almost comically bad fake eyes placed in them. It is wearing a conical birthday celebration hat and is poised in front of a small table with a slice of cake. 

7. Temple of the Obscene