The Beastmaker's Age - YEAR 3
#28 of Tales of The Beastmaker
The Golden Age of the Beastmaker continues. The world is at peace, prosperity is rising everywhere, and everything is going just swell. Still, conflict is a fact of life - even within the very heart of the Beastmaker's vast empire. Close friends and lovers may sometimes wind up stepping on one another's feet, hooves, or flippers, overstepping boundaries or making foolish mistakes. Accidents can happen. Fortunately, with the empire largely running itself, Sayn is free to focus on fixing up any such incidental issues... because surely, there's nothing else she should be doing, right? No other outstanding issues she has neglected to deal with... surely.
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The Beastmaker's Age
YEAR 3
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A beautiful, golden-haired elven woman is kneeling in the grass of a well-kept park, a pond with a spectacular water-feature in the background. She is wearing a spring-green dress that complements the background well, and is smiling softly as she looks down on her highly pregnant belly, cradling it with her hands. A mysterious, golden light seems to suffuse the entire scene, washing out the shadows of the foliage and the painting's subject alike.
The First Mother - Tassarion Qi'maris, Oil on Canvas
Possibly one of the most famous - and valuable - paintings in existence, owing to both its artistic and historic merit, and the crown of the Irenwaen Collection. No other works by the painter have survived to this day, though scattered historical records suggest that he was a highly-regarded painter during the era of the Elven Empire - supposedly, after most of his works were destroyed during the Elven Civil War and subsequent slave-uprising that heralded the fall of the Elven Empire, he swore off ever wielding a brush again. It was only once the intercession of the Beastmaker restored the elven people to fertility and set them back on the path to prosperity that he - very briefly - broke that vow.
Accounts from the time suggest that, after having undergone the arcane process of fertility-restoration himself, he found inspiration returning to him, and begged for a chance to paint the one who had made it possible - the Elven Consort to the Beastmaker, Thielwen Den'terra. The request was ultimately granted, and he became one of the few outsiders ever permitted to enter the Palace Seraglio, in order to paint her there - which explains part of the painting's great historical value, since it represents a unique look at what the Seraglio Garden looked like during the actual reign of Empress Sayn I.
A famous story claiming that Tessarion was only granted access to the Seraglio for ONE day, causing him to work frantically from sunrise to sunset and use an ancient, elven technique to make his paints dry faster - explaining the painting's most famous trait, the strangely ethereal lighting and the fairy-tale atmosphere it invokes, by the fact that he was painting continuously as the sun moved across the sky. This is of course considered apocryphal, with no real evidence for this tale having been found in his surviving correspondence, though there are other sources suggesting the existence of such techniques among other elven painters from the era.
Even more than this, though, the myth of 'The Kirin's Copy' has captured the imagination of the painting's admirers for centuries. The tale claims that, before the painting was presented to King Irenwaen on the second anniversary of his ascension to the Glorious Throne, it resided for a spell in the Seraglio itself - during which time the Kirin Consort, Korlin, crafted a reproduction of it using a combination of artistic skill and magical power. That version, which supposedly decorated the wall of Elven Consort Thielwen Den'terra herself during the many years she spent in the Seraglio, is said to have been virtually identical to Tassarion's original - save that its subject is entirely naked in it. According to some versions of the tale, however, the Kirin magic used in the replica's creation furthermore inspired it with a kind of illusory life, causing it to shift continuously before the viewer's eyes - as if the subject was breathing, and the wind rustling the leaves of the trees in the background.
Needless to say, there is no real evidence that The Kirin's Copy ever existed, and though magical techniques of course do exist today for creating such 'breathing paintings' - the Irenwaen Memorial Museum contains several examples of this art - most historians doubt that it would have been possible to accomplish something like that with the level of magical sophistication available at the time. Even if it_did,_ however, the transitory nature of such enchantments means that, by today, any such animating magic would have long-since worn off - a detail that is generally ignored in the various adventure-stories, popular movies and conspiracy-theories that have cropped up over the years, dealing with this mythical piece of art and its recovery.
However, while it is doubtful that The Kirin's Copy even exists, let alone survived to this day, The First Mother most certainly _does_exist, and any person who loves classical art - or even just holds an interest in those heady days of yore when The Beastmaker strode across the world, shaking it with her very footsteps - owes it to themselves to see it in person...
- From an advertisement pamphlet titled The Irenwaen Collection.
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Sayn thoughtfully gazed up at the painting that hung above Thielwen's bed as she waited for her friend to return from the Palace Nursery. They had a highly able wet-nurse there, of course - namely, Achidias' baby-mamma, Shanera Odariusdatr. The centaur mare's tits - which, by Sayn's best judgment, had actually outgrown Aishee's during her own pregnancy - had proven to be as productive as they were large, so she was more than capable of feeding both her own young colt and Thielwen's twins. Still, the elf - understandably, in Sayn's opinion - preferred to feed her children personally whenever possible.
As for keeping the kids in the Seraglio... that just didn't seem like a good idea, considering what went on there most days, not to mention the decor. Like this painting, which she could never quite seem to tear her eyes away from for very long - it drew her eyes inexorably whenever she visited Thielwen's chambers. The way it moved, courtesy of Korlin's magic, was probably to blame for this - if she had to be critical, she'd probably have mentioned that it really only seemed to consist of something like six or eight separate versions of the painting, which it just flicked between a smooth, constant rate whenever anybody looked at it, a measure that Korlin had explained would lengthen the life of the animating enchantment significantly.
The painting showed Thielwen at the height of her pregnancy, mere weeks before she gave birth to her son and daughter. Her belly, consequently, was hugely swollen, lined with veins that were clearly visible against her ivory-pale skin...
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