The House of Mallac is unlike any other in Cillamar. Day and night, strange cries can be heard issuing from behind the high estate walls, and every day herders deliver several carcasses of butchered sheep and pigs. The retiring master of the house is seldom seen outside the estate, although those who do encounter the skeletal Lord Mallac say that the stench of blood surrounds him. Despite his impeccable adherence to the latest Criestine fashions, he seems to exude a tangible aura of dread and gloom. With rumors marking Lord Mallac as a necromancer, cultist, or worse, the truth is disarmingly mundane. Mallac has transformed his home into a menagerie of monsters. Live (and often deadly) specimens are kept caged in the estate’s courtyard, while preserved specimens are displayed about the house. Mallac is always on the lookout for new specimens, and pays top coin for live specimens. He refuses to pay for the corpses of monsters, no matter how exotic, insisting that he must witness an animal alive to properly capture its aspect when it is preserved. He does all the taxidermy work himself, in the basement of his estate, in a workshop outfitted with hundreds of specialized knives, sewing needles, and mesh frames. On occasion, Mallac has been known to commission parties of adventurers to recover certain beasts and monsters, but the odds of returning from one of his hunting parties are disturbingly slim. The lord is particularly interested in Whiterock’s unique specimens: the trollhound, inferno tiger, and fissure wasp, to name a few.
n