Footnotes

* This is a popular misconception, part of the romantic lure of venturing. Only a fraction of cutters make money substantial enough to be jealous of.
** Tradition and a typical wont for secrecy dictate that magicians perform abscission upon themselves, one-handed. Rarely, a close accomplice or trusted minion will be employed as assistant. Even then, the magician will perform necessary cutting without assistance, for simple, perverse pride.
*** The Crown Academy of Firlund is the largest known producer of knucklebones. Their manufacture is private, limited only to faculty and magician military officers.

† The Holy Inquisition is especially fond of removing the hands of magician assassination targets.
†† As resizing knucklebones is an impossibility, inherited bones are often worn in different positions in different owners. A ring-finger third phalange made for man may serve as a woman's middle finger-bone of the same row. Often, magicians' hands are knotted and painful for precisely this inherited mismatch.

"Point and advance," said One-Eye, breath catching on the foul air.

The lance-points turned, wavered in fearful hands. Their wielders stepped once, twice, a dozen times; grew near. The monster did not raise its head. One cutter stifled a gag. So close, it stank of putrescine and urine.

Neath its dripping head, the wounded cutter whimpered, now lost for screams. She lay trembling, eyes locked with the fanged visage.

"Keep at it," whispered One-Eye to the others, his tone of confidence eroded. He set down his lantern to face the thing, drew a saber. "Strike!"

Four lances flashed. The long neck jerked, pierced. It seized into striking motion. Someone cried out. Hooves clapped against the floor. Steel and teeth grated against bone. Liquid bespattered stone. All grew silent, save for the wheeze of stale air fleeing a collapsed lung.

Long minutes later, two cutters stumbled from that chamber: Viré, supporting a barely-unconscious lad. Both were battered and stained, trembling.

"Kill it?" said Sortholt, worrying his rough hands. 

Viré nodded, lay the lad down. "Barely."

"Didn't have a clue how to, did he?"

"Not a whit," laughed Viré, half sobbing. "But it knew how to kill us."

"Aye," nodded the guide. He looked through the tomb's broken gate.

"That's what they're made for."

Chimeras

For every sorcerer, there is a cauldron. A pitted, iron belly warmed by coal. A gaping gut fed with gore and obscenity. A womb, from whose clotted lip chimeras are born.

A chimera is a recombination of flesh. Disparate pieces of man and beast, broken down, boiled, and reassembled in the cauldron's roil. An artificial organism, purpose-built; greater and more awful than the sum of its components.

This recombination is a sorcerer's most fundamental art. An avenue to ever greater dominion over life. By its power, the sorcerers of old ruled for great ages, sustained by armies of what are today's most dreadful monsters of lore. †

And all the while, they developed more.

Patterns

For millennia, sorcerers toiled over their iron wombs, puzzling out the rude gestation of new chimeras. A million and more patterns, they tested. They cut, and flayed, and stitched flesh into new shapes, put it to the amniotic boil in hopes an effective life tried out. Dog, serpent, babe, and crow, all were dissected and rejoined for the pot. Ox, toad, scorpion, and tiger, all combined and sent to the burbling gore. ***

The sorcerers' successes came slow. Their failures were numerous. Often, the cauldron yielded weak, gormless combinations, no better than the countless fetal wrecks that never lived at all. For every half-promising experiment, a hundred thousand wet failures were dragged from the cauldron's caked rim.

When successes did come, though, they were terrible indeed. These patterns they recorded, kept with special jealousy. It is these patterns that we know today as among the Coast's most fearful monsters.

Now, long after the height of sorcery, these patterns are secreted deep away. They lie in the buried tomes of old sorcery; in the sequestered, chained stacks of deep academia; or in the flawed, stolen pages of mad folk and hedge sorcerers. To acquire one is no easy feat, for a recipe for monsters is precious indeed. ††

A selection of most notable patterns is detailed below. 

• Manticore has existed in Coastal lore since its first deployment by the relic-lords of old. Its name, oft-incorrectly assigned to the mere tyger of the far South, means simply "man-eater." It is a name well-earned, for the manticore—fused from tyger, porcupine, and human babe—sports three rows of teeth in an ear-to-ear, cannibal smile. Neck-down, the beast is akin to a broad tyger clad in red-tipped spines. When erect, these spines are a fearsome weapon: Subtly barbed, and apt to stick in flesh like arrowheads. When laid flat, they are better than iron maille. The worst manticores, brewed from a pattern perfected in Ancient Naussia, sport a giant scorpion's sting for a tail. Both patterns were intelligent and highly obedient; an archetypal sorcerer's pet. Reports claim manticores live yet today, prowling high mountain haunts and guarding the deep Underworld fastness of their sleeping masters. 
• Kætoblepas is an engine of terror, a toxic wretch spliced from man, serpent, and ox. It is a miserable thing: A wiry, ungulate hulk, large as a bull, with a serpentine neck twice as long again. From this trunk hangs a bestial head; downturned, drooling between fangs an emission so putrid, so noxious, it poisons the land the kætoblepas treads. This putridity is a chemical weapon of meticulous design, arousing irrational panic and apprehension in those who breath it. When paired with a glimpse of the kætoblepas' death-mask visage, the stuff elicits paralysing fear in all but the most stalwart foes. Kætoblepas was once produced and unleashed as a terror unit, meant to sap and punish enemies and subjects alike. It's use was otherwise limited, for the monster was, from its birth from the cauldron, unpredictable and quite mad. In modern times, it is practically unknown, save for a final few rumored specimens who roam the very farthest wilderlands and Underworld keeps, insane even before the long ages rotted their minds. 
• Lampago is produced by boiling a human babe with double its weight in young dogs. The result is a tailless, long-limbed, nude thing with a long-muzzled human head. It is intelligent and highly obedient, capable of complying with relatively complicated tasks such as patrol and reconnaissance. For the later task, it is particularly useful, as it may come to produce human language after just a year in age. ††† Established sorcerer-kingdoms could produce lampago in significant batches after establishing effective slave bases or tithe-lines from dominated states. Such bulk production occasionally birthed mutant specimens with multiple auxiliary heads. These were short-lived, but quite prized if proven hardy. Distasteful legends yet abound of sorcerers gladly boiling their own children to produce lampago. Such beasts often feature as sorcerer's familiars, in myth. These days, though the pattern for lampago is dangerously well-copied in academic occultism, the lampago is most often seen as a heraldic character, rather than in the flesh.
• Calcatrix is a pursuit pattern brewed from the flesh of toad, bat, and cockerel. Its rubbery body is that of an outsized, naked bird, with four long hand-limbs like a bat's, but with no webbing. When commanded to take a scent, it will pursue its target to the end of the world, even if set to pursue from lands away. Unlike a good and natural hound, it will not simply immobilize caught prey, but lacerate them with long fingers and a hooked beak. A recipe for calcatrix's creation is said to have been found in a Chicol-era sorcery tower in the South. A Tevillan Viscount is rumored to have reproduced the monster for purposes of hunting both foxes and mankind. 
• Pigmen, also known as "long hogs," are a recent development in the art of the cauldron. Created by Northern nouveau practitioners of unearthed sorcery, pigmen are not true chimeras, whose pattern requirements are substantial. ‡ Rather, they are a variety of hybrid, one made possible by the compatibility of human and swine's flesh. ‡‡ While they are produced via the combination of human and piglet in a cauldron, later generations need not be, as the first pigman produced is capable of successful, if obscene, reproduction with basic swine. Whether born by nature or by cauldron, pigmen are apt sorcerer's servants. They are large and strong, oft surpassing 150 kilos, making them fine builders and brutish guards. So long as they go undiscovered, a small troupe of pigmen can greatly assist a would-be sorcerer in their dark ambitions. The Office of Secrets is concernedly attempting to trace these new-age practitioners and their long hogs. They are alarmed by tales of depraved magicians birthing or stealing infants for purpose of pigman genesis; distressed for the national security implications of rogue pigmen spawning fast within Firlish borders. Most of all, the Office is afeared for one very real posibility: The ushering-in of a new age of Coastal sorcery.

Author's Note

Footnotes

* The Litany of Tombs, as cutters and scholars know it, is a phrase oft inscribed on the portals of tombs, warning, or perhaps challenging, those who would enter them.
** Standard, collapsible variety. Inexpensive steel. Ten feet, at standard length.
*** Chimeras, when properly fused, do not overly resemble a collection of disparate parts. When a pattern is produced successfully, it gains uniform structures and tissue, including skin and appropriate musculature to function effectively, if not hideously. Chimeras of considerable age, which are not uncommon, as they are nigh-undying by design, often appear frayed and pale, even skinless. Despite their tattered appearance, their strength is only somewhat reduced by the centuries.

† Few chimeras, save for beast-men, yet survive outside of tombs, where they are set as guardians. A rare few, usually the largest and most clever, have kept hidden dens for centuries after the fall of their masters. They lurk in farthest mountain valleys, safe from those who might exterminate them.
†† Said recipes are truly requisite for the creation of chimeras. No simple process of cutting and boiling will suffice. Along with the basic combination of animals to be fused, patterns include the vital specifications for cauldron keeping, including the amniotic gore particular to each chimera, and the other arcana required to produce life from butchered beasts.
††† Most chimeras lack the ability to speak.

‡ Near every chimera pattern requires what is legendarily known as a "sorcerer's stone," an organic catalyst essential in the reshaping of flesh and life. The creation of such a stone, while widely researched for intentions both scholarly and wicked, remains a mystery. Pigmen require no such mysterious rock for their creation.

‡‡ Discovery of the pigman pattern was historically impossible, as swine were only discovered in recent centuries. Myth abounds of a Captain Libri of Pesk, who famously, perhaps fictitiously, discovered Pig Island long ago. He brought the beasts to the Coast under no small duress, as his journey home proved a stormy and dreadful one. During the voyage, the Captain's trusted first mate, a man by the name of Pig, was lost to sirens. Supposedly, both the far-off Pig Island and swine themselves were dubbed in honor of him by the good Captain. Whether this is true, none can any longer recall.