During the Middle Uzdumalian era, Emperor Drevis III charged the various scientists and natural philosophers of the Imperial Academy with several daunting tasks: producing a list of all of the types of faces, of all of the useful numbers, of each star and planet in the sky, and so forth. Most of these projects were extravagant failures (like the Book of Addresses, which listed the places of residence of all the citizens of the Empire, but which was completed some 20 years after it had begun and was almost entirely outdated by publication) or modest successes (such as Hambro's Universal Almanac).

One of these works, Beasts of the World, had a more interesting fate. Written by a consortium of twelve well-regarded scholars, this book listed each and every species of bird, fish, or animal that could be found within the Empire or any of the other known lands, complete with sketches and descriptions. Other essays groups families of animals together into taxonomic categories. At the top level animals were divided into the following eight categories: Holy Animals, Birds, Fish, Animals that can be tamed, Dangerous beasts, Harmless beasts, Animals whose males and females cannot be easily distinguished, and other Unclean Animals. Within those groups distinctions were made based on means of locomotion, diet, form, habitat, and size. The book included a series of essays- judged by the rest of the authors as 'interesting, but frivolous'- postulating ancient common ancestors for some of the groups of beasts.

Following publication, the book was presented to the new Emperor, Drevis IV, who read it over a week of evenings and summoned all of the authors to his court. Eleven of them arrived promptly; the twelfth, Professor Emeritus Eblas, was delayed by hurricanes along the western coast. Eventually losing patience, Drevis invited the eleven who were at court to an audience, where he began to berate them, individually and as a group. When asked what fault he found in the book, he ordered some soldiers of his guards to bring forth into the chamber a mule who bore loads in the Imperial residences and grounds. He was outraged that this book, which purported to contain all of the Beasts of the World, did not contain a animal so common as an everyday, load-bearing mule. Before they could protest that mules were hybrids, and did not breed true, Drevis had every one of them executed, by a different one of the twelve sacred means of execution (with The Slow Bleed resereved for Professor Emeritus Eblas as extra punishment for being late.)

Professor Emeritus Eblas, finding himself a fugitive from Imperial Justice, fled beyond the borders of the Uzdumalian Empire and never returned home.

The Alchemy card "The Forgotten Beast" is believed to take its name from this incident. The mule is said to have wandered off imperial grounds, and according to a popular series of legends, travelled the length and breadth of the empire being an integral part of many amusing stories, all of which involve the triumph of simple, folk wisdom over the folly of so-called 'learned men'.

The loss of all of the top figures studying zoology in the Academy more-or-less ended all work in the field, and crippled study in the life sciences in general up until the fall of the Uzdamalian Empire. So Beasts of the World remained the definitive work on the subject through that entire period despite Imperial disfavor and academic flaws.

Citations: Alchemy (game)

Hurricanes

Execution