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What's new, Bill?

Last update 4/16/2010

Michigan Witches Ball 2010

I am very excited to be a sponsor for this great event! To find out more about one of Michigan's best parties, click the link above.

All sales are now being handled through my Etsy shop: www.splendidfish.etsy.com
Click on the link above to see what is currently available.
Don't worry, friends, it's still me behind the scenes!

I've added a new section called

Gods, Heroes, and a Couple of Regular Guys:
Corbin's Tall Tales

When I create a new piece
of design work, it often happens that they come, much like a baby with a silver spoon in it's mouth, bearing a story. Unfortunately, when I sell a piece, the story is sometimes lost with it. I've decided to collect these stories into a section all
their own, for your enjoyment.

Enjoy them!

Don't forget to click on the BLUE WORDS anywhere on this site to enter
new worlds of mythic imagination.

The Black Egg, and the White

Copyright 2010 - B. de Corbin and Splendid Fish Studio

The Black Egg
The White Egg

Back to index?

According to the story I’ve heard, the French metal smith and mystic Pierre Montathos (1753 - 1793) received two mysterious stones from that strangest of all characters, the Compte de St. Germaine, whose biography weaves it’s way in and out of the historical record for well over two hundred years. Some claim that St. Germaine was a pretender and a charlatan who preyed on the naïve occult longings of the French aristocracy, while others believe he was exactly what he claimed to be - an Alchemist who had discovered the secret elixir of immortality during his wandering in the Far East.

Whatever the true truth may be, we know that the Compte de St. Germaine moved, for a time, amongst the very highest levels of French society… and also, the very lowest. Somewhere between the two he ran into Pierre, they became friends and carousing buddies, and the Compte gave the two stones to Montathos, instructing him in their use.

According to St. Germaine, which we have from the fragments of Montathos’ notebooks which survived the Terror, the two stones were a matched set carved from the last two known hippogriff eggs (this explains why the hippogriff, if it ever existed, is currently extinct). One was a black egg, the other a white. Together, they form a matched pair, which, when brought together and arranged in a certain manner so as to form an Alchemical Conjunction, give the one who can use them all the powers that lie between dark and light - in other words, infinite power.

Whether Montathos believed this tale or not isn’t known, but what is known is that our friend Pierre was a French royalist. He was, after all, a jeweler whose livelihood came from selling various bright trinkets to those with impressive pedigrees. With the stones in his possession, and the Revolution already underway, Montathos decided to mount the stones in a set of matched, yet contrasting, bracelets which he was determined to give as a gift to his long time benefactor, Marie Antoinette.

I honestly can’t tell from the surviving manuscript fragments whether Pierre actually believed this would save the French royal family, or if he meant it as an entirely symbolic gesture, but the bracelet set was never delivered. Montathos stretched his head a bit higher than was good for him, at a time when doing so was a bad thing, and suffered a form of retribution which reduced his overall height by roughly one foot. Marie Antoinette suffered the same fate shortly afterward.

For a time, the two bracelets were lost to history, although there were vague rumors that the arch revolutionary, Robespierre, would, when in a giddy mood, produce them at intimate parties with his cronies, wearing one on each wrist and dancing around the room giggling like a loon. I don’t know though, I’m just repeating what I’ve read…

Eventually, after years of searching, I was able to track them down. They were in the possession of a very old woman - the last of an old French family line - living in Piney Holler, Tennessee, of all places. I’ve had these in my possession for some time, and conducted a series of carefully controlled experiments, but have not yet been successful in obtaining infinite power, although once I won a two dollar lottery ticket, and on another occasion I was able to locate my wife’s contact lens after everybody else had given up. This is not, of course, proof that these bracelets possess any extraordinary powers, but it does make you wonder…

Well, financial circumstance have forced me into the embarrassing position of having to sell off some choice bits of my exotica collection, and, I’m afraid, as much as I regret it, these have got to go. Much to my regret, my creditors insist that I sell them separately…