Madame Incarnadine
Ruler of Beauty is Only Skin Deep
Planar tanar’ri—subtype unclear [she/her] / CE
Madame Incarnadine’s history is shrouded in rumours, but all agree she was once a mortal—a vain and ambitious surgeon from the Prime who sought immortality through mastery of flesh. After uncovering a forbidden ritual of fleshwarping, she peeled away her own skin and stitched herself anew, believing it would free her from the ravages of time. Instead, it put her into the dead-book and bound her soul to Skindjur. She took root in Beauty Is Only Skin Deep eventually became its ruler—and its greatest victim.
Her appearance is a masterpiece of uncountable surgical procedures. She wears no skin of her own, her own form is a horrifying glistening lattice of muscle and sinew. Instead, she drapes herself in living flesh taken from others—patches of exquisite skin stitched together with silver wire and enchanted to writhe and shimmer like silken fabric. Her face changes as often as the town itself; each day, she selects a new one from her collection, a mosaic of stolen visages.
Madame Incarnadine views herself as an artist, not a tyrant. She believes it is her divine duty to push the town’s philosophy of continuous improvement to its most extreme, grotesque limits. To her, every resident is both canvas and clay, their bodies raw material to be sculpted into perfection. She claims to be able to see the “potential” hidden beneath every imperfection, the beauty waiting to be revealed through pain and transformation.
But her vision is not altruistic. It is driven by her own unattainable desire for perfection—a perfection she will never achieve, no matter how many faces she wears or bodies she reshapes.
Under Madame Incarnadine, Beauty Is Only Skin Deep operates as a brutal pulchritocracy—government by the most beautiful. Those who display the most striking transformations and the greatest dedication to their personal evolution are elevated to positions of status and privilege, while those who resist change—or fail to meet their Madame’s impossible standards—are ruthlessly cast aside.
Madame Incarnadine enforces her rule through a secretive order known as the Exquisite Choir, a cadre of elite enforcers who act as beauty consultant, surgeon, and executioner. They travel the streets in floating, gilded palanquins, wielding enchanted scalpels that can reshape flesh with a single touch. Their role is twofold: to “inspire” citizens into greater acts of transformation and to eliminate those who drag the town down with their mediocrity.
Madame Incarnadine’s influence ensures that aesthetic conformity and constant self-reinvention are not just cultural values—they are laws. The town thrives under her grotesque vision, yet it also suffers, as her relentless pursuit of perfection drives its citizens to greater and greater acts of self-destruction.
Her Dark Secret: The Rot Within
Though she projects an image of flawless mastery, Madame Incarnadine is far from perfect. Beneath her stolen skins and carefully crafted personas, she is rotting—literally and figuratively. Her own flesh, no matter how often she replaces it, is decaying at an accelerated rate, a cruel punishment from Skindjur for her hubris. No amount of surgery or stolen beauty can halt this rot, and every day, she feels herself slipping closer to oblivion.
This secret drives her obsession with transformation, as she desperately seeks a cure for her condition. She believes that if she can create the “perfect” body, the rot will cease, and she will finally achieve the immortality she craves. But perfection is an Abyss with no bottom, and her desperation only feeds the town’s endless cycle of vanity, pain, and despair.
Sources: Jon Winter-Holt. Partly inspired by trashy TV shows like ’10 Years Younger’, and ‘What Not To Wear’. And Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.