Elderly Tax Goblin Seated by Treasure Chest

Elderly Tax Goblin Seated by Treasure Chest

• Model: Nano Banana 2 (Pro)

• Size: 768 X 1365 (1.05 MP)

• Used settings:

  • Prompt: Old Nickademus was a goblin of advancing years, one of those small, wiry folk whose lives are stitched to the long reckonings of coin and account. For many winters and summers — for longer than most men in the fair land could recall — he had served the lords and magistrates in a calling that suited a goblin better than any other: that of a tax-collector. It was a trade of patient cruelty and exacting habits, of keeping small things in order and looking after great things with a covetous eye. In the ledger of the countryside his name was known and feared in equal measure; in the ale-halls and at market-stalls he was oft cursed under breath while his face was spoken of more seldom, lest the curse carry a summons. The dome of his head showed through wispy dark locks, not all of them obedient to the laws of neatness. Time had made the hair thin and the skin beneath pale and veined, so that his skull shone like a dull coin beneath a lamp. His shoulders stooped, not wholly from age, but from the long hours bent over scales and balances, over piles of shillings and groats. Yet though the hollows about his eyes gave him the look of one half-sleeping, those watery orbs were still keen as a hawk’s when a glint of metal leapt or a corner of foiled paper promised profit. Greed had taught him its own kind of sight. His skin was the broad, deep green that belongs to his people, not the glossy green of young leaves but the greyed green of old ivy on a northern wall. His ears were long and pointed, twitching at the whisper of a purse-string, and his face, though clean-shaven, bore the hooked projection of a beak-like nose that gave him an unwholesome and memorable silhouette. Small, narrow-mouthed, and sharp-chinned, he might have been carved from some grim wood by an artisan with a fondness for grim things. He wore the costume of his office with an almost devout scrupulousness. All his garments were of a deep, learned black, cut and tailored with a fineness one might expect on the body of a cleric or a law-clerk in the days of Shakespeare; seams were close and buttons neat, and the hems carried a faint dust of road. The clothes sat oddly upon his skinny, bony frame — too good, perhaps, for one of his sort, yet he treasured them as tokens of his rank. His shoes were of soft black leather, long-toed and curling at the tips in a fashion both archaic and faintly comic; they padded without sound, and their points tapped and clicked only when he wished them to. About him, always, was the smell of oil and old paper, of warmed metal and the faint sweetness of coin rubbed near. He wore leather gloves pored like a scholar’s, and at his hip hung a chain with little brass scales and a ring of tiny keys — keys that had opened many a coffer and many a lie. He possessed a ledger thicker than a man’s wrist and bound in brown hide, where his neat script had multiplied the sums of farms and tolls until the pages sighed. On the iron-riveted chest which he kept like a throne he sat, or atop which he perched like some small sentinel, waiting and watching. The chest itself was a thing of many repairs — straps renewed, nails driven anew — and the coins within answered his touch with a sonorous, satisfying clink.
  • Using base image: No
  • Aspect Ratio: portrait_tall