Nights spent fretting, daily routine he's forgetting.
Enter, Student Amponix Vinchix!
Lamplight, the nauseous yellow gloam infecting each word and page. Amponix is a student, ever studious, skulking the libraries for half a dozen years, using the better part of his young life to find inspiration, and knowledge in the secrets of old tales. Chilling recordings of horrific myths, but none hold magical concepts not yet coveted. Mortal creatures had taken fire-slinging, shock-stinging, cold-bringing, earth-swinging and wind-slinging. The forbidden arts of necromancy, demon bargaining. The holy arts of healing, purification, and restoration. The arcane arts of rune carving, crystal chiseling, and stone scrying.
Tales that, since the beginning of thought, have inspired magicians to develop all sorts of magics. But what stories could inspire him? The librarian and underlibrarians often caught him trying to snatch books that were reserved just to pry them open and peer in.
Tonight, however, he had free reign over the library. Special permissions forged, permissions from the Professor of Cold Casting! The official looking document gave the furtive, solitary man private time to study. His feast of knowledge for the night was the Hounds of Tindalos. A tale that made his blood frigid, and his flesh tingle.
A man takes a highly dangerous hallucinogenic from an eastern nation, and asks his secretary to record what he does. After taking the dose, the nobleman convulses, screeches, and seizes on the floor, blood emptying from his nostrils, and streaming down from his eyes.
After the mental attack, he seems to be fully lucid, but alarmed, fearful of an impending threat. He had soared through all of human history and future events, feeling eternities in a dozen minutes. At the 'vanishing point of all things', he found creatures indescribable visually, and smelt of nothing he could compare it to on the natural good earth. Corpses area fragrant bouquet compared to the awe strikingly terrible stench. Gods could not help him in that realm, for the baying and howling of the hounds chased him back to reality.
The nobleman declares also that our universe naturally is made up of soft edges and defined curves. The realm where Tindalos Hounds walk are sharp, beautiless, disgusting worlds that are nonsensical, asymmetric, and unaesthetical. The Hounds hate perfection and beauty.
The two, harrowed by their findings, begin plastering up the room to make it into a sphere, leaving no sharp corners behind. Before the final hole can be patched, the nobleman is suddenly slain, his throat torn open with a cut in the shape of a square, and then compressed and pulled into a corner formed by a wrinkle in his face.
The secretary piles more and more plaster, and after wards, removes all his clothing, and smooths out his body by rounding it with plaster, hardening to encase him in his prison of paste.
But the Hound was already inside the room. An imperfection. The gap between eyelids, and the ends to the east and west had created a corner. A wide cut divorced the two halves of his body, and the sphere, and the secretary's corpse, now being mauled, devoured and brutalized by invisible forces, was forced inside his own eye, which collapsed upon itself, and disappeared.
A horror story, to most, but untapped potential to Amponix..!
