Hounds of Tindalos

Overview

Long before humanity learned to fear the ocean or the sky, something hunted in the angles. The Hounds of Tindalos are not beasts of flesh in the ordinary sense; they inhabit the sharp places of geometry, the corners where lines meet, the recesses of time that predate life and will postdate it. When a man gazes too long into the past, when he drinks the powders that send his spirit backward, when he touches an amulet linked to the Burying Ground in Paris or to stranger soil still, he opens himself to a scent the hounds do not forget.

The archive ranks them among the few predators that cannot be bargained with, cannot be shot, and cannot be outrun in any direction humans understand. They come through corners. They come when the victim is alone. And they do not stop.

Description

Survivors, a category numbering fewer than a dozen credible accounts, speak of lean, blue-grey shapes pouring from the meeting of walls, from the apex of a room, from any angle sharp enough to cut reality. The faces are abominable: jaws that open too wide, eyes that reflect no light, a hunger that is not for meat but for the traveller who has trespassed in time. The bodies may be half-fluid, adapting to the corner through which they enter; the smell is often reported first, a mustiness like dust and old blood.

They do not walk; they flow along angles. They do not sleep. Once the scent is taken, whether from direct travel or from contact with one who has travelled, the hunt is eternal unless the victim dies before they arrive, and even then the archive records dreams that suggest the hounds remember.

Historical Record

The Exham Priory incident is separate; the Paris affair of the amulet and the powder is not. A writer in a garret room, seeking vision in the past, found instead the hounds. The walls were angled deliberately; the blue mist poured from the corner; the body was found shredded in a manner the police could not admit in open court. Chalmers, who warned him, disappeared from a sealed room with no exit save the angles.

Miskatonic's temporal research division treats the hounds as the chief argument against unauthorized chronal experiment. Two researchers who replicated powder formulae in 1952 were found dead in a laboratory with perfect right angles; the corners were scrubbed for weeks. The scent, witnesses said, lingered longer.

Archive Notes

No chronal projection without Theta clearance. Avoid acute angles in rooms where psychical experiments occur; rounded architecture is mandatory in Annex Lambda. If blue mist appears at a corner junction, do not approach; evacuate and seal. Contact with persons who have used the Hound amulet or similar artefacts requires quarantine. The hounds are the price of looking backward; the archive posts that price where every ambitious historian can see it.