Skiver Hound

Mirrors are vacuous and vacant things. They dully and perfectly reflect back a world that is already known to us, and they allow themselves to be shattered far too easily. And it is well they do. We would hate it if they actually showed what was on their other side.

The land beyond the silvered sheen of mirrors in terrible, sharp, and irrevocably hostile to us. Razor-limbed stilt-people stride through forests of cutting edges and jagged points. Fractal-plane mountains stab up from the horizon, and a cold and silver sun looms above in a sky filled with clouds of metal-dust. There are soft and blunted forms in that world, but they are a hazard to its inhabitants, so they do away with as many as they can. If they could see our world, they would despise it and us, a world of crushing death.

Thus, it is not idly that people warn of the long years of ill-fortune that follows the shattering of a mirror, though they do not know the full truth of it. Sometimes when mirrors break, some being from the scalpel-world might slip through, unclad in physical form except for the dagger-splinters of glass from the broken mirror.

It looks something like a swarm of bees imitating the shape of a dog, if the dog was something like a porcupine, and the bees something like bayonets.

The size of the Skiver Hound depends not on the size of the scalpel-being that made it, but thankfully on the size of the mirror that forms it now. Hand mirrors create only kitten sized hounds, easily bludgeoned to nothing. Full-length body mirrors however will form hounds the size of hunched over people. As far as is known, there is no upper limit to the size of a Skiver Hound, it is limited only by the size of the broken mirror.

They behave somewhat like a rabid ape that has been force-fed bath salts. They rage uncontrollably, shredding and slicing, ruining and destroying. When a Skiver Hound is born, the nearby area is rarely well defended enough to contain the hound, let alone survive it. Once the immediate area is cleansed of the obscene, blunt meat-things the hound begins to shape the world to its liking. Grinding down curves to flat planes, sharpening points, polishing what it can to mirror-sheen. A further result of this is the entry of yet more scalpel-world beings to this realm. Rather than life begetting a habitat, the habitat of the scalpel-world begets life. A mature Skiver Hound’s lair is a razored nightmare, all sharp points and whirling splinter-creatures.

Even when a Skiver Hound has fully transformed its lair, it will not stop. It merely starts the process over.

And it’s a notoriously hard cycle to break. Trying to fight a Skiver Hound is like fighting the wind, weapons and spells pass through the vacant spaces, and even when they do connect, the splinters of glass merely split into smaller splinters. In return, the Hound will scythe through you, the shards slicing and cutting and stabbing as the beast rams into and through you. Eventually though, the Skiver Hound degenerates into a whirling, furious cloud of sand, and the threat is done, mostly.

The only way to fully destroy a Skiver Hound is to melt the glass that forms its presence in the world. Binding the glass together smothers the force inside, finally fully exposing the scalpel-beast to our existence enough to smother it. Of course, forcing an angry swarm of glass shards into the flames is not such an easy task.

If a Skiver Hound can be slain and its glass recovered, it can be used to form the basis of rather potent divination tools, though one must always be careful never to break them. These recovered glass tools could also theoretically be used to access the Scalpel-world the Skiver Hound originated in. This is uttermost foolishness, needless to say.

One thing a Skiver Hound must never be exposed to is its own reflection. By forming a reflection of it, another will be born within the mirror. The reflection-beast will rage and batter against the inside of the mirror until eventually it breaks, and another Skiver Hound is loose upon the world. One way to deal with a Skiver Hound, even if only by a loose definition, is to lead a Hound to a reflecting pool. The Hound, in an attempt to bring forth its brethren into the world, will stare fruitlessly into the depths of the pool. A hound will be born within the water’s surface, but it will never be able to escape, and the two will be transfixed upon the other until something distracts the real one.

A Hound born in a mirror that it cannot break, however, will never leave the mirror, and no known force can exorcise it. This wouldn’t be such a problem save that such a mirror must be protected against breaking lest another hound be born, and that the hound-in-the-mirror can harm creature’s who’s reflection can be seen in the mirror, wounds manifesting on the real creature as the mirror-thing savages the reflected person.

Inconvenient Locations

Sometimes, you just really need to put something out of the way, like really out of the way, where reaching it takes some sort of actual investment of the party's resources beyond just time. Some of these are actually quite hard to reach (like the past) so be a bit careful, but otherwise, go wild!

Staktenwelk

A great whaling ship, impaled in ice. Mud men come here to freeze and die. It has many levels, they would drag up the carcasses through ports on the side of the ship when the sea was calm and then butcher the beast still living within the ship itself. They are the red decks for a reason. Whale ghost still haunt them, eerie songs and thundering roars. Occasionally one will haunt the frozen carcass of a mud man. The corpse will break, but the ghost doesn’t care. It will drag all the pieces of ice with it, until it is a storm of crystal shards. The uppermost decks are the captain’s quarters, the purple decks. There were five different captains, such was the size of the ship. One would be voted Captain-Ascendent by the crew, but that doesn’t matter now. Many riches probably still squander their time in those hallways and cubby-rooms, but no one could know, they haven’t been explored in a decade. Or more. The middle decks are the white decks where the crew quartered. They are still there. They have let the ice take them. The ice is that keeps them alive. Their blood is all white and frozen grit, sluggishly seeping through veins now cold and black with frostbite. The crew too, are sluggish, and cold, and black with frostbite. They miss their captains. The Captains don’t miss the crew. They are dead, and having a great time of it in the green decks of the mess hall. The black deck was mostly shorn off when the ship smashed its rude way into the glacier it now resides in. The engines it housed were too heavy. Probably they have rusted away long ago in the ice cold waters. What remains of the black decks are haunted by smoke-specters, the ghosts of the engines spirit-fuels. They are terribly cold too, though, everything here is terribly cold. In days long gone, the ship would hunt dream-whales, and bring their loaded cargo holds chock full of mystery-meat and fantasy-fat and belief-blubber. Sometimes Pearls-of-Wisdom too, though they always lie when they sell those, as they know they are merely the nacreated thoughts of the whales, but the punters can never tell the difference. When the captain’s had tallied up all the wealth thus earned, and given to each their share, the crew would shower wealth on their favourite captain, and he would be the new Captain-Ascendent. It was almost always Scarlet-Patches. The Red Deck’s crew was the biggest after all. Cinders-Flag sometimes got it. People always like it when their ship doesn’t sink. Captains Vermillion-Cape, Royal-Cutlass, and Ivory-Hook never got much of a look in, but that didn’t bother them much really. Sometimes the whalers would get into scuffles with krakens, leviathans, sea-demons, and man-anglers, but the mighty harpoon guns would often see them off without much hassle. Even a mighty sea-god has better things to do than pull out a six-fathom-long barbed spear from their soft and milky flesh. Very occasionally, the whalers would kill a sea-god, and drag it in through one of the whaling-holes and butcher it too, if it would fit in the boat. Mostly only Man-Anglers and Sea-Demons, but the takings were good enough from them to be worth dredging their colleagues from its guts. In the end, it was a tussle with a particularly vicious sea-demon that lead to the ship being gutted upon the glacier. The sea-demon didn’t escape death however, and even now, it rots and stinks beneath the ship, propping the floundering hulk with its death-gases and rot-vapours. The mud men come to the ship for that reason, they die near sea-demons. No one knows why though. The Captains tried their hardest to go down with the ship, but considering that the ship is still going down, they see this as a good excuse to declare themselves dead and thus escape all their former commitments, such as bringing their crew back to life, properly at least. They see their current deaths and the crew’s icy demeanours as a good half-measure, and besides, the Mess Hall is too warm for the crew so there’s precious little they can do about it at this point. They would very much like to go upstairs and pick up their belongings at somepoint, but Royal-Cutlass is too fat on Whale-Figment-Meat to get out of his chair let alone anywhere else. So they wait, and hope the stores of carcass-flesh remain long enough for them to starve Royal-Cutlass out of his seat. The crew for their part, have mostly given up on complaining to the captains. They mostly just mope about now. They are trapped on the boat, the Ice would melt anywhere else. Sometimes they will prime a Harpoon and spear and butcher a whale if one comes close enough. They rarely do anymore. The Whales know what the ship is now. Some have even started eating the sea-demon beneath the ship in an attempt to sink the ship completely, but it is a rather large sea-demon. So for now, the ship is going nowhere.