The city dripped like a candle left burning in a cathedral, wax pooling in the gutters where Inspector Hannibal Lecter traced circles with his cane—each revolution a slipknot tightening around reality's throat. His pocket watch (stolen from the Mad Hatter during an unfortunate tea incident) ticked backward, counting down toward some obscene apocalypse of geometry.
At the psychiatric gala, Vellux Swan floated through the crowd like a sleepwalker navigating a minefield. Her dress—woven from spider silk and the last sighs of Victorian consumptives—clung to curves that defied Euclid. Edward Cullen nibbled his crystal champagne flute filled with O-negative, tracking her movements with the precision of a taxidermist measuring for pins.
Darling, whispered the mirror above the punch bowl (its glass still smudged with Blancus' red lipstick), you'll fracture them all.
And so she did.
The mayor's son fainted when Vellux's hip grazed a Corinthian column, leaving the marble instantly striated. A Nobel laureate (whose name I forget) wept into his petit fours as his shadow bent light into forbidden colors. Even the gargoyles on the balconies crossed their stony legs in discomfort.
It's the curvature, moaned Dr. Lecter, licking the equation off his scalpel. The golden ratio made flesh. We're all just asymptotes yearning to touch her infinity.
Across the ballroom, Jacob Black's teeth lengthened as his shirt seams burst. The werewolf mathematician had spent three full moons calculating Vellux's waist-to-hip ratio, each attempt ending in howls of madness and charred graph paper. Now he lunged, not with claws but a compass—desperate to map the coastline of this terrible new geometry.
Vellux exhaled.
The chandeliers swayed like hanged men. The string quartet's instruments warped into Salvador Dalí's wet dreams. And in the ensuing chaos, as grown men—resembling those imagined by the famed Daniel Paul Schreber—sobbed over their suddenly inadequate protractors, she slipped into the night, leaving behind only the stiletto's imprint on the pavement that, by dawn, would birth a new cult of topologists.
The moon hung low and heavy that night, a perfect curve even Vellux couldn't rival. It watched, amused, as the city's skyline developed scoliosis in her wake. Somewhere, a Gothic architect wept over his blueprints. Elsewhere, a baker burned his croissants for not being crisp enough.
And by morning?
They found Lecter crouched in the opera house, murmuring to a parabola as if it were a lover. The newspapers called it madness. The poets called it revelation. Vellux simply hailed a cab, her smile bending spacetime in the backseat.
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