A little, yellow book and the beauty its readers behold
Car j'ai, pour fasciner ces dociles amants,
De purs miroirs qui font toutes choses plus belles:
Mes yeux, mes larges yeux aux clartés éternelles!
There is a little, yellow book that can be found on an out-of-the-way shelf in a private library or antique bookshop. It has no title, nor an author's stamp upon the spine, and the owner has no memory of its arrival. Though the paper cover is slightly torn and the edges are soiled from use, you are the first to have found it, always.
Many choose to slip it back on the shelf. They soon forget they even found it in the first place. When you begin to flip through its pages, however, you find that it is a poisonous book. The poison is Beauty, and you have already been overcome by the time you notice its stranglehold upon you.
Nothing is more important than the truths revealed to you by that little, yellow book. In exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world pass in dumb show before you. Things that you had dimly dreamed of are suddenly made real to you. Things of which you have never dreamed are gradually revealed. Everything is made clear—there is nothing to the world but Beauty. No longer do you harbor such delusions as family, culture, or morality. "Evil" is simply a mode through which Beauty can be realized.
(Of course, this is but one of the paths a man may walk to leave mortality behind.)
The Beholder
It wears a proper suit and waistcoat, finely tailored and exquisitely made. From the chin down, the perfect image of a gentleman. A high collar frames a face that is no longer a face, for it no longer has all the necessary components. All it has is eyes and eyes and eyes. Oh, god, too many eyes. A masquerade mask can only do so much to hide them.
HD 3
AC as armor, though always unarmored
Damage as weapon, though always unarmed
Mind like Gautier, or, better yet, like Beardsley
Moves languorously, like a dancer grown old and stagnant
Appears never alone, but always singular. It hosts decadent orgies, feasts, art exhibitions, theatre performances. They are always masquerades.
Treasures are uncountable and eclectic, unified only in their beauty. Owns mansions furnished to perfection, vast collections of artwork, libraries of first editions, gardens of gemstone flowers, menageries of stuffed animals. All pale in comparison to that little, yellow book, usually kept in a coat pocket and nestled just below the heart.
The beholder has no tools to kill you with its own hands, and in fact it would find it ugly to do so. It hopes you'll do it yourself.
To gaze upon the beholder is to read the little, yellow book. Its philosophy is laid bare across the visage of its most fervent devotee. Anyone who still believes in the lies of society or morality must roll versus willpower or else be overwhelmed by this glimpse of Beauty. If you fail, you must either commit suicide or surrender your character to the referee as an acolyte of Beauty. This is mind control only in the sense that, for many, there are only two options when stripped of all anchoring ideologies: adopt the beautiful truth undergirding the lies or be rid of it all entirely. Beauty is anathema to those who spend their lives pursuing ugly lies.
If you commit suicide, your hair, teeth, and fingernails will be harvested, and a wax sculpture will replace you—it will be far more beautiful than you ever were. You will join the beholder's sculpture garden, in which a bejeweled tortoise lies motionless on the marble floor. It is replaced whenever it starts to smell.
If you don't, you are not necessarily permanently adrift—you are shaken and forever changed, but you can, with time and effort, return to a semblance of your former self. Wounds thought healed immediately reopen if you ever again set eyes upon the beholder or the little, yellow book.
Killing the beholder is easy—simply set off a bomb without ever looking at it. Killing it quietly and precisely is harder. Mirrors are helpful—it is fascinated by its own reflection.