Struggling artist gets a break of sorts.

The art scene of year 2018 is a tough one. All has been invented or at least so it seems and getting grants is becoming more and more difficult due to tightening economy.

Polarization is also strongly present: those few who succeed, make it big while a mass of artists struggle and do other jobs to make a living.

Jared is a struggling painter who boasts about his French origins. His art hasn't really worked so far, he has lived off of random jobs and charity of his relatives. He feels misunderstood and troubled and thoughts of quitting painting altogether invade his head more and more often.

He bought the book from some random antique sale and got it with the few pennies he had, as nobody seemed to be interested in it at all. The large, ancient-looking book had covers of black leather and metal edges that looked like they were made out of copper.

Jared forgot the book for a while and it just layed in there on top of piles of random paperwork on his desk. It was only in the evening after he purchased it that he remembered it.

When Jared opened the book, a queer, dusty smell of paper mixed in with something unrecognizable greeted him. Later on he thought that it might've been some sort of seaweed. Nonetheless he continued and was first hit with a disapointment: the book was written using some peculiar language. Even the letters where unknown to him. They certainly weren't Japanese or Arabic, or Russian for that matter. He browsed through the book anyway, finding odd spiral-like shapes here and there next to the odd writing. The longer he read, the weirder his sensations got. At first he thought that the letters were moving on the paper. A slight dizziness fell over him and he browsed the book back and forth. For some reason the pages never looked the same, even if he started the book over from the beginning. He felt that each time he opened a new page it looked like nothing he had seen before even though he browsed through it just few minutes ago. Deeper and deeper he went, until he must have fallen asleep while browsing.

Next morning he woke up from his sofa with a terrible headache and a metallic, strange taste in his mouth. His cloggy thoughts cleared up immediately, though.

Across the room there was a large canvas that held a mesmerizing image. It was a landscape, but an alien one with a reddish hue in the background. The scenery itself was barren, and desert-like, but in the front of the picture there were round holes in the ground, of which tentacle-like plants or creatures grew out. Most striking were the colors and the forms of the tentacles. It seemed that when Jared moved, the figures in the pictures moved as well, even if ever so slightly.