For but one second, time seemed to stop.

Hugo's eyes were kept shut, images began flooding his mind alongside the air that entered his lungs. familiar visions, memories of his hard work, sketches and sketches detailing a metallic golem, towering and menacing in it's presence, made to protect his suitors with it's own life. parchments unraveling to reveal the complex inner structures and anatomy of the guardian, completely organic on the inside, working perfectly for it's purpose. A design he had perfected long ago.

time had resumed, and he could feel the sensation of energy flowing through him, seeping out of his finger tips in threads, unraveling their way towards the space in front of Hugo, intertwining reality with magical will, acting as threads, tying the golem into existence. His eyes remained closed, but he could feel the golem being assembled, for a moment, Hugo actually thought it had worked. however, he had thought it worked many many times before. although this time the process did not get interrupted by the conjuration retaining too much energy to quickly and destabilizing, Hugo could feel something. something wrong.

he could feel cracks forming, the threads of magic that he was using to hold the golem together were breaking and fading as they got further. Soon enough they completely vanished, and Hugo let go of the connection. opening his eyes and getting up from his crouching position. taking in the sight upon him.

The Golem, well, parts of it, were suspended in mid air, translucent, stuck in a state between existence and non existence. Blood still pulsating and spilling through open veins and arteries, fading into nothingness, a fleshy mess with malformed metallic plates attached to them. slowly fading, breaking into smaller bits and slowly fading away, as the energy that held it together weakened, and dissipated in a memorial of yet another failure.

Hugo lay back onto the grass underneath him, bringing his right hand to his face, a simple rag appearing in his grasp, using it to dry up some sweat before quickly dispelling it. he let out a frustrated sigh, turning his head towards the red shape moving towards him. a red fox made his next to him from the corner in which it was previously, curling up and laying in a comfortable position next to him. 

[b]"What is this? the 7th try"[/b]

The fox gave a very slight nod, seemingly to comfortable to do anything more significant, Hugo lay there for a while, watching the pieces of the golem fade away.[i] what went wrong this time..?[/i] Conjuring things purely of his own creation, without resorting to memories, is always a tricky ordeal, but he's done it many times before with smaller things, or non living things. however, for some reason whenever Hugo tried scaling it up, and creating things with much more substantial size, it stopped being a problem of sheer effort and practice, and seemingly begun failing in several different ways, this had been yet another failure, yet more issues to fix.

[b]"well.. progress is progress nonetheless isn't it?"[/b] he said while petting the fox. 

[i]Yet I've been making progress for a very.. very long time...[/i]

Almost an hour went by, Hugo and the fox lay there, as he went through the process in his mind, thinking of what could've gone wrong, eventually however. He got up, and with the fox to his side, begun making his way to his manor, for although none of his experiments had gone wrong for a very very long time, he still always did his major experiments in some woods to the south of the village. The way there was mostly uneventful, as he ranted to himself and to the fox, still brainstorming.