"The Demon of the Flower" by Clark Ashton Smith

Lophai - I could come up with a half dozen different pronunciations for this word without even trying. *sigh* Of course no help from the author as to what he intended, so I had to pick one and go with it. Ugh.

Aphom - Oh look, another word with many possible pronunciations. At least I was able to be consistent about my pronunciation of Lophai, with this one I think I used probably every possible variation during the recording. Grrr.

tourmaline - a real word with multiple correct pronunciations. Except, perhaps somewhat ironically, pronouncing that last -line syllable as if it were the word line. That would be a wrong pronunciation, but just about any other way you care to pronounce it would be valid. WTF, English?

addorsed: set or turned back to back

isoteric: I don't think this is a real word, perhaps he meant esoteric? To be sure, no dictionary seems to know it, so if it is real, it is either so far obsolete as to have dropped out of dictionaries a hundred years later, or it is a foreign word not used enough in English to be worthy of inclusion.

adyta: the innermost sanctuary of an ancient Greek temple

The picture used is an illustration from the 1933 publishing of the story in "Astounding Stories".

The follow along: https://archive.org/stream/XiccarphClarkAshtonSmithLennySAMouse/Xiccarph - Clark Ashton Smith (LennyS-aMouse)_djvu.txt

Ah, the dangers of only having half the information that you really need! I mean, at an absolute minimum he should have asked the Occlith why it advised against doing the thing!

I feel like this story is one of the more imaginative ones of the Xiccarph cycle. Although we've seen Smith use flowers before, such as in "A Voyage to Sfanomoë", and earlier in this cycle with "The Flower-Women" and in "The Maze of Maal Dweb" we saw magical flowers that transformed human men into ape-men. It's a theme with Smith, he loves his flowers! Loves to give them magical powers of metamorphosis!