fragment of scanned manuscript of unknown provenance
“The Mage’s Lost Exhortation. Page 87”
There is an evil hunger that gnaws in the cherry pit of my heart. Day by day it grows stronger, nursed on the vile malice that it itself nourishes to festering. The creature that feeds itself its own body. I have let it in by my own willing and cannot now evict it by any power. What grace yet dwells within me is diminished in equal measure as the beast is empowered.
The body of that loathsome creature may yet remain barred in the foul room in which I first brought it forth, but its mark is sure upon me, and soon it will be the creature that dwells in my skin, and perhaps I in that wretched and befouled corpse.
Though I yet cling to life, I lack even the faintest spark of hope to unmake the undoing that I wrought with my own hand. I am but a pitiable fool, one more victim of the same hubris which undid Icaraus in his flight to the sun–
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