Prologue

Dalal has finally agreed to help me. It’s been months of asking and prodding, but finally they said they would give me what I need. They said that I would need to dive deep into the catacombs as I had thought. But they would not answer any more of my questions. They said I had to listen and be silent. But I need to know more. Why won’t they tell me more? But I’m afraid of pushing them too far. I already shouldn’t have this job in the library and asking too much would get someone like me replaced quickly. 

It was hard enough getting them to admit that they had been down there in the first place, let alone admitting to finding a way to release or summon one of them. I saw a glimpse of their arm today, they already have welts and a slurry of flesh from their contact with them. I’ve heard the bedtime stories and warnings from my parents. But I really have no one else. I have to trust that they are guiding me down the correct path. It truly is a great fortune that someone so knowledgeable works here with me. 

If the king is to be believed, this city does have a tendency to attract cultists and Mist Seekers. How ironic it will be his downfall.  

It’s all a matter of time… 

Entry 0.2 - Location 

Deep under the city of Squ’hev are long and twisting catacombs filled with ghosts, death, and delights. Explorers from all over the world venture into its winding and dreadful depths hoping to make their fortune. Little find anything of value, and the ones that do barely escape with their lives. 

Old legends say that demons are held captive under a doorway that leads to nothing. I do not need to find this doorway if we are going to summon just one. I simply need to be close. Dalal has found a passage that is well hidden from explorers where we will do the ritual. 

They said the ritual will take weeks, maybe even months. I gathered all the supplies I could. Jars of water, bread and rations that travelers usually take. I had little money but all of it I spent on sundries for our time. The only thing remaining from my home was the small quilt my mother had made. I brought it with me to remind me of my rage and purpose. 

We leave tomorrow.

The forest had slowly been reclaiming the edges of Squ’hev and the king who sits upon his malachite throne atop the ziggurat has done nothing for his people. There are whispers in the dead of night that he is waiting for it to clean out the edges where the people he deemed undesirable live. There has been no evidence to the contrary and soldiers, deforesters, and any aid have not been seen in the day in the area for years. 

When the sanguine claws, a creature found deep in the forest, claimed its first victims, the king did nothing. When the bandits from the roads claimed the second, the king did nothing. And when his own soldiers raised and looted my home, I lost everything, and he did nothing. 

Some nights I dream that I am there with my family when the soldiers come. They take me down into the pits of the ziggurat where I am jailed, starved, and slowly drowned in anointed oils. 

Other nights I dream that they have found us in our ritual site. They kill Dalal and bring me to be tortured down in the pits. They ask for other Mist Seekers and I am flayed alive before I can wake. 

Dalal saw the doubt on my face when I awoke. They shook their head before beckoning me to sit across from them. They said that for every doing, there was an undoing, and we seek to undo the patterns and hexes that had bound the Mists in the first place. They unwound the bandages on their left arm and showed me the welts and decaying skin in the candle light. 

These were unmistakingly the signs of demon contact. I had no time to doubt. I only had time to follow. 

We sat together, surrounded in a circle of iron dust, Divine Script written along the outside, and what Dalal called Desecrated Script on the inside. They told me that the demons have few weaknesses, but Decided Metal was one of them and handed me a knife made of black steel and carved with more Divine Script.

 It felt wrong to hold such a holy item in the middle of a heretical summoning and I didn’t want to touch it at first. They held it out for me, squinted their eyes and demanded that I do what I asked with no questions. I took it. 

They nodded and spoke allowed the true name of the demon.It ran in my ears, through my head, and deep into my bones. I could not understand it with my mind but I knew that it meant in our words Censure. 

I did not sleep well that night. I dreamt again and again of the ritual. Sometimes it failed and I was consumed by a ravening mist that poured forth from my body. Sometimes it succeeded and I could hear the screams of the city even from below in the catacombs. But in every version in my dreams I could see my back consumed by the welts on Dalal’s arm, the skin broken, festering and slowly turning to gas around it. 

I awoke in the morning and felt the same pain upon my back. I could not see it but I knew it was there. The ritual was working, but for the first time since this started, I felt afraid. I pulled the quilt around me tighter and thought of my family.

The way that Dalal sat across from me, peaceful at first, palms outstretched in front of them reminded me of my mother. She would meditate before sleeping every night. When I found her body she had been stabbed in the back, legs crossed and eyes closed. I hope that she didn’t suffer. 

Dalal is nothing like her. Dalal is everything like her. And then their eyes snapped open--wide and wild and they spoke eagerly in manic tones. They asked me if I knew the history. How these demons came to be. 

I shook my head. They smiled but their eyes contained no joy. Their history is forbidden, they explained. It is the only thing they fear. The only thing the gods fear… I hesitate to write this as it may draw unwanted attention, but this record needs to be recounted. 

They said that long ago, when a long dead god was still alive, it started to dream. It dreamed many things that broke the world, monsters, cities, creatures, and everything that wreaked havoc upon mortals. But one of those dreams was a nightmare, a rolling mist that consumed the gods and ate them from the inside out. It twisted and billowed into horrendous faces and human forms and everything it touched melted and warped into the mists. And from this dream the demons were born. Soon humans learned to use them and started a long war against the gods. The gods won in the end and the demons banished below. But a city grew on top of the site, and this is where we are now.

They held up their arm which was dissolving as their story said. It was the only proof we had. It was all I needed. 

They held it out to me and said, “Look, It speaks.” 

From the skin and gas on their arm a face started to appear, twisting in horror and anger. Dalal grinned and nodded along with it. “Can you hear it?” they asked. I couldn’t. Dalal became more and more manic by the moment. I wondered if this was to become of me. 

Soon this would be over. Soon my vengeance would be at hand. This was for the greater good… once the king has fallen then we will be at peace. 

Before Dalal agreed to help, I sought out a book from the back of the library. I stole it away at the end of my shift one night and brought it into the hovel I had to call a home. I didn’t have the ingredients, no iron and no knowledge of scripts. I scrawled in the dirt the best I could remember from my times in the temples and used pieces of metal I had scrounged around among the wreckage: a fork, a screw, a rusty nail. 

There was only a hot feeling on my skin and a clamoring of bells in my ears for hours on end until I erased what pathetic circle I had made. 

It was only then did Dalal take me seriously about wanting to summon a demon. They stole me away after a long shift, down winding corridors and deep into the city. They spoke in hushed whispers about the other Mist Seekers and forbade me from trying anything else without their supervision. They would not tell me much else other than they were from a cult from a fallen empire far, far to the north. One who wished for freedom. One who wished to make their own Choices. 

I remembered the person they were before we started, calm and collected, and saw before me a manic person, vibrating with energy, barely able to contain themselves with spreading welts and mists over their body. 

The sores on my own back reminded me there was no going back. 

That night I dreamed of Censure. We were alone in a black void and they were a faceless form, barely in the shape of a person but still I felt its gaze upon me. It did not want me. I was no one and it sought those who could bring it power. 

I screamed in rage, I could bring it power. I could bring it what it wanted. Didn’t they grant the ability to Choose? I Chose vengeance and I Chose power. 

Censure brought me to my knees and stood above me. It told me to leave and it would remove itself from festering in my body. 

I wouldn’t. It dissolved itself and poured through my mouth and nose and into me. 

I awoke then, coughing and choking before spitting up a mass of flesh and blood. I feel no paint and I do not know it is mine.

I wish for a world in which none of this could have happened. I wish for a world in which the king loved his people. I wish for a world in which he was dead. Should that bastard fall before I am finished then I will stop. Should he continue to live, then nothing will stop me. 

Censure appeared to me again, offering me a way to escape. It offered me a new life, in a new city. I do not want a life. I do not want to forget. I want there to be an end to a bloody tyrant. I want his death. 

I wonder if I had been there if I could have stopped it. I do not feel guilt that I wasn’t. I too would be dead on the floor of that burning house if I were there. I am in a way grateful that I am here to carry out my vengeance. I wonder if the library knew and that is why they kept me late. I wonder who there also bears guilt. 

The ritual will begin soon. Dalal says that when the stars in the sky have reached their peak, and the moon is at its lowest, then the pattern will complete and we will have our best chance at releasing It. I can hardly wait.

Censure comes to me more often in my clouded states. It can reach me in my waking hours when I meditate deeply. I see It in the festering wounds that crawl all over Dalal’s flesh. Their body is failing them and their mind still remains in it’s manic state. I do not know how much longer they can last. I fear they are close to death. 

They have never once asked why I try this desperate magic. I think that they know. They know my status and they know what happens to people like me. I doubt they couldn’t have figured it out, though I do not know if they are aware of the specifics. I wonder if they know I seek vengeance against the king, or just the soldiers in general. 

Today we prepared a minor ritual after hours of meditation. Something… something was wrong, though. We were supposed to feel cleansed after wiping down our filthy bodies in oil. We stood dripping, covered in filth and grime in the depths of the catacombs. They could feel it too. Something didn’t happen. Their eyes calmed a bit and they stood in the moonlight, through the tiniest crack in the ceiling, the only indication that time had passed. Their body was nearly covered in the sores and it churned my stomach to look at it. My body was also becoming a festering mess. ...I feel as though I too may not be long for this world. 

I had considered.. Simply trying to kill as many guards as I could before this magic. I held a knife in my hand as I stood in the darkness of an alleyway. I could have taken their life, but I knew it wasn’t enough. I knew I would only manage maybe one person before I myself was killed. That would not change it. I needed to kill the king.

My body cannot last much longer…. I cannot last much longer. There is so little time left. The time is almost at hand. I feel myself grow manic along with Dalal. I am laughing and I am shaking. 

My skin is falling off in pieces. What would they think of me? Censure is at the corners of my vision where the spiderwebs and fog are starting to creep in. My body must last. My body must last. My body must last. 

Censure has been there since the beginning. It has always existed in the mind of a god and then Decided upon Reality by a dream. Soon it will be here in the flesh. Soon it will be in my flesh. I am It is Me. 

Soon.

We are here and we are here. …. Censure is here and I feel It and it has eroded all of my senses of … well censure. 

I can write of it because they will not see it. Remember that time, that time, that time, remember that ritual that Dalal and I did. It was forbidden. Cannibalism. We took the blood from one another, holy oil from the body and drank merrily to bond. We are two of the same. 

They said not to tell but who will stop me now? They said that up north, up.. Up north. They said that where their cult is from, they do this. They do it to strengthen the bonds and so that if one of them dies they are still a part of them. 

Dalal doesn’t look well. They are shaking and haven’t slept in days. I haven't slept in days either, but but soon. It will be here soon. I am shaking and I'm so tired. I can’t sleep. I will see them in my dreams. 

Dalal was being mean. They said they were going to leave. I told them they couldn’t. I told them I’d kill them. They were so sick, they were so tired. THey… they. THey are not going to live past this ritual. I do not know if I will either. They wanted to live. They have others… but there is just me now. I am alone. Alone with Dalal. 

I have no doubts. I can see them.. I said that before. I wrote that before. It is still here. It .. it will come soon. 

Soon.

Entry 9

Author’s Note: 

Full disclosure, I completely forgot to do token rolls and have only been removing tokens when the cards said to. This also means that I always had the teacher with me, when they should have left, meaning that I most likely should have been making more tower pulls. 

The next card is the King of Hearts, and I want to see if I have a chance to actually win the game so I’m going to make all the token rolls now: 

Entry 2 Token Roll: 2

Entry3 Token Roll: 6 Success -1 Token 

Game Win ?

I’m going to make an additional tower pull for every card that asked me to pull a block after Entry 3 which should be 5, and then an extra because I fucked up!

Since the 4 of Clubs and Ace of Clubs have pretty much been answered by the previous questions I’m going to move on to the final entry.

End Author’s Note 

Final Entry

Dalal has become Unbound and soon I will be too. They sloughed into a pile of mist before me and there it was, Censure, the demon of the mists. It’s face twisting and riling before me. It knew what I wanted and vanished among the air through the small cracks and out into the night. 

I took what I could of my broken body and hulled it up to the surface. Hours and hours of slow climbing and winding, I made it, up and out into the fresh air. My skin barely held together as the wounds festered into gas.   

But then I heard it. The horn, the trumpet, the call of death. The king is dead and the fire up top the ziggurat is lit. 

What would Censure do now it was free? What would I do when I too became free. I can barely write anymore. I can feel myself slipping away on the winds. 

Read this and feel rejoice for I am Unbound by fate.

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