The Rite of Passage
One phrase in particular was repeated innumerous times throughout the foul text I was reading: the maiming of the soul. In this ungodly hole I had begun to slowly demystify murky horrors that I now believe better lie hidden in the dank earth down where no sane mortal treads. The text elucidated the intricacies of an unholy ritual, used by the daemon Lords themselves in the darkest depths of Ioxos, where such wretchedness is so commonplace that those who enact these ancient rites render themselves blind so that they do not have to bare witness to the untenable horrors being performed. My hands quivered as the skin-bound book I clung to divulged its accursed knowledge to me, and I learnt how the great daemon Lords create their fiendish armies.
The knowledge about this ritual plagued me endlessly. I would journal furiously throughout the night instead of sleeping, trying desperately to make sense of what I had learnt, the thoughts ceaseless. I spent my days searching through the greatest libraries in the lands; speaking to scholars and laymen alike, to anyone who would listen; spending countless sums of gold on occultist books sold through back channels hidden from the purview of the law; pleading adventurers to tell of their tales into the hells. No matter how much I learned, however, I knew my unending thirst would never be quenched until I performed the ritual. I needed to see it to understand it: the vast power that I, and I alone in this plane, held.
It took months of planning to acquire everything I needed, the corpses I gathered being the simplest of the tasks. I was not unfamiliar with the arcane arts, and so I knew about most of the ingredients and where to find them, but in my old age it is far easier to pay adventurers to do such work. With my equipment and ingredients ready, and my body well rested for once, I began to chant what I could read from the archaic infernal script scrawled within the skin-bound book. Huge columns of flesh rose around me, my voice echoing through the bare stone room which was now becoming unbearably hot. My flesh began to sweat blood and as I continued to chant vast tendrils of potent black magic filled the room, gyrating in multifarious patterns in chaotic inconstant directions, to create what the text had referred to as a maelstrom of disfigurement. I marvelled at my creation as the tumult of wickedness grew louder and louder, the screams of the damned ringing through my ears and I soon began to scream too as my ear drums and eyes suddenly burst, with great spires of flesh growing outwards from within them. I felt my body twist and warp as the accursed power I brought into the mortal plane began to consume me. The unconscionable thing I had created was craving energy and I was the last soul needed to feed it, to fuel its entrance into this realm.
You may be wondering how I have finished writing my account of what happened that night. Truth be told, the sick rite I performed did not kill me. Instead, I have become part of an amalgam, one of many souls I took that night that formed the fiend I conjured. I form the tongue of the unholy beast, and can taste every mortal it eats. I have written these last notes using magic as a cautionary measure, for anyone who may find this corrupted place and that accursed tome I wish I never read.