Auga

My friend's magic remained strong as ever, but her desire to practice it was gone. After weeks of sleeping through her classes, she finally withdrew from training altogether. Despite Auga's reclusive behavior, she was happy to see me visit every once in a while. Once I dropped out a few months later, I saw her less and less. Just as I started to worry, she sent a letter - the first of many.

Initially, we wrote back and forth like any pair of friends would. But as time went on, Auga's letters grew increasingly strange. Her formerly perfect handwriting went out the window, and she stopped bothering to respond to anything I wrote. At the expense of all else, Auga's focus shifted entirely to her new favorite research topic: a small clan formerly nestled in-between light and shadow territories. Virtually all records of it were wiped from history centuries ago, and she was determined to understand why. Her initial writings were obsessive enough, describing every scrap of information she had in extreme detail, but they soon took a darker turn.

Within a few short months, my home was flooded by countless scrolls. I received so many letters in such a short time that it seemed like every courier in Sorenith knew my name. Auga's writings rapidly went from upsetting to incomprehensible as they devolved into mad rambling. Amongst her wild scribbles, foreign runes and horrific imagery were scrawled into any and all free space. Her rough artwork depicted a world as chaotic as her writing: a landscape of tortured faces and bodies that seemed to melt into each a single, unending mass. She always drew one beast above the others, to form a living, twisted sky. Perhaps most bizarre of all, there were a several letters where I swear she spoke of a twelfth god.

Then, just as suddenly as the deluge of letters began, Auga stopped writing to me entirely. Concerned as I was, I took the moment of peace to do some ill-fated research of my own. I contacted over a dozen libraries in multiple flights about Auga's research, but none of them had the slightest idea what I was talking about. One scholar went so far as to ban me from entering or contacting his place of work ever again. Growing desperate, I showed some of Auga's letters to several colleagues from school, but all of them insisted the scrolls were blank. Months passed, and I got nowhere. I was almost ready to give up on the matter entirely, until one last letter made it into my hands.

In small, neat letters, Auga's final letter read as follows: