Two days. I had wandered into the depths of the ruins, alone, for that long, not knowing what awaited me. Mhachi architecture has a way of stirring one’s soul, though, not in a manner all too pleasant. The path was decaying and difficult to traverse. It was eerie and offered to the senses naught but a foreboding sense of dread, as though the very walls were the scaly hide of an enormous, living entity within which bowels one was to meet their end.
While all around me lurked an ominous darkness when I came to rest, I revised upon my journal in the light of a meagre fire and engaged with the tattered papers. Trying, and trying, and trying to decipher the text which greeted me above the gateway into this chasm.
"It must be a rare and unique script", I thought, for neither my peers nor I had ever seen such a language; it could well have been the only scripture of its kind in the Saltmoor, since, for all my expeditions into the Weeping City, there existed nothing like it. I was determined, however. Naught would prevent me from deciphering the writing, and uncovering the mysteries of the Mhachi, whose history had for so long eluded me.
I spent hours in a dank corner reading until I was convinced that I try in vain. "Perhaps I should turn back", I thought to myself. "It would be a long hike before I would see the sky again, but perhaps I do not belong here, in the dark and the cold". Doubt filled my mind like a virus and I came close to being convinced of the folly of this venture, until, a realization struck. I took one last, defeated glance at it and saw a striking resemblance in the text to the rare writings of an extraordinary sage. Their learned scrolls are kept, to this day, in the library of the Studium. I found myself quickly isolating letters in groups. “Ehi”, “Dqj”, “Bwlq”, and so on and so forth. It was an anagram, and I realized the message.
In that moment I looked away from my journal and into the darkness around me. It was a warning, and it read:
blakekathryn
prguitarman
jacobvanloon
annaxmalina
germansingergirl
theartofmadeline
