80% bacon, 20% cake

(Journal of Adelaide Montaine; 1338 AE - Season of the Phoenix)

'I'm not sure when I became the kind of person whose personal struggles included charging through crumbling ruins in an attempt to ignore the fact that my conscience is rapidly gaining sentience and might want to eat me.

If I really thought about it, I could probably pinpoint the exact moment, but I suppose all that really matters is that somewhere along the road from Kessex to here, I stopped thinking like a farmhand and started thinking like an adventurer, and now I can't stop making astonishingly stupid choices.'

'The Priory found me after I fled the cave. I don't remember much of my trek through the blizzard, but the Magisters say they encountered me standing over the body of an ice imp, rambling incoherently, half-in, half-out of my necromancer's shroud. I awoke on a bedroll in a spare study room, and just like that, I'm here---but no closer to my original goal.

The Magister in charge of my recovery (I suppose prolonged exposure to cold is not good for humans, no matter how warmly we dress) claims there is no ethical way to cure a magic-user of their magic. It would be like trying to 'cure' a drake of its scales; impractical at best, and tortuous at worst. I don't know how to express to them that I already feel tortured---not without admitting to several counts of murder. (Manslaughter?) I spent the last few months becoming the last thing I ever wanted to become based on the vaguest hope that they could fix this, could fix me, and now. . . I don't know. I feel empty.

I'm not sure where to go from here. . . except for the obvious path, which involves admitting the thing whispering over my shoulder is real. Was it another stupid choice to lie? I can feel the thing peering curiously through my mind, gaining strength and form as it snatches up every guilty thought and feasts on them.

I think it was always there. I think I created it. I don't know what the Priory would do to it if I told them.'

'But I am in the largest library I know of, a repository of every ritual, every scrap of archaic lore Tyria could possibly get its hands on.