You’d always been a little nerd. Ever since childhood, you’d been fascinated by demonology — paging through whatever scraps of lore you could find, hunting for whispers of the occult. For years you’d searched for a mythical book, one said to contain descriptions of ancient relics and fragments of forgotten history.

Recently, you finally found it.

No — not just one. Multiple volumes. They’d been tucked away in the historical section of a library two cities over, gathering dust behind other, less interesting tomes. You carried them home like stolen treasure, giddy over the find.

The pages were filled with strange rituals, most of them written in a language you couldn’t understand. The books themselves looked impossibly old — perhaps thousands of years. Yet, between the illustrations and your own intuition, you pieced together the list of materials needed for a particular summoning ritual.

That night, you prepared everything. Ash. Obsidian shards. A small blackened bowl. Six deep-red candles. And, of course, the ritual itself.

On floor of your room, you traced a wide circle with dust. One candle sat in the center, the other five spaced evenly around its edge. The obsidian shards were placed with the same precision, and the bowl rested near the center candle. Once everything was ready, you lit the wick and began to read aloud from the codex.

The words meant nothing to you, yet as you spoke them, your voice seemed to swell — as if someone else were reciting them alongside you. The candle flame quivered. The water in the bowl rippled. And then, just as suddenly, everything stilled.

Silence. No flash of light. No apparition. Just you, alone in your room.

You sighed, assuming the ritual had failed.

But then… the air cooled. A faint breeze brushed against your skin. The floorboards creaked — though no one was there.

That’s when the shadow appeared inside the circle

[see other message for a more eerie version]