A sleeping stone, with no title and no author—only leather pulsing with a strange heat, and a secret word carved inside me long before I knew it.
Never did I imagine that my slow steps behind a flock of sheep on Mount "Arkzal" would lead me to a gate of darkness.
I was neither a scholar, nor an astrologer, nor a student of alchemy—I was a simple shepherd, fleeing the noise of people to the silence of the mountains.
One silent afternoon, my foot slipped on a stone, revealing a piece of dark metal beneath which lay a burnt wooden box. When I pulled it out, I was surprised to find a book... its cover leathery as if sewn from a skin of unknown origin, bearing a symbol: an open eye from which a mountain emerges.
The book did not open until I uttered a word I had never known nor spoken before... "Arkzal."
The moment I pronounced the word, I felt something inside me break—or perhaps be freed—I do not know.
That book... was not merely a book. It was doors overlapping enchanted realms, maps of a hidden universe, and teachings of deeds capable of changing the nature of things.
Among its pages, I found this introduction, written in a hand unlike any human's:
> "Know, O seeker tempted to delve into the sciences of philosophers, and the mysteries of talismans, that I have composed this book—which I named The Forbidden Guide to Magic—after seeing that people in our time seek magic but do not understand its gate, spending their lives on locked paths, tightly closed by the sages so that the earth not be ruined and souls not destroyed.
I divided this book into four treatises:
The first: On the honor of wisdom and the stars, and the celestial configurations at the time of casting talismans.
The second: On astrological images, their effects, and the secret of the union of the elements.
The third: On the temperaments of the generators, and how to prepare enchanted smokes and magical consumables.
The fourth: On the magic of the Kurds, the Nabataeans, and tricks that only the heartless dare to mention."
So know this... what I will recount to you is not the fabric of imagination, but chapters etched into my soul before they were ever written in this book.
This... is not merely an autobiography.
It is the testimony of a simple shepherd who became the guardian of a gate between worlds.
These are my papers… for the one who dares to read them.