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[ July 22nd, 620 ]
(( Several dizzyingly complex occult designs are drawn out on the left-hand side of the page ))
These are some of the sigils drawn by Alkan on the floor of the inn room, though I hesitate to show them in their entirety. This is a journal, not some arcane research tome. I’d prefer it contain private thoughts, not incantations and the scrawlings of madmen.
Some time later today I’ll come back and write them down in more completion, assuming the housekeeping staff hasn’t cleaned the walls or reported the fool. Aside from the obvious fact that it frightens the ignorant, fresh blood is not the best substance to write sigils on walls with; it runs too easily, leaving vertical streaks that can mar the symbol... sometimes with unintended results.
As for the misfortunate canine, it never even made a sound – at least not one discernible over the loud retort of the rifle. It had probably never even seen a gun or the damage they can do. Alkan lured it quite easily away from its home with a single piece of raw meat. Dogs, it seems, are even more faithless than their human counterparts.
But lining the wall with the brains of the hound was no political or artistic statement, I knew. By killing this “filthy common animal”, as he called it, he was answering a compulsion, some abject itching in his brain that manifested in the need to destroy something breathing.
Normally I do not blithely follow about lunatics, not when the under the sway of their visions – or rather, I avoid ones I am under no contract with. But when I saw him in Stormwind last night, I mistook his fever to be alcohol or drug induced; perhaps, I mused, he’d been offered some of Osrien’s “solution”.
However, I have a sickening feeling that Mr. Streunan has delved too far for his own good this time. I do not know when the last piece of the puzzle slid into place for him, and what keys Kyltania may have unlocked in his head (for she is the only one to play such games so lightly, and with so little regard for the dangers). He was once an arcanist of some prowess, it seems; and while he abdicated his former lifestyle, one can never forgot the allure of the unknown.
Poisoning the mind of one who is aspiring to escape their past, and commit no more wrong, is cruel indeed. But Kyltania has suffered enough loss of late. She may have sought solace in creating another who could “understand” her again, and Alkan’s fragile will was easier broken than Kaith’s. She still could have picked a better subject than a man with such an addictive, compulsive temperament.
Away from her company and calming influence, he is a bundle of nerves and agitations, repeatedly talking to himself and full of some mania - as if once he ceased his incessant motion, his fears might catch up to him and feast. None of this is unknown to me; I know enough to sense that his aberrations are neither wholly self-induced nor delusional. While his particular distemper has its own unique peculiarities, the outer signs – the echoes – are still there. Yet even Ellyee seems incognizant to the dangers.