The document started with a statement as follows: “Be aware, dear reader, that what you’re about to put yourself in is probably going to have no practical use for you.

The truth that I have discovered about Sympathy, it’s that it’s not meant for the use of common folks like you or me.

I am simply writing this as a record so that I can state the existence of this phenomenon, and maybe be able to recognize its influence whenever I find it in the future.”

Ironically enough, what followed was a mix of a very detailed group of instructions and explanations on how Sympathy worked and the transcriptions of what seemed to be a conversation between Arwan and someone else.

I truly wish I could tell you all of what this guide had to offer about the understatement of Sympathy, but I don’t have that type of gifted memory yet.

Instead, I can offer you what I understand about it, and my own experiences making it work, because in spite of Arwan's warnings, what I discovered was that Sympathy far from being merely a group of quasi-magical symbols or runes shredded in myth, was that they were something closer to a science, based on knowledge that I was barely beginning to acquire.

That said, I hope you endure this accountancy as a crucial part of my story, one about how I became what you're watching right now.

The first thing that I truly learned about Sympathy was far away from the initial descriptions given by Arwan, something more focused on the nature of the symbols he would later describe how to use.

One of the first things Arwa stated in his guide was that Sympathy was an act of “reality bending” made mainly through “Hex’es”. These Hexes consisted of four parts:

One, the Command, a process in which symbols become the equivalent of an action, to say so, a few straight lines following a ratio in representation of a “towards outside” or “expelling” action.

Two, the Nature, in which another equally symbolic representation of the medium through which the action beforehand represented would be made, to say so a wind rune.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

And Three, a Circle, the specific ratio in which this Sympathy would take effect, although it could be drawn inside any other form depending on the purpose.

This is the way in which he would describe the method used for his interlocutor to create a stream of wind strong enough to overthrow him using only a paper sheet with the Sympathetic Link or Hex drawn on it. An experiment enough exciting to convince Arwan to try it, with no similar outcomes whatsoever.

There was where the fourth part of the equation entered into action, the Link, what Arwan would describe as a connection between the Sympathist and the “Stream”, a sort of feeble metaphor for the Other Side, what he called the House of the Ideas, where all souls come from.

Arwan speculated a lot about what could possibly be that Link through his manual, leaning finally toward a Unified Theory of Totems. The idea was based upon shamanistic beliefs and observational reviews of an object that his interlocutor held.

So, due to Arwan's inability to either explain it well enough or comprehend it to its fullest, he accused Totems as the main source of these powers. The very idea was that this object, described as a memento, worked as a canal between this world and the other, providing his owner with the energy to make Sympathetic links work.

It was as if the symbolic constructions were a machine that took energy from another plane of existence, he stated.

From that point on, Arwan started to describe more in-depth the way in which one could build Links using a set of Commands and Nature runes within a circle, in such a way that it was hard to imagine he would do that without being able to test it himself.

If he eventually became able to use Sympathy or not, and how, it was never described in the book. But somehow he discovered how to use it and recorded his findings.

When I was near to reach the end of the book, I found a Hex that seemed weirdly familiar. It didn't take me that much time to find where had I seen it before, inside of Aunt Martha's exorcising story. There, I knew I had to test it myself.

As described by Arwan, the most basic form of this Sympathetic Link was the one of a Hex drawn inside a circle, being the Command a group of arrows pointing to its center, where a rune that should mean “pressure” was located.

In the description of this Hex, there were a couple of footnotes, for example, in its basic form, it would just cast a strength through its center forbidding or making it difficult for those in its middle to get out. Then he started laying down more examples, in which by adding another circle and a second set of arrows the Hex would exert a far stronger grip on its victim, making it closer to a punishment chamber than a containing device.

The only inconvenience about trying to modify the variants of the Hex, adding, for example, other types of runes explained Arwan, was that the Link used by the Sympathist may not be suited for it. This would cause what Arwan described as a case of SRE or “Sympathetic Rebound Effect”, a moment in which the Hex cannot draw energy from the Stream, taking the users instead. This effect was described as the "Sympathist Feeber".

In expenses of all these intricacies, drawing the first draft of the Hex was as simple as sitting down and tracing the lines on a piece of paper.

Once finished, I sat down in front of it for nearly half an hour, just looking at it. Three out of four elements of the Hex were there, a nature’s command within a circle to hold captive whatever was put inside, but there was something else needed to make it work.

A link between this world, and the Stream, as Arwan called it, a sort of Totem. There, regardless of all I'd been warned by Arwan, I had a crazy idea, partly moved by curiosity, partly influenced by an instinct.

I set my hands on top of it and watched. There, my world made an overturn.

At first, it was like a feeble shine. Then, it became dim light.

Lastly, and before my arm got expelled out of the Hex, it became a sudden sparkle. I felt how my shoulder almost got out of its axis, and behold the paper burning in its place.

There I realized, I had made a Sympathy Link for the first time.