Don’t get me wrong, I knew it was a bad idea from the start, but at the same time, after gathering so many stories about what Arwan called Sympathy, and what this sort of mix between science and occultism could do, I knew it was my best shot.

Two weeks had passed since that whatever-would-be creature had taken possession over my body, kicking me away from my life, when I drew the first Sympathetic Link in the basement of my newfound home. Two weeks when I placed my hand on top of the shakily drawn Hex, to find surprised how its strokes shined before expelling almost immediately my hand so hard that I could hear my shoulder cracking. That was the moment I realized that the Unified Theory of Totems that Arwan had formulated during half of the extent of his manifesto didn’t apply to me, or whatever I had become. At that moment, I felt like the luckiest person in the world, I was somehow not only gifted among those among the Archive users, many of whom had a whole life studying, working, and handling supernatural affairs, but I had also discovered the closest thing to magic I could know off.

I knew it at that moment, what I hadn’t been able to admit to myself when I had started to Nightwalk nor after I found my body somehow possessed by Him, that my life wouldn’t be the same from that moment and on.

Then I just felt sorry, sorry for the fact that unless I found the way to beat Him, I was probably doomed.

My main goal then became to make an arsenal for myself, in which at least there was a Hex able to contain Him for good. How would I make him give me back my body, I would solve it later. It was at that moment when I had an idea, one that would put me the closest to dying I’ve been this last summer. Or at least one of the three times I’ve been close to death. I would craft my own Hex using Arwan’s teachings.

For this experiment, I needed four things, the first of them all, a Command that I pulled out of Arwan’s original example of a restraining Hex, with the form of a few arrows pointing in the same eccentric directional flow. The second one, a Nature represented by one of Arwan’s list of runes, being Strength or Pressure. Third, an Area represented by a Hexagon, which I drew on the floor using salt. Fourth, an emergency breaking mechanism that consisted basically of a bucket set off in a stiff on top of a chair and under a water tap open at its minimum. The idea was that it would eventually be filled enough to throw the water down on the floor, diluting the salt, a process that I even proved by letting it fill and watching how it dropped a few times. My idea was, as you could guess by this moment, to put myself inside of the Hex, and prove its effectiveness on my own flesh.

All of this took me a morning, and part of the afternoon, so when the night came in, my little experiment was completely set.

There were some issues no matter the less to what ‘restricted or contained in’ could actually mean in practice, all of Arwan’s descriptions about the effects that could unchain in the subject were vague and narrated from the point of view of the user, apart from set in a theoretical type of instruction vocabulary. Surely in most cases, little was his interest in how safe it could be if you applied it to yourself anyway, so I had to take a leap of faith along with my chances.

When I finally decided to launch the experiment, I already knew that whatever would happen, it would last at least nineteen seconds, that is a minute and a half. I was sweating even before going in, when I made the first step in and nothing happened, I felt so relieved that I walked straight to the middle. It was at that moment that I realized that I didn’t exactly know how to activate a Hex, nor how I had done it before. Arwan instructions about the casting effects were limited to saying “Hold the Totem in” which didn’t seem to apply to me.

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I leaned then and touched the salt of which the Hex was made, there was no shining that time, instead, it must have taken about five seconds when I felt my body heavier than usual, and it wasn’t until the clock reached the thirty seconds mark that I realized that I had a problem.

It seems to be that the way in which this specific trap worked was by increasingly applying a sort of invisible force upon the subject, a sort of “pressure” made of thick, invisible to the eye air. At first only noticeable, then bothering, till it became a strikingly painful pressure coming from all directions. If I had to describe it, it was as if I was being pushed by a thousand hands, in a palpable, painfully overwhelming feeling that made me shrink in my spot, till I fell on the floor thinking I would be crushed by the pressure. When I searched with my eyes for my phone on top of a table across the other side of the room, one minute had passed. What happened during the last thirty seconds I cannot describe, at that point, the pain became so unbearable that I fell unconscious.

I woke up fifteen minutes later, all wet and with the taste of salt in my mouth, for a second, I realized how close I had been to dying. Surely it was luck that I had set the weather stream to reach its limit only after ninety seconds, but I would be lying to you If I didn’t tell you that I wished It would stop long before.

When I found the strength to stand up and clean myself, I looked back at the floor, the Hex had been completely erased and only a puddle of dirty water remained. And still groping myself, a thread of hope shone inside my head. I had now a line of action strong enough to make a plan, one that could give me back my life. The next thing I had to do it was obvious, I had to trick Him inside one of my Hexes.

I will try to save you a lot of my hesitation when coming to the point in which He and I ended up setting our last encounter. I was just glad that I had convinced him to meet with me, or so I thought. Thinking back now, it seems to me I may have fallen under a false feeling of self-confidence after learning a trick or two about Sympathy. I was a fool, though I had managed to make a plan that seemed infallible by that moment.

We had set our encounter at midnight in the Playgrounds next to Hollow Creek's Mall, precisely speaking in Almond Stadium, probably the only baseball field in proper conditions of all Hollow Creek. The plan was simple, I had to make Him go inside my restriction Hex without noticing, that was the easy part, the hard one was not to die in the attempt, and then manage to get my body back, for which I had prepared a few things, that we’re going to call my Tree Trump Cards

When the hour came, I jumped out of the fence and took a stand in the middle of the field, it was late at night and the only noticeable lights were the ones coming from the Mall a few blocks away.

Between here and there, there was the rest of the playground, a long extension of concrete holding a few basketball and tennis fields, barely interrupted by a couple of sand puddles sown with iron constructions that worked as recreational areas for the children. There was no one, at least on plane sight, and only the silence worked as a companion, along with the cold of the night.

One hour after the time we had agreed, he appeared in the distance, walking as a familiar figure in the void. With no hurry, he dived into the field, jumped the fence, and faced me right in the middle of it. The whole process should have taken him about two minutes.

It was then, without mediating any words yet, that I realized it was going to be harder than I expected.