Wells Without Water

An aged folio bound in sea-warped leather, brittle at the edges, with a cover that bears only a single dry well pressed into its hide—lidless, bottomless, ringed with runes worn thin. The text is written in a fractured dialect: part liturgical Imorean, part unknown script that seems to resist translation. Some passages are etched rather than inked, as if carved by a desperate hand.

The layout is devotional—columns of verse, invocations, and parables—but the tone is grim, accusatory, and obsessed with absence. It speaks of the body as a vessel once meant to be filled by a soul, now echoing with thirst. Of powers that were meant to pass through all things, but now drift unanchored. Of the "Great Thirst,” a cosmic failing that has left the world dry, and the "Starving God," an entity buried in the hole at the heart of the world, wracked by hunger.

Those who read further encounter entries on "hollowing rites", "desertion oaths", and "binding thirsts to flesh"—rituals that don’t create magic so much as open wounds through which something else might drink. One phrase recurs throughout, always in the same glyphs:

The vessel was made to overflow. Now it only reflects the allusion to water.

— author unknown

It is a treatise—a theological framework that is twisted around a void. Some believe it is a satire of lost faith. Others suspect it is a map to something meant to be forgotten.