“Ignore the omens that demons present, and thus perished are the lives we lived! Before the fall, wrought by Cyrus, these demons descended onto Babylon as mortal humans: in the guise of foreigners, they sought the secrets of the alchemists here so as to return to their immortal forms amongst their demon kin. I know not the lands they hail from, but their names were strange: they were (-E-) [of light] and (-M-) [of dark]. I hope to press the knowledge of them into this clay; in remembrance of one, and for the other to be heeded as a warning.”
“Know this: I am able to recount this tale to you for I once considered them friends. They claimed to be students of one of my own, the alchemist Lustamar-Adad, and cursed my home with their warmth. Their pale skin grew darker through the two years with my family, they told us lies of their distant home, drank our beer and ate our food. I wish I had known, if I could have stopped this! If I hadn’t told them of the red stone, if I had stopped them from leaving, if I had killed him before he could (-)”
“The demons left us for (-Lost City Name-), following the alchemists' trail east to the caves from which the scarlet gems are cut. In the span of 3 years, we only received news of their lives through messages sent by the ‘house of alchemists’; in the first year, we were told that they had been discussing immortality with their peers; in the second, we were told the two had fought bitterly in public; in the third year we were told (-E-) left the city while (-M-) remained and had come into the service of the King of (-Lost City Name-), (-Lost King Name-). The city then turned silent and all were anxious for word, so a small band of messengers and soldiers were sent.”
“The horrors they recounted: the silence in the streets, the corpses in the palace, the blood in the water. The King lay before his throne, throat slit, long dead. But they never found (-M-), the sole survivor of (-Lost City Name-). (-E-) had returned to us soon after we heard of the mountain city’s fate, panicked and seeking to prepare a ritual. The last I saw him, we embraced like family as he left for the temple. No one but Marduk, King of the Gods, knows what transpired within those sacred walls and all we found in the aftermath was his corpse. A blade had been stabbed into his left eye and his chest was hollow with his heart torn from it.”
“The demon (-E-) curses a sacred temple with the obscene corpse it left behind, and the demon (-M-) has disappeared leaving carnage in its wake! Or (-M-) is the root of this evil, flooding the streets of (-Lost City Name-) with blood, killing the King he served, and then turning the blade on his oldest friend! The stench of evil is heavy in the air, making way for the destruction of our homes and the lives we leave behind. I beseech you who read this, beware of these demons, for I fear their goals may have been achieved. May Uta-Napishtim curse their arrogance and pluck the fruit of immortality from their lips!”