Gorren woke up with a start. He sat on the chair, blinking until his vision returned into focus and his hammering heart set into a somewhat normal beat. Slowly, he looked around, taking in his surroundings.

His laboratory was just as chaotic as he had left it. Tall libraries leaned from the walls like tired giants, crooked under their massive loads of old and dusty books; each was swollen by age and notes and papers. Tables were packed with forests of glassware and armies of pots of all sizes and forms. Paunched cabinets were filled with arrays of alchemical provisions of all sorts and colors. A trio of cauldrons huddled together like fat sisters on a stone platform, their voices the ever-going bubbling of strange liquids. And more: strange symbols, dried herbs or just series of knots dangling from tattered ropes, chalkboards covered with runic glyphs and alchemical equations, discarded pieces of old machinery, dripping candles set into rusted chandeliers, organs and strange things preserved into jars on shelves and another hundred things that let visible barely a glimpse of the thick stone walls.

The wooden ceiling had been made smooth and black by decades of fumes, and the air carried an unnamable smell, the mix of a lifetime of experiments that seemed to have seeped into the very stone of the place.

It was the stage of one life passed through study and experiments, but for some reason, Gorren didn’t feel the usual comfort of familiarity. Instead, it felt unnatural, wrong.

He passed the back of a calloused hand on his forehead, trying to clear his thoughts. He felt like a carriage had just run over his head. His skin felt cold and clammy. He wasn’t getting sick, wasn’t he? He had important experiments to do, a schedule to keep. Had he dreamed? Yes, he remembered something like that. The dream was about… was… ack, it had got away from him. And he felt it was important too…

A sudden hiss startled him out of his line of thought. Whirling around, he saw that what had probably to be the biggest apparatus in the room, a complex construction of interconnected glass, copper tubes and iron barrels dotted with glyphs, was trembling slightly, while emitting a rising hiss. A steady plume of green smoke came out from one of many muzzles.

Gorren jumped at his feet with a startled gasp. Why was the Major Still not properly aligned? All the chemicals would go wasted!

Forgetting his thoughts, he ran to the machine and started to frantically manipulate snob and handles. He hissed when one lever proved almost scalding, and his alarm redoubled. The element symbols were mismatched! The final substance could be hazardous!

He got into febrile work, deleting glyphs and drawing new ones with a brush and chalk he had hastily retrieved from a table, separating tubes and, ignoring the scalding substances splashing over his hands, snapping them over in new configurations. When he finished, the still had gone silent, the bubbling of the liquids inside now barely audible.

Gorren slumped against a barrel with a sigh of relief. The combinations of glyphs were charging the liquids rasing and mixing into the complex still with unstable magical energy. If the process had got to completion, there was no saying as to what explosive chemical could have been created. He never, never! did such lengthy mistakes, so the culprit could be only one.

“Tim!” He barked, anger and annoyance taking over. For Goodness’ sake, that boy wanted to be his death or what?

The “apprentice” he had chosen to take in what had to be a moment of brain rot didn’t appear. At least, he knew what was good for him. This time he would throw him into the damn well, like he should have done that time with the frogs and the gold. Or the time with those pesky students that had been making noise with that new devilry just while he was taking his usual nap or…

Gorren stalled, sudden confusion cooling his rage. Students? He did not have students… or did he? Tim had students if he wasn’t mistaken. Maybe it was his? But then again, wasn’t he just a boy? How could he have students? And if his apprentice had students, why he didn’t?

A wave of dizziness hit him and he had to use the barrel for support. His memories were like a pot full of holes. Faces and events moved and mixed one into the other, confusing him.

It had to be some kind of spell affecting his mind. Did someone try to confuse him? But why? His treasures maybe? But nobody should know about what he kept in his tower.

Thinking this, he raised a hand to twirl at his beard, like he did when he was nervous, only to stop short. His luscious white beard barely reached to his chest, and it wasn’t white at all but a stark black.

That realization knocked him out of his frenzied thoughts. Something wasn’t right there, not right at all.

Pushing himself off the barrel, he found to be barely able to stand. His knees trembled and his breath was short. Stumbling, he reached a table and leaned against it with both hands.

Despite rising nausea and confusion, he forced himself to think. What was happening there? No, he had to start small. If it was some kind of mental attack, he would have more chance to overcome it by focusing on a detail. His beard. What he did know of his beard? Well, it was long, long enough to almost reach the floor and kept afloat and out of his feet with a trickle of magic. He kept it with great care, making sure that it remained luscious and sparkling white no matter what. Sure it could be impractical and long work dirtied it quite easily, but with magic, those inconveniences were easily resolved. A fire-proof and anti-stain oils, a series of robust clasps and a magically-moved wood servant and his beard could survive a direct attack by a fireball and come out unscathed. A session of brushing and combing also helped him to think.

A new wave of confusion scattered his thoughts, making him sway. Gorren snarled, forcing his mind back into focus.

But why had he started to carry a beard so long? He wouldn’t reach a reason alone. It was too much of a step away from his work. It was because… Tim! That was who! Since that arrogant moron had taken that ridiculous place as Chancellor of the school, he had started to wear a long beard! And never be said that he would allow for his disciple to look wiser than him! That was why! He had a big beard, not that stubble!

He turned sharply to the laboratory, his thoughts burning with a newfound focus. Now he saw a new series of details. The more useful books weren’t arranged for quick consultation nor were the pathetically retrograde relegated to the foot of the libraries where they belonged. The Akashik incantation on that formula on the chalkboard was spelled wrong! The Brimoac Potion didn’t need to boil to be complete! The Ulthren Diagram didn’t look at all like that! AND WHAT KIND OF IDIOT EVER MADE A QUIPU WITH FOUR KNOTS?!?!

Gorren straightened up in all of his height. He could see them now, the cracks in the world, how that image of the home was but a colorful sheet drawn to blind him.

“You dare to try and imprison me in my own memory?” He barked in outrage. “Me? I am the Archmage! You cannot contain me! You will pay for this insolence!”

He spread his arms and clasped his hands together. He didn’t try to be subtle, to pick at the imperfections of the illusion to make it fall to pieces with disbelief and its own contradictions. Instead, his memory, the true image of that place, jumped out of his mind, called to reality by his furious will. It clashed with the illusion in a jumble of images, details and sensations. The paltry copy didn’t hold a candle at the complexity of the true thing and crumbled to pieces under the assault. Reality exploded into a swirl of lights.

Gorren’s eyes snapped open, incandescent with rage. A monstrous visage filled his vision, all needle-like teeth and stinking breath. He choked, panic surging alongside anger, and swung a fist at it without thinking. There was a disgusting crunch and he felt slurry-like meat gave way under his blow.

The visage was knocked upwards, emitting a moaning sound that rattled his teeth. With a scream, he tore himself away from it and flailed with his legs. There were two other crunches as he felt the disgusting touch of slime-stuff.

The monster gave another disconcerting moan, the sound enough to drill a spike of pain in Gorren’s head, and drew back quickly.

Gorren scrambled up, legs and arms not responding properly. He had a glimpse of crooked wings and a toothed-filled maw at the top of a spindly-looking body. There was a whoosh. A sudden gust of force almost sent him tumbling. He managed to hold on, hooking frantically to a ground that seemed to bend under his fingers. He swirled to look…

…and madness took him.

White Black Red Blue Yellow Gray Sand Large Small Wide Slim Beautiful Horrible Impressive Negligible Good Bad Divine Wormy Everything Nothing Everywhere No Place. No Place. No Place. No Place! Nothing Everything!

It was more than confusion. It was like the entire universe was trying to force its way into his brain, all at once, a shrieking cacophony of emotions and sounds and vistas and everything.

He screamed, but his voice was but a drop into an ocean, invisible and meaningless. Who was he? What was he? Everything screamed and cackled and belched and popped and piped and he was but a sound into the chaos.

Only one thing remained: his ambition. To conquer, to reach where nobody had reached ever before, to touch the stars. Everything he had, everything he needed, or would ever need. The Archmage, the pioneer. That was what he was: Gorren An-Tudok, Gorren of the Tower. And he never got lost, never surrendered, never failed.

To that nucleus of identity he clung with feverish desperation. His stray thoughts and memories followed, rushing back like running soldiers that spotted an allied camp. Gorren snatched them up as they came, feverishly reading them before adding them to himself. Little by little, he made himself somewhat whole again, an island of sanity amidst a raging sea of chaos.

But already he felt control slipping through his grasp again.

With fury, he lashed out, trying to make a sense of the chaos around him, to force him to bend to his will. He recited incantation after incantation, launching magic, and will to try and take control.

It was useless. It was like throwing pebbles to an iron wall, like trying to jump a mountain with a single step. The chaos swallowed his attempts like nothing then ran through his own attention and tried to overwhelm him once again.

Despair rising, Gorren tried to call back his own senses, to focus only on himself once again, but it was too late. The chaos had latched over his being and it spread quickly like water on parchment.

With no other escape, Gorren made his mind turn upon itself, shut everything else away. All the parts already taken by chaos were abandoned as the nucleus of his identity retreated inside of itself, where the chaos couldn’t reach it. It cut away any contact with the outside, snapped any feelings, cut off any sense, until the world was reduced to just himself and his fundamental identity, a thing of determination and ambition and thirst. The effort having sapped his energies, Gorren fell into himself and into blissful unconsciousness.

In spite of Gorren’s focused and hopeful stare, the potion settled from its boiling into a horrible green sludge. Furious anger took the old magician. He threw his hands into the air with a hateful snarl and started to look around the laboratory for something to unleash his anger upon. His gaze settled on the little haggard-looking boy that was trying to sweep the floor while remaining unseen.

“You, boy!” Gorren roared, pointing a crooked finger against him. The boy jumped. “What is magic?”

Timothy, or Tim like he had decided to call him, because apprentices didn’t deserve to be called by their full names, looked startled for a moment before settling into a hesitant expression.

“It’s… it’s to use Mana to change the world.” He mumbled.

Gorren snorted with disdain. He conceded that the boy was fast with his mind, but he was as ignorant as a turnip.

“What a pig‘s farmer could have said.” He mocked, then pierced him with a stare. “Sit down, boy. It’s time for your first lesson.”

Tim looked around with hesitation. There wasn’t a chair in sight in the cluttered laboratory, except for the sturdy one that Gorren used and nobody that didn’t wish for a fried backside had to use.

“I said, sit down!”

Tim jumped and mechanically plopped down on the floor. He watched him with a mix of expectation and doubt, clutching the broom’s handle against his chest.

Asking himself for the umpteenth time what had possessed him to welcome that stray in his home, Gorren started to impatiently walk back and forth.

“Magic!” He declared suddenly, cutting the air with a sharp wave of a hand. “Magic is more than a tool, foolish boy! More than a simple manifestation! Magic is passion! Magic is emotion! Magic is art!” He fumed for a moment. “We call upon the Mana, yes. But what is the Mana? We don’t know! We can’t know! Mana is everything and anything, the beginning, the end and everything that is in the middle! Can we completely understand it? Never! Humans are a frog and Mana is the ocean! Can a frog imagine the complete extension of the ocean, every single wave and all of its immensity at the same time? It can try, and its little mind will explode! The same is for us monkeys! We can try, but our little minds can’t ever hope to contain the immensity of what truly Mana is!” He threw an angry glance at his disciple. Tim looked entranced. He grumbled, somewhat mollified, and continued: “So what do we do? We have a world of possibilities, but we can’t understand it! What do we do, then?” He stopped, staring him down with his fists on his sides.

Timothy blinked. He opened his mouth, then closed it, unsure of what to say.

“We invent a language, you fool!” Gorren exploded. “If we cannot understand it, we picture meaning over it!” He restarted his stalking back and forth, gesticulating angrily. “The magicians of old found that they couldn’t interact directly with the Mana. Their minds simply didn’t have the capacity for it! So they tried to invent a language that they could understand and that the Mana reacted to. What did they found? Focus, that’s what! They found that Mana reacted to a certain pattern of thoughts! But those patterns had to be pure, focused! Focus focus focus! That’s the word! You call upon Mana, direct it to do something but if your wish isn’t completely purified by distractions, nothing happens! That’s the base! Focus! So they invented ways to reach and maintain focus! Breathing techniques, dances, chants, incantations, objects focus! Whatever you think of, they invented. And they invented a language that now they could understand! They invented magic! And what they found then? They found that Magic changed, was variable! Its effects changed if the patterns changed! Different incantations, different rituals, different actions, different formulas, state of mind and body, conditions, inspiration! And so magic started branching! It became a discipline, but it always and will always remain an art! Why? Because it cannot ever be completely explained! Logic cannot explain it. It’s made of emotions, focus and inspiration as well as materials and gestures and discipline! Do you understand?”

Tim shook himself from his entranced listening. He nodded hesitantly.

Gorren snorted with contempt. “Of course you don’t understand, fool! It’s not something that can be understood right away! But you will if you walk this path! Magic will thrust itself on your brain and remain there for good!” He stopped to glare at him, towering over his disciple, bony hands clasped on his sides. “So, again, what is magic?”

This time, the reply was quick and sure. “It’s the language that we use to make use of Mana.”

Gorren nodded gruffly. “Good.” He pointed a bony finger against Tim. “A mage that says that he completely understands is a charlatan or worse an incompetent. There is always mystery into magic. Yes, a mage worth his salt has to be able to launch a fireball effortlessly. He has to know the gestures, the incantations and how to reach the proper state of mind, but that doesn’t mean that he understands the exact mechanisms. You better remember this always. Have i made myself clear?”

Tim nodded quickly, and he turned back to his table lab with a snort.

Leaving any thoughts of teaching aside, he started to think about the experiment again. The moondaughter’s juice hadn’t been enough to sustain the transmutation. Maybe he could try to reinforce the lunar element with a mixture of liquid silver and etheroot…

Gorred came back to with a gasp, mind whirling. Feeling like something was constricting him, he flailed in panic, and even more when he realized that he couldn’t feel his limbs.

Memories returned into a rush. His prison, the ritual’s completion, the portal, the monster and the chaos that had enveloped him after. As the images rushed him by, cracking back into their place like pieces of a puzzle, confusion was steadily replaced by clarity. Eventually, a calm kind of awe settled in and he stood still. He had done it. He had actually done it. He was on the other side of the barrier, he was in the Crux.

Terror for the finality, the absolute madness of that choice rushed him but was quickly took over by overwhelming exultation. He was on the other side! He stood where nobody of his race had ever stood before! He was a pioneer, the first of his kind to walk that path! He stood at the pinnacle of humankind’s delving into magic!

Exhilaration overwhelmed him and he started to laugh, launching his triumph in the recesses of his mind. Then he remembered his situation and stopped abruptly as survival instinct kicked in. Yes, he had done it, and he was alive and conscious, but where exactly he was? And in what form? Bodiless souls couldn’t remain but a few moments in the material realm before being snatched away by the cycle of life and death. But here in the Crux? What had remained of him? He still felt like himself, but… and what about that monster? Where it had come from? And why? And that terrifying chaos? What…

No, enough piling questions. He wouldn’t get an answer to them now anyway. For now, he had to start small.

He began to assess his situation.

First of all, himself. He felt… lucid, his mind was as clear as an unspoiled pond. Incantations and formula paraded quick and defined like jumping fishes when he tried to recall them. Had his memory taken some kind of damage? After a long exam, he concluded that it wasn’t so. His personality? Tim’s bumbling around his laboratory felt as annoying as always, so that seemed to be okay as well. He felt a surge of relief. It seemed that his mind had survived the passage unscathed.

Next, his situation.

He couldn’t feel his body, but he could perceive it. It felt like an island in the distance, one that he could reach whenever he wanted, provided he put in a good swim. He recognized that forma mentis. It was an ancient technique that his master had taught him to preserve his own mind under extreme duress. Using it, one could abandon the body and retreat into his own mind, becoming untouchable by any external stimuli even if damage remained. It was a last-ditch tool, but it made sense. The chaos that had assailed him, he could barely try to remember it for his mind to feel like it was splitting apart.

There was a problem though. If he was a soul, why did he have a body? It didn’t make any sense… Except if the Crux was behind it. The sheer creative power of it was enough to pull off anything like that without breaking a sweat, and, after all, he still knew so little about it…

“Bah!” He scoffed. “This is just theory-making. Fantasy! I need more data! I need to see!”

And the only way to do that was to get back there. In fact, he couldn’t wait…

Giddy, he started to expand his consciousness. Thankfully, he was mightily expert with such exercises. The trick was to imagine yourself like some kind of that jelly-blob-thing, a slime, that was its stupid name, and, most importantly of all, don’t panic. Obviously, only a moron would panic while experiencing the cathartic freedom of out-of-bodies experiences but better safe than sorry, or something like that.

He willed his mind to expand, imagining himself to grow tendrils with which to probe around. It should have required some measure of concentration, but, to his surprise, it came very easy. Little tentacles obediently emerged from his consciousness, ready for order.

Repressing his unease, he started to probe around. As he expected, he found some kind of shell. It surrounded him completely, a hard, airtight barrier that, in the not-physics of the mental world, still allowed him to receive muffled shreds of impressions from the outside world. What he received wasn’t very encouraging: he had to immediately shut it off, a rising headache barely stopped in time.

He stopped to brood. The shell was the effect of the mind-retreat, a little safe haven from the chaos outside. It seemed to keep him safe, at least for now, but like this, he couldn't interact with the Crux!

Gorren squashed rising irritation and started to think of a way to circumvent that situation.

So, the cacophony… it obviously was his own limited mind’s incapacity to process the majesty of the Crux. His little monkey brain was trying to divide and receive individually the infinite elements forming the potentiality of that ethereal substance. Pah! Pathetic! What were the Gods thinking when they were designing humans? To have them farm potatoes forever?

That said, he couldn’t do anything like that. He couldn’t interact with the Crux! There had to be a solution…

Gorren remained there, a disembodied presence suspended into the nothing, for a long time, thinking of a solution. He thought and discarded numerous possibilities but eventually came to something that could, maybe, work.

“So!” He began and if he still had a body, he would have taken an imperiously cathedratic posture and tone. “It’s obvious that i can’t re-enter the Crux for now. My mind wouldn’t be able to process its potentiality and would just shut down again. But!” And he would have raised a finger to that, if he still could. “What about the opposite? I could open a tiny hole into my mental shields and let a tiny trickle of Crux enter into my mind. Even the most infinitesimal quantity of it would still contain the infinity of possibilities, but i could set some kind of filter. It would divide the Crux trickling in from part of its potential, allow only a simplified distillate to enter, maybe even degrade to Mana.”

It was all in the realm of theory, but not in the one of wild theory. He had worked to do something similar during his long decades of experiments with the Crux, managing to obtain an energized form of Mana. That string of experiment had been a failure, what was the point of obtaining slightly better Mana?, but right now he figured it would be the right step to start from.

“It’s so vexing!” He whined with irritation. Even after the jump, he was still forced to wriggled forward, instead of running. “Even that dream! I was wrong to tell Tim that Mana was unlimited. Crux is! Ack! My vision was limited!”

But, as much as frustrating it was, no matter the past. Now he had something he could try at least. If he succeeded? Who knew? Magic was full of jumps into the nothing! He just had to try!

Excitation rising for what was going to be his first attempt to Crux manipulation in that realm, he set to work. He focused his attention on a specific point of the shell and willed it to weaken, slowly. As he did, he felt his connection to the outside grew. The barely muffled shreds of sounds and images became stronger, melting together into a string of incoherence.

Gorren passed much time adjusting the connection, moving back and forth between levels of comprehension until he found a result that satisfied him. His efforts appeared as a minuscule hole on the shell, incredibly small chipping that was ready to give in at the proper command.

Then, he set to work on the filter. It felt almost blasphemous to try to disrobe the Crux of part of his infinite potential, but that was for the best of his research, so be like it wanted.

The work was slow and incredibly complex, Gorren weaving together a dizzying knot of meanings: void, emptiness, rejection, restriction, isolation. He worked non-stop for he didn’t know how much time, setting his filter to siphon an infinitesimal of the potential of the Crux, so that he could study it.

Still, it didn’t feel tiring at all. If all, it felt exhilarating. Without his old, battered body to hold him down, he felt as spree as a young hare. His mind moved as quickly as never before, jumping from a formula of massive complexity to the other like a dancer between pirouettes.

When he finished, a shout of triumph echoing in his mind, the filter was ready. It was a horrible thing, a twisting, gnarled spiral of anti-reality and death of potential, a hole of anti-life barely held in check inside of the ever-reforming cage of thoughts. Any other mage would have judged it an abomination and would be right. To Gorren, it was a masterpiece. Something like that couldn’t have ever been brought into being. The only reason it could exist was that his creator worked inside of his own mind. It was a construct that didn’t belong in reality, just what it was needed for that place.

Slowly, sustaining the filter with images of his tower ever-reforming and ever-crumbling, he set it into the hole. Then he stepped back, metaphorically speaking, admiring his work with satisfaction. He could almost feel the moment, maybe the first step of his continued research. Some trumpets or a drumroll would complement it well, but, hey, what the hell.

With laughter, he opened the hole. It did so for the barest fraction of moments, opening and closing, enough for the smidge of a drop to enter.

It was almost enough to overwhelm him once again.

A thousand thousand smells wafted to his nose, a million images, a hundred lives thrust themselves into his awareness. His conscience swirled, and he managed to catch himself barely a moment before blacking out again.

“Already better… urk… very good…” He mumbled, feeling his stomach, that he shouldn’t be able to feel, making spins and twirls.

Fighting against the dizziness, he focused, pushing his mind to isolate the distilled drop of Crux. He tried with a series of thought-configurations before snagging on the right one, a combination of revulsion, rejection, nihilism and thoughts of death.

“Good.” He huffed. He watched the drop, now appearing as a multicolored tear encased into the crystal to his mind’s eye. Its beauty was breathtaking. Colors of which humans had no names reached across and inside of it, vitality and life and eternity made manifest. No artist could have ever been able to bring such a thing into life, no matter his skill. That was the shadow of perfection. And, what was more important, he could see it, could perceive. Eventually, he would be able to interact with it.

He had no doubts about that.

Only then he realized to be exhausted, at least mentally. Well, that was expected. He had been going no-stop for how knew how much time. It was time for a well-deserved rest.

Letting himself go with a satisfied sigh, he left his mind focus back on itself. His conscience relaxed and set into a comforting rest, watching the beautiful drop encased into his mind.

Thoughts of the monster hit him. In all the excitation of the moment, he had completely forgotten about it. Was it some kind of lifeform? Living in the Crux? How strange, how peculiar. If anything, he expected Gods to live in such a realm. That was ugly, but it was no God, that’s for sure. A God wouldn’t have needed an illusion to try and subdue him.

Oh, well. In case it decided to appear again, he would give it another piece of his mind. It didn’t look too dangerous anyway.

With those thoughts, he let his conscious sink into darkness, drifting to sleep.