Musings of a Magic Surgeon or, How To Hate Yourself and Live

[Iceborn]

Compulsion.
The enchanter stares. He knew compulsions. He knew the mind, their workings.
Take them close to the ear, hear the little ticks like a pocketwatch.
Action.
Reaction.
Action.
Reaction.
Stop.
The compulsion was Force. It was Pull and Push. The compulsion was aggression from within. It was to turn what was inside against oneself - override information, rewrite directives. Alter the order of priorities. A compulsion defines what is truly important, what needs to be addressed, tended. What needs to be done. It doesn't ask why, it doesn't delve so deep as to explain why - no, the mind itself takes care to invent its own excuses.
To justify itself. It needs to justify itself to retain integrity.
Without a reason, there is no reason. Sanity is natural.

So when the enchanter was confronted with a compulsion, he stares.
He holds it in his mouth, even though it has lost all its flavor a long time ago. It lingers there, the presence in the lack of another, like the withdrawal follows the addiction.
A horrid dance of needs and cravings.
Consuming.
And there is nothing else to do but to stare. To give in is to perpetuate the cycle, a cycle of decay and slow waste. The early grave had no allure to the enchanter.
And yet he stares.
The door wasn't open, yet he had the key.
He didn't remember pulling it out, but it was between his fingers.
He was grasping it, the hologram of might and magic dancing on the table. Its arcane etchings, dull, and even then he had managed to draw blood from his hands merely grasping. Merely grasping.

The door was inviting.
He held the invitation.

The enchanter stares. He knew compulsions.

The mind was truly a horrible and cruel machine.

[Iceborn]

Silence.
For the wizard, silence was more than a mere state. An environmental condition. For the wizard, silence was a necessary resource. It was a quintessential commodity, essential like the very ink that defined the infinitely complex equations that composed the magical medley of formulas in every single spell.

Only in silence, was the wizard honest with himself. The false barrier of fragile reality that those wandering souls with pretensions of sentience and emotion attempted to build, would shatter like the glass it was, and from the reflection through, only reality as it truly was could be contemplated. All that was left was the wizard and his book. The one final, inescapable element: oneself.

It was a necessary pain, that moment of silence, that bubble that it would form. It was the lapse what provided the order to the next sequence of events, and previous. Voids. The silence was this void. This negative where life was allowed to stand upside down. At some extent, it was sacred. A sanctity that not even the most intimate of the divine bargains knew.

Once, the wizard had ruled the silence with iron grip of mechanized monarch. Now, to say that the roles had reversed would be an oversimplification. In the silence, there was purpose. There were memories, reasons. The integral order that made him. And now, something else held the monopoly of silence.

Not even to suffer on his own accord, was the wizard permitted.