Mindscape

He was lost.

No name, no memories, no sense of direction.

All he had to keep him company were bleak sky and the barren wastes around him.

Occasionally he would come across people, but they were faceless. They always seemed familiar, but in the end he could never identify them. He was scarred, disfigured and badly wounded. He bled but did not die, wept and yet no tears graced his injured visage, could hear but not speak. He was dressed in rags that bore numerous scents, all just as hard to recognize as the people he encountered. He walked for days on end, miles of rough road causing his feet to bleed ceaselessly and painfully. Eventually after what seemed like an eternity of wandering, he found something that wasn't open wasteland.

It was a grave.

The rules of his existence were simple things, truly.

He could not leave the bounds of the Woods. He could not deliberately destroy the fabric of the prison that held him, though he'd found ways around that precept quickly enough. And, after a daring, rigged gamble, he was no longer allowed to harm Poet when the feeble rhymecrafter entered his domain. Infuriating checks to his power, stumbling blocks at his feet. Chains that held him at barely a fingertip's distance from what he deserved.

But they change. Bending. Tonight, I break them.

In a basement in Brill, behind steel doors, Jakobus paced down the isles of his laboratory, a blackboard closeby. Occasionally, he glanced at his scribblings; endless rows of formulae incomprehensible to any but him. He ran a hand through his golden hair, the ring on his finger catching a few of them – the light pain as the hairs were pulled from their nooks in his scalp barely registered. Self-activating behaviors, Jakobus mused, before snarling at his own lack of focus and returning to staring at the board. It all added up. It was correct. It had to be.

Standing upon the hill, overseeing his Mindscape, Jakobus narrowed his eyes in tense anticipation for what he would have to do. Decades of work would be risked; his very sanity lay in the balance. Perhaps tonight, he would not return to Aedran. Perhaps he would finally overstep his abilities, cracks and tears slowly laying waste to his very mind. Necessity, he mused, may be the mother of invention, but it is the sister of destruction.