My name is Laurence Hartdale. I am 63 years old, born and raised in Connecticut, schooled in Washington DC, and currently a Philosophy professor at Astarte University, in Birmingham, New York. That is, that's who I am to the general public. Privately, I am a student of the occult, of astrology, numerology, incantation, and all others ways Man has tried to impose his Will on the world, and understand the effects of that Will. A student, not a practitioner, try as I might. I know it all, I see clearly the patterns that govern, and yet I am no closer to making my will manifest now than I was when it all began.
I was a much younger man, then, just making my way into the world of Academia. I was well educated, schooled at universities of excellent reputation, but I was still as a blind man; I saw the world as everyone else, saw what I expected to see, and not what was truly there.
He was an odd man when I found him; or when he found me, depending on how you look at it. He always insisted that he was the active player, that the world bent and wove around his actions. He told me, after a time, that he had found he could impose his will on the world, make things happen, work magic. he said that he did just that, for a time, and saw to it that he and his got whatever was wanted. But then he started to see some of the after effects, some of the deeper ripples of his tampering. He started to fear his own power, and the damage even the most harmless nudge might cause. He was paranoid about cause an effect when I met him, and only grew more and more so as time went on.
When he first told me of this, he said I was an experiment of sorts for him, though I never learned the end to which he played that game. He came to see in my own trials, successes, and failures evidence of his doing, or not doing, depending on how things played out. He began to curse that he'd ever met me, but said he was too afraid to leave me; too afraid of what might happen if his experiment were left unfinished. He eventually tried to do nothing at all, so far as he could help it, but eventually saw dire consequences even in that.
He tried to kill himself once. He stepped off the curb in front of a bus. The driver must have seen him, I guess, because the bus swerved to miss him, hit a pot-hole or a bump, and skidded into oncoming traffic. A dozen cars were caught in the resulting accident, ending in a great number of injuries and even a few deaths. It wasn't long after then that he vanished; I never saw him again. Presumably, he left his experiment unfinished, and figured the results of that were better than... whatever else he might have done.
He perceived great weight in his actions, presumably because of the power he wielded, and I believe that weight drove him slightly mad even before I met him. It surely drove him insane before he vanished. But he opened my eyes. I saw what he did. Sometimes he was simply rambling like any paranoid delusional. But sometimes I really saw him change things. I really saw him impress his will on the world around him. I saw that magic was real.
I've been studying the ins and outs of occultism, mysticism, and wizardry ever since then. He managed to manifest his will, yes, but I think that his error wasn't in the doing, but rather in that he couldn't control his will well enough. He lacked focus. I would learn what it took, and I would focus my will. I would become a Mage.
It's been nearly 35 years now, and though I've learned much, I can't actually *do* any of it. I know the rituals and the words, the theories and the formulae. Maybe I'm too old. Maybe it would take a younger soul, a stronger will. Maybe I could find someone, an apprentice, and then my own great experiment could begin. |
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jackofallgeeks
