The wizard sat back one day, looking upon all of the ruined statues, half-finished works of art, and deranged life-forms that had been born of his impatient spell-casting. He had created much strife in the lives of many, and he'd made plenty of messes that millions had died to clean up. He sat back and fumed. He was one of a long line of many, and they'd all come to the same, sad conclusion. Magic was not a means to fulfillment. It was a means to producing results, and a means to creating interesting experiences, but that was all.
He looked at his scores of music, his effigy sculptures that had embodied those spells he wanted to cast continually, his soured potions that hadn't worked well, the elixirs that had healed only minor ailments, those sour poisons he'd created when he got angry, and the way he managed to create different kinds of weather by reading about them in a book. He'd produced a series of fascinating experiments in his laboratory, but they'd lacked any degree of focus. He'd never stayed with any single discipline of magic long enough to attain any higher degree of skill than mediocrity.
But worse yet; he still lived in a prison of fear. He knew that he was terrified of something unknown. He knew that he was paying any price that he had to, just to avoid looking OVER THERE for yet another day. Over there lied terrifying things that he didn't dare think about. Over there was something that he'd built up in his mind as the worst possible outcome. Over there lied the worst days of his life, or so he thought. He didn't actually know what was over there, and he'd been casting spell after spell after spell to protect himself from finding out. Tonight, he said, there would be no more.
He planted his stake in the ground and the world went quiet. He finally took a deep breath and descended the flight of stairs into the terrifying dark of where he didn't want to look. Downstairs, he saw all sorts of fascinating things. He saw opened and unopened chests filled with scrolls. He read some of them, and they contained the spells he'd been casting without knowing it. He began to soon realize that he was in a dream. He was OVER THERE. He wanted to wake up, desperate to get out. But he didn't. A calm came over him. He looked through the library of spells, and found some really juicy ones. The memory of casting these spells came back to him. He began to remember. He began to remember the days before he'd begun to cast these. He began to remember the days before his Sentence.
Scroll after scroll, book after book, time disappeared as he tore through the stories. Time disappeared as he began to see beneath the stories and began to see what was happening. Time shrank to a pinpoint as the volumes merged into one. It all fell away and it all disappeared. The universe collapsed on itself, and the wizard was alone in the Void. It was just him, his awareness, and Nothing. Nothing was waiting for him to speak. His world would put him right back in a new world.
"I'm ready to go back," was the first thing he thought. And he woke up.
He knew that he could do this again. He needed to attain impeccability with his word first. Few things could be more dangerous than being in the Void and saying a curse word.
He discarded his spell books, his magic wands, and his crystal balls. That was the day he discovered magic.
