Colours.

Sounds.

Then images, hundreds of them, then thousands.

Blurring together in a kaleidoscopic riot.

Distinct visions of specific images, abstract ideas, half heard whispers then more and more.

Words in a language I didn't know but somehow understood, then another then another.

Thoughts pressed upon my mind as each vision flashed before me.

Huge workings of a complexity I couldn't comprehend until suddenly I did.

While the visions hammered into me, the thoughts that came with them were not my own.

They forced themselves down onto me, forcing meaning into what I saw.

Hammered over and over again, all the while a foreboding presence, the origin of the thoughts and visions I witnessed threatened to drive me into shivering wreck of madness.

Over and over, visions came and went, more meaning came with each repetition until I began to feel the beginnings of understanding.

Just a thread, a mere suggestion at what was truly happening.

Not my own knowledge, no not even the book's knowledge but it's creator.

The one who had created the book, this was their knowledge, given freely into the book's keeping.

I had not been the one who was supposed to receive this knowledge but I also just knew that I wasn't expressly forbidden from taking it either.

Directionless?

Meaningless?

There had been no one specifically destined for this knowledge, no inheritor, no special purpose for a chosen someone.

I even knew that the knowledge contained within the book had no really purpose, it was not to be used for a specific thing, no grand design or destined reason for it.

It simply was knowledge, a collection of it.

No, this knowledge was put into the book's keeping for anyone to find, for what ever their own reasons might be?

The sense of time between this moment and the time when this knowledge was birthed seemed vast, even the time between the beginning of the visions to when they would come to an end seemed much longer than a human lifetime.

I could do nothing but witness and absorb.

Things began to make sense to me, I had always known about magic, or known of it's existence.

It was, if not exactly common, then at least not too uncommon.

It was more of an abstract idea to me, it was a thing that just happened.

Like a bird that flew over a mountain or man on the other side of the world who felled a tree.

It was something that surely happened but not something I knew about specifically.

Up until my parents had died I had only a child's view of the world, the thought of actually trying to perform magic wasn't a concept that even occurred to me.

When they were gone, I had grieved and locked away the torn pieces of my heart.

I had withdrawn into myself, a broken hearted child who had lost the only two people in his life.

Then Lord Hendrik, my uncle had arrived.

He was supposed to be my caretaker and I his ward.

Instead of caring for me, he had cared for only himself.

He had taken everything left to me, using my mother and father's wealth as his own.

I was little more than a golden chit to him, so long as he possessed me he controlled what was supposed to be mine.

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When I turned seventeen years old, he would have to turn over my inheritance to me.

He wouldn't allow that, I knew it and he planned for it.

The abuse began, the beatings, the mind games, the rules, the punishments.

Whatever it took for him to try to break me, to wear me down.

I knew what he wanted.

He wanted me broken and defeated for when I came of age, for me to meekly give over what was rightfully mine when the time came.

I hadn't been broken though.

During that time, there had been no thoughts of using magic.

Nothing but surviving and the daily battles against him in our...

No, in my estate.

Now though, it seemed so easy.

Something in my mind had shifted, as if I just hadn't been looking in the right direction all my life.

As if I had only had to turn around to notice that magic was right there for the taking.

To grasp it.

Visions swam in and out, meanings and concepts of primal forces.

Runic symbols, vast in their complexity or basic and simplistic, it differed from use to use.

Creatures, beings, animals, people I had never known.

All of them swam before me, information about them, bits and pieces seemingly random or without any real purpose flooded along with them.

The creator, the one who made this grimoire. I knew his name had been Althalan, a man, wizard, mage, wise one, old man, spry youth, foreboding, carefree, brooding, joyous, beloved, hated.

Pieces of his life, impressions without remembrance, knowledge without memories, recollections of abstract thoughts throughout his life from the idle whisperings of a wandering mind to the deep meaningful weighing of heavy subject.

Nothing complete, I did not know this man's entire life.

I knew pieces of it, seemingly random thoughts or memories, feelings or even dreams were splashed haphazardly into me.

I knew, I actually knew that this grimoire had been his second attempt as creating one. The first had been too poor to use, this one, the one I had unknowingly touched had been barely acceptable in his mind.

I knew why this room it had been left in had been sealed away, the answer was simply that it hadn't been sealed at all.

I just had not known how to find it.

I knew I had collapsed to the ground.

I knew that there was a very real possibility that I was dying.

A grimoire was created to pass on knowledge, even the best grimoires, the ones made flawlessly were never an easy thing to handle, not even for a mind prepared for it.

I was not prepared, this grimoire was just barely able to pass on knowledge and the knowledge itself was seemingly random.

Some of it incredibly useful, powerful, the kinds of things to inspire awe and wonder or give nightmares to those who beheld them.

More still, small things, simple workings used in everyday life, things done without any real thought, more reflex than anything else.

This grimoire was not meant to pass on anything of any real value, nor was it supposed to pass on nothing at all.

It was supposed to be a second attempt at a complex working, a thing a great magi wrought.

An exercise, practice.

What I gained from it was pure chance, if I truly gained anything at all that is.

I would either awaken or more than likely, I would not.