This book has been transcribed by Lilian Williams in AR 169. The original author was Ayin Mesmer.
The human consciousness is so frail, so fragile. That is what people forget whenever they ask me, like you have, whether I'm truly aware of how terrible and mad I am. You people interview me thinking you'll get an old lunatic raving at you incoherently, and spouting abuse about old enemies. You won't get that from me today, my friend.
My mind broke some time ago. All wizards of a certain intellect tend to break. It's usually for the same reason. Obsession. The hunger and thirst to discover knowledge becomes overpowering after a while. Magical power rewards in consistent little chunks. Whoever invented 'circles' of magecraft should be cursed for creating such a dangerous gateway to the insane. I can see you're doubting me. And yet you've stopped taking notes. Pull your chair closer, pour yourself another drink. Listen.
Some decades ago, as an Archmage of the Arcane Tower, I experimented with creating synthetic intellects, or artificial intelligences. Life without life. Consciousness without the burden of a mouth attached to a tube to keep it going.
Sort of a living library, was the practical purpose, but books are fairly inefficient when compared to a human mind - and a wizard's mind, at that. Storing 'knowledge', that is, true knowledge - ideas and concepts - is not something that can be done with words.
Don't look confused, this is fundamental. Every sentient being is encumbered by its faculty for language. Language is too cumbersome for the thoughts, the feelings, the concepts that race through our minds.
Words are simply a system of symbols, inferior facsimiles of true thought. This suffices for the everyday, perhaps even the complex. Philosophers have made do for centuries. But to truly store a thought - a pure thought, an idea, a concept, not a symbol - is astonishingly tricky.
Are you familiar with soul gems? Oh, now the pen comes back out. Give it to me. You see this? This is the tool of idolatry. I'll give you it back later, if you understand. Soul gems. They were the starting point of... everything. I was well into my second century of life, but it was the true beginning.
I purchased many thousands of gold coins' worth of soul gems from Hell itself. Each one is a fragment, a shard if you will, of the consciousness of a dead individual. It's possible for the life-essence contained within to be absorbed into one's spirit by eating them, but that's woefully inefficient. No, it takes a little more to extract the memories contained within.
Divination. I was once known by an old friend as 'Diviner', such is my skill at it. 'No Finer Diviner'. 'Soothsayer'. And so on. With my skill it was relatively simple to extract them, but the gem itself was what contained and channeled it.
I needed a better vessel - an interface, if you will. I first contemplated a... humanoid interface. Speech. This eventually became the Genesis project, a very dumbed-down version of the real breakthrough.
I also considered an artifact interface. That should be artifice... faceted. Created. An object, but this suffers too from the problem of simply representing through symbols, of watering it down. No, the ceramic and fully-automatic models of thinking of the universe are over- I've lost you. It's not important, another time, perhaps.
Regardless, I needed a natural method. A means of placing ideas within the mind directly. Enchantment is not my strong point, but even if it were it relies too much on suggestion and social skill - these rituals of life that have no bearing on truth and knowledge.
So I turned to my other skill - necromancy. Necromancy is more than necrokinesis - that is, the application of negative energy - it is the study of death and life. Note, and life.
I took a simple seed and manipulated it to take root in a pot studded with soul gems. The pot was warded with divinations to extract the knowledge, the ideas, into the soil. Mental nutrients that fed the plant... a small tree, which I nurtured in the eastern bonsai style, solely to ensure it remained a contained test subject.
From this miniature tree grew red apples. Perfectly edible, and with the precisely desired effect - one saw.
Oh yes, I saw. For weeks on end I sustained myself solely on these apples and the things I saw under their influence. Eventually I came to the clear conclusion that I was quite mad. Certifiably insane, thoroughly amoral and, to top it all off, that I was entirely satisfied by these circumstances.
Furthermore, I realized that every genius - and, after a certain point, every wizard can be classed a genius - is also mad in the same way. Obsession, a lust for knowledge. The hint and idea that language and symbolism are but barriers to deeper thought and knowledge of the universe manifests roughly when one's spellbook is fairly complete.
Incantations no longer hold the same weight they once did. Everyone and their mothers own near-complete spellbooks, and there's very little to be learned from making more spells just because one can, not that it stops us trying.
This is soon followed by the realization that knowledge is infinite. This is perfectly obvious, one can't know everything, but this is only fully accepted around the time one begins casting tenth-circle arcana.
This acceptance is what accounts, I believe, for the mindset of the most powerful magi. It's an observable trait, and I've seen it many times over as young wizards become powerful ones with an overwhelming sense of ennui about their never-ending task.
The lucky ones die at this point, before the full grip of the obsession takes hold. The burning hunger to know all, yet in the back of your mind there's the niggling fact that all is all, and one cannot know all as it implies there is something greater than all to know it. Who knows the knower? Is it you who is thinking your thoughts? Do you feel feelings, or this simply feeling?
Here, have the pen back. You're not looking so good; I should have stopped a while ago. You want me to go on? My dear, if you want me to go on I think you'd have to join me.
All right then. Renounce your anchor. Let go of the social mores, petty morality, and inferior symbology.
Break the pen.