Over and over again the sorcerer reached impasse. In one thousand years of study he had done all the calculations, collected every sample, scoured over every record of man, beast, and element from the threshold of time itself. And yet the answer evaded him, tormented him, and filled him with the sensation of rising waters, feet no longer touching the bottom. Overcome with desperate exasperation he cast up his hands and wept.

He was not familiar with weeping - he had only but a vague recollection of it from his Parting all those centuries ago, and wouldn’t have realized had it not been for the clink of the single tear that dropped from his eye onto the table before him. Puzzled, he respited, and picked it up. Rolled it between his fingers and felt its strange weight and crystallized texture; held it to the light and examined its supernal luminance. Peering into its infinite facets he saw the universe, each window unveiling a vignette of its immaculate and wretched totality. He saw his answer, and he saw all.

Hungrily he turned it in his hand, devouring each morsel of knowledge not just from that which contained his sought solution, but from those whose root equations were unfathomable. Turning and turning, absorbing, enraptured - until on one facet he took pause. It was not like the others, not a transcendent portal but rather unremarkably opaque, with a surface so smooth it betrayed no characteristic other than his own reflection mirrored back at him. His mind quieted as two pairs of deep, tired eyes stared into one another, tracing an unfamiliar map of lines running down drawn faces toward a silver beard. He saw, for the first time, that he had become an old man.