The old man shuffled slowly around the crowded room, searching through the myriad contents for one, particular spell component. He picked up a small, crystal decanter and examined the contents, shaking the bottle gently as he peered into it. Finally, with a dissatisfied grunt, he replaced the bottle and continued to search.

He was a stooped, old man. His face was a craggy mass of wrinkles that hid his sunken, grey eyes. His steel gray hair was long and unkempt, falling down to his mid-back in a tangled, stringy mess. The beard he kept neater, carefully trimmed to an even square, a relic of his youth when his hair had been stark black and the women tripped over themselves to be a part of his life.

He had made a grand figure once, in his royal magician robes trimmed with ermine. In his youth, he had been praised as the most promising young magician. Now he was what all the aspiring magicians wanted to be – powerful and secure.

He did not wear those grand royal magician robes now, although the worn hat sat at an obscure angle on his head. In fact, the royal magician and most powerful man in all the land wore nothing more than a pair of underwear and a single sock, his big toe sticking out of a large hole. There was no one around to care, expect his raven familiar in the corner, and that bird had seen far worse than the magician’s scrawny back and knobbly knees.

The room he shuffled through had barely enough space to move in, as piled as it was with magical tomes, spell components and a myriad of knick-knacks that may or may not have had magical properties. On one pile of tomes near the room’s doorway  was a strange, golden, circular contraption that had spinning rings around that never seemed to stop.  Though it looked fancy and often caught the eye of those rare visitors to the magician’s chamber, the device was actually completely useless and did nothing except spin. The magician kept it there as a distraction from the more dangerous artefacts in his care, the shiny spinning wheels tended to mesmerize his visitors.

Some of the most dangerous artefacts the magician owned were small beads held in a shallow, crystal dish. A single bead held enough explosive power in its clear sphere to level an entire kingdom. And the magician had dozens of the small beads sitting in the dish, collecting dust. They hadn’t been touched for many years, not since the civil war of two decades previous when he had been forced to threaten several towns with devastation to stop the rioting.

The crowded bookshelf next to the dish held a wide assortment of weathered tomes and, strangely, a simple piece of folded, white cloth. Whenever the magician’s shuffling steps took him near it he would reach out and gently caress the fabric before removing his gnarled fingers and moving on. Out of everything in the room, this was the only object that had no magical properties or insights, it was entirely mundane. The memories it evoked in the magician, however, were as far from mundane as could be.

It had been his wife’s. The simple, satin cloth was a sash that she had worn on their wedding day, that beautifully terrible day. Though it had been over 50 years ago, the magician still remembered every little detail of that day. He remembered her smile, beautiful and free, as she walked down the aisle, white rose petals in her dark hair as the guests threw handfuls of the fragrant petals towards her. Her dress had been a simple one, clean lines accentuating her curves and the white sash belted around her middle.

They had held hands at the alter, exchanging their vows to love and protect one another for all their days. For two blissfully perfect minutes, they held hands and kissed, magician and wife, to the happy cheering of their friends, family and all the most important members of the King’s court. For two minutes, life was exactly what it should be.

And then the two minutes ended in one gut-renching, heart shattering moment that was so silent it was surreal.

They stood together on the alter, arm in arm as they faced the crowd, beaming and waving, newlyweds about to commence their lives together and build a family. Suddenly, she had stiffened and become a weight in his arms and the cheers morphed into screams. He had turned bright eyes towards her and saw the bolt that had appeared in her chest, bright red slowly seeping into the white cloth.

The magician had exploded into a vengeful wrath after gently, carefully laying the corpse of his new wife onto the ground. He had taken to the skies, sending bolts of lightning in the direction the bolt had come from, burning the assailant to a crisp before he could even be identified.

They had never found out who had killed her. They had never found out why she had been killed – she had not been an important person, her family was just one of the minor nobility that were a dime a dozen, but she had been his.

The magician had never fully recovered from that day, and he often mourned the life that they could have had, the children they could have raised. He had thrown himself into his duties, becoming who he was today – the most powerful man in all the land. Powerful and supremely unhappy.