#10 – Georgius Greniczer

Georgius is a gruff, short-tempered and generally unagreeable old man. But he is also a brilliant Wizard, spending much of his time charting the interelationships of various materials and developing new ways to use sub-sets of The Word to better control and shape magic. Though he has the respect of many of his peers for his studies and findings, he has very few friends because of his consistently deteriorating demeanor. As he has aged (over a long 200 years, lengthened by magic), his bones and joints and constitution have failed him slowly. Now life is a series of medications from Maria Toella, canes and walking implements and attempts to keep his body working another year. He keeps much of this from his colleagues and peers, though, so to most people, he is simply a perpetually annoyed and irritable individual.

He hides another secret of his condition, which terrifies him more than the deterioration of his body. He is slowly loosing control of his senses. He has already had two apprentices taken away from him, and has chosen to move himself to a more remote section of the castle ground, up in a tower connected to the facility by old stairs. It is at this point that he is given Leandra, who is warned of his ill temper (this was her master BEFORE Thadeus. She was perhaps ten when she was told to help Georgius). Over the course of two years she spent helping him with his studies, research and measurements, though, she grew to respect the old man greatly. Her meek attitude and constant apologies were a nusiance to him at first, until he realized she genuinely wanted to help and be acknowledged. When he began to see that she actually had enough of a mind to grasp his work, he actually showed her the occasional smile. These smiles unfortunately came as often as his rages. He was grab her wrist and shove her around, or toss his laboratory implements at her. It grew to the point that she would appear the next day with bruises that he could not remember, or could not understand the reasons for his previous anger. He was slowly loosing grip on his emotions, and the pain of his aging years did not help.

Leandra never judged him for it. She would simply nod and continue her work in the naive belief that if she did better, he wouldn’t have reason to be mad.

One day, a few years later, his rage and madness grew so great that he grabbed Leandra and shoved her, and finally kicked her down the stairs leading up to his laboratory. He passed out, and she was fond by one of the dormitory mothers, concerned that she was out past her curfew. She was taken to Maria Toella, who refused to believe that she had fallen ‘by accident’ without Georgius giving notice to the other Wizards. Within a week a quiet, secret committee was discussing Georgius and his actions in recent years, and by the en of the week, Leandra was forbidden from seeing him again, and Georgius was denied any further apprentices. Leandra tried ot plead that he was a good teacher, but as a younger Wizard, her words fell on deaf ears. Georgius, finally faced with the severity of his own mental deterioration, simply closed the doors of his study and kept to himself in self-exhile.

Category: 2011, Drama, Fantasy