The Sage

There was once a sage with the form of an old scholarly man; he had long white hair, unblemished skin, a youthful face, and wore long robes with a cap. Everywhere he walked, plant life and small animals would spontaneously generate at his feet. He could split mountains, fly, see from afar, and teleport. He never aged, nor could he get tired, nor did he ever feel any negative emotions. He simply walked the world, generating life as he went. Hundreds of years passed as he walked the world, joyfully interacting with its residents. Sometimes, he would end up with people following him and worshiping him as a divine being, though he never really paid them much mind. He would spend his days helping those that needed help, offering advice to the ill-informed, and joyfully creating more life around him.

One day, the sage came across a large lake, with two houses on opposite banks. There were crop fields around the lake, and it was clear that those living in the houses lived by farming and fishing. Being curious, he decided to discretely observe those that lived there for a few years. He observed a husband and wife, with one child. At first, the family lived happily, despite not having many luxurious items. Their tools were old, but they kept them maintained. Their clothes were full of patches, but they could still wear them and smile. As the years passed, the sage noticed that the family was drifting apart. The father often took the child out across the lake, to work in the house far away from his wife. His wife was often left at home for weeks on end, and when the father would come back, he would do so drunk, exhausted, or belligerent. There was no village nearby, so the wife would spend her time working hard on the crop fields, keeping the house maintained, and saving food for the winter. Unfortunately, she was not skilled enough to keep the roof from leaking, nor was she strong enough to reforge the blades that became ragged from use, nor did she have enough stamina to keep the entire field maintained. Thus, the house, tools, and fields on her side of the lake gradually deteriorated.

One evening, the husband came home by boat. He was unusually composed, as he was clearly not tired, nor inebriated, nor belligerent. The wife was incredibly happy to see the man that she loved appear the way she remembered him before they had drifted apart. She happily welcomed him back into the home, but he simply stood on the shore with his boat. When asked what he was waiting for, he replied that the fields around the house were irreparable, the house itself was waiting to fall over, and the utensils that she used to cook his meals were clearly not fit for cooking. He asked how she could let it get this bad. The wife froze, looked at the husband, and told him that she was not physically capable of doing that much work alone. The husband looked at her in disgust, and told her that he was going to live across the lake permanently, and would never bring their child back to such rotten conditions again. He told her that she would be best off running off and finding a new family.

This interaction greatly disappointed the sage, who then teleported into the house to attempt to mediate. The sage questioned the husband on how he could be so cruel to the wife he once loved. The husband simply stated that he never loved her in the first place. This statement enraged the wife, who grabbed a rusty cleaver and ran at her husband. The sage, not wanting to allow them to kill eachother, flew to the husband, grabbed him, and teleported him to the other side of the lake. The sage then teleported back to the wife, knowing that she needed someone to vent her frustrations to. He teleported across from her and asked her if there was anything he could do to help her rid herself of the bloodlust she had acquired. She simply screamed that she would kill both the sage and her husband.

The idea of such a loving family falling apart awakened an emotion that the sage hadn’t felt in his thousands of years of life: anger. Being a new emotion, the sage drowned himself in it. The sage lamented the very fact that he hadn’t intervened sooner, and was enraged that the family could treat eachother so badly. As the wife rushed at the sage, the sage flew high in the sky, much above the rooftops. Afterall, the sage could fly and the wife couldn’t. She could not reach him with the cleaver when he was so high up. As he looked down at her, she screamed obscenities at him, threatened to chop him limb from limb, and waved the cleaver wildly. As his anger grew, he resolved to rid the world of such an ugly scene. He resolved to kill the family, to prevent such an atrocity from being seen anywhere else. As soon he resolved to use his powers to kill, he suddenly fell from the place that he was flying at. As he was falling, he tried flying, teleporting, and all other abilities that he had used countless times over his millennium journey. He couldn’t. As he impacted the ground, many of his bones broke. Feelings of pain that he had never felt before struck him. As he lay there, suffering, the wife runs over and chops him into small pieces with the meat cleaver.

The sage could live forever, would never get injured, and could create a great many things. However, as soon as he decided to use his abilities to destroy something, he lost everything.