On the day The Mage reached the 6th Age, the Old Man acknowledged his return. On a previous night The Mage experienced a strange visitation. The familiar sense of someone sitting at the foot of his bed. The signatory recognition of those visitations experienced as a child. There was a presence there …but in the following nights it did not return. But old familiarity was aroused. He had a sense who it was and why.
It was then later confirmed days later on the morn of his 42nd birthday. Quiet music had played through speakers and The Mage had untaken a peaceful and tranquil sojourn. Along a path within the inner worlds he travelled. There before him, unannounced appeared the Old Man. A grin on his face and a wave of acknowledgement. It came as no surprise at all to The Mage. There before him was the visitor in his room who frequented the manifest plane from the other realms … when he was a young child.
He took note of the Old Man’s appearance … saw his beard had been tidied. He wore spectacles over his piercing eyes. In his hand he held a gift of sorts for The Mage. Then he was gone as suddenly as he had appeared.
The question now for The Mage … why has the Old Man come at this time? Significantly right on cue in the 6th age … significant and not coincidental at all. Only human time will reveal the reason why. He must recover fragments of memory back as a young child when the Old Man would nocturnally visit him and take him out onto the astral plane, around the stars and galaxies witnessing many things.
Visits which have remained with The Mage throughout his life. A distant memory of something so very real which his logical mind had tried to dismiss as figments of imagination. A deeper part has always known it was real. So very real.
Thus a pact must have been made or a contract written that decreed the Old Man would return on the blink of a cosmic eye … 35 years later for the mortal … the Old Man would be back again….
For the next stage in the contract perhaps?
