Pillars
Jarlsberg - Obsession
Jarlsberg was fairly stable for most of his childhood, but signs of deeper psychoses sometimes made themselves evident - an anal arrangement of books here, a nervous breakdown there. Many people assumed it was a by-product of his uncanny and inscrutable levels of genius. The insecurities came to a breaking point during one innocuously important evening.
Exhausted from a long day's contemplation of the universe, Jarlsberg perused his house for a piece of cheese, and, eating it, he didn't notice until too late that he had absent-mindedly riddled the morsel with bacteria, an innate talent performed without any mana or humorous gesticulation. One bite was enough to cause infection.
The sickness lasted only a few days - mages often possessed innate resistance to the effects of their own spells - but the mental scars were to last much longer than the vomiting and malaise. In the aftermath, almost every waking moment was spent immaculately grooming and cleaning his possessions and cowering in fear at anything that suggested disease. If not for his breakthroughs in ethereal food and beverage conjuration to follow, he might well have starved. Few historians knew how close one of the archetypal elders came to death by malnutrition, nor how damaged the most outwardly sane of the legendary trio was. It was only thanks to the hidden determination common to the folk of the Times of Old that he got through the bullying.