The blizzard encases me in a furious cold, and as I dangle my legs over the balcony, all I can think about is the cold. Not that I can think about much else. There isn't anything else I can think about. Only the cold, and the colder Skooma trickling down my throat.
I'd heard stories about Skooma, how that sweet substance could creep into your system and damage it beyond repair, infect your brain and drive it wild with crazy thoughts. Knowing this, I drank down the bottle even faster. It wasn't easy getting ahold of a bottle of Skooma, in the College of all places, but, as I used to say, Jzargo can do anything. Even if it includes sitting on a ledge a hundred meters up and chugging down what might as well be poison.
The Skooma is finished in seconds, and my thoughts turn pleasantly chaotic. I lift my hand up, extending it over the world, and drop the bottle. I watch it fall. It seems to take a long time. Finally, I see it land on the snow below, shattering into a million pieces upon meeting the ground. That was quick. quick and painless.
Then I hear it. There is something in the air, something heavy and dark, and I can feel it in my bones, after all, Jzargo has a sixth sense about these things. I know, instantly, that it has arrived. The daily disaster of the day. The apocalypse is rolling around for another spin. Only this, time, this will be it's last round. I've made it so. The world, everything, from the day it first started to the day it stopped, from alpha to omega, from every single particle to every single speck of life, they will end. But before the end comes, I'll jump before it can take me.
As the air around me heats up and the darkness spreads across the sky, and as the blizzard redoubles its freezing wrath, howling desperately around my ears, trying to drag me off the ledge and send me plummeting off the College, I close my eyes.
There was a time when I wanted to be Arch-Mage. There was a time, when all I did was learn magic. Where concentration and time added up to a spell, back when two plus two made four. That, at least, I could understand. But now, I cannot understand anything. Jzargo does not understand anything at all.
It's coming, racing across the skies, vibrating every bone in my body, and I know it is time to leave. The stomr rages around me as I stand up, extend my arms horizontally, like in a cross, and then, I let myself fall.
Into the blissful abyss of nothingness.