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The wizard’s body contorted under the assault. He convulsed, writhed and shifted. Chunks of ice broke away from his body and crashed down the mountainside, dragging debris and snow in their path, as he twisted in the throes of transformation, his form collapsing into something smaller.
The mountain resisted, ice clawing at him as he shrank, striving to reclaim him, but the transformation tore through him too swiftly, violently breaking him down. In the grotesque process that was shapeshifting magic, his body twisted into the semblance of a beast. He was becoming a predator of many legs, distorted and diminished — a horrid creature caught between worlds, neither man nor beast, stretching from the unnatural into the uncanny. Scales erupted over his elongating limbs and spine, arching at distressing angles as his body reformed into a crude, disfigured likeness of a lizard-kin. The stone artefact clung to him still.
With his size, his presence diminished as well. Life flickered weakly within him, a candle guttering in the wind. He had been broken before the shift, his strength drained in the futile struggle to save his companions and retrieve the golem, blind to the orich’s trap. What should have been a grand metamorphosis turned into a grotesque mockery of itself — a stunted, misshapen creature no larger than a patherren, something that could do little more than scramble for survival. His dark, bulbous eyes rolled erratically in their large sockets, pupils expanding and contracting, reflecting a mind that was no longer whole. He was incomplete, vulnerable, and fundamentally wrong.
The lizardkind creature emerged from beneath the ice, scuttling down the slope on pure instinct. Midnight observed him intently. Despite all that was so utterly wrong, she recognised something deeper within the twisted body, something more than the mere veneer of bestial nature. Unlike the novices of Emery Thurm, who draped themselves in the mimicry of animalism but held none of its truth, the wizard had undergone a profound, intrinsic transformation — he had shed his humanity. It was in his movements. They were honed, not conjured but carved from the crucible of raw wilderness survival. It was as though his mind had fully succumbed, leaving behind only the instincts passed down by his familiar bond — a haunting, hollow echo of what had once been a mind of sharp wisdom and intricate strategy. What remained was a fragment, a reduced consciousness bound to the form of a beast.
The lizardkind rushed downward towards the Snowtrail, its six jointed limbs scuttling with eerie fluidity as it cut through the web of terrain that should have belonged solely to the mountain but now adhered to the orich’s will. Its six feet were a complex interplay of fingers adorned with lizard-like suction cups, and equally numerous claws sprouting just above them. The claws, sharp and independently articulated from the suctioned fingers, gripped and released with great flexibility, allowing the creature to navigate the icy rock with unnatural ease. The lizardkind flowed across the mountain's surface like water, claws biting into stone and suctioned digits gripping onto even the smallest patches of ice.
His energy continued to transfer to the golem below, which now burst free from the thick pillar of ice encasing it. While the beast-wizard descended in frantic-fluid haste, the golem surged up the mountain with speed that belied its monumental size. With a torso rotating ceaselessly, stone arms reaching upwards with relentless purpose, and fingers supple yet unyielding, the golem found purchase even on the most challenging surfaces. Where its stone flesh met the mountain, it appeared to meld with the rock; a grotesque illusion of a massive boulder falling not down, but upwards. Each thrust of its powerful legs sent it hurtling skyward in aggressive defiance.
Yet, even amidst this display of raw power, Midnight discerned the spell unravelling. The wizard's Rothar had faded entirely — She realised that it was now his very essence that bled into the artefact. With each moment, his life diminished, feeding the golem but depleting the beast-wizard’s own being.
Meanwhile, the orich had transformed the mountain into a weapon of devastating potential. Midnight, now closer to ork magic than ever before, perceived the exhaustion of the frosthearts through a lens of intricate, alchemical transmutation. She recognised the orich’s magic not as the simplistic process of energy harnessing, but as a form of transmutation so profound it bordered on evisceration. The frosthearts were not merely depleted like spent energy crystals; they were being altered at a fundamental level.
The crystalline structure of the rock was unravelling, its natural stability sacrificed to unleash a torrent of raw energy that impacted both the Material and Alladharian Dimensions. While this orich drained frosthearts, Midnight knew that others channelled their will through different natural sources, each method marked by the same ruinous mark. Ork magic, regardless of its origin, bore the same destructive potential as the arts of witches, the condemned alchemy denounced by Emery Thurm's tutors — an unrestrained manipulation that drained and irreversibly compromised natural resources. In the case of the frosthearts, this magic warped the stones’ crystalline density, siphoned their thermal inertia, and left them brittle and hollowed, stripped of all resilience.
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While Midnight had heard these explanations several times, she had never grasped them like her wizard did. She did not learn from words, but from the visceral understanding that came from experiences. Now, as she witnessed the orich's magic consume the frosthearts, she felt its true nature. It was magic born of hunger and devastation, an irreversible depletion of resources that could never regrow. She understood, finally, that this was a predation upon nature itself — a feeding that would scar nature beyond recovery, leaving it forever unable to recover.
The orich did just that. In his attempt to halt the advance of the golem and the beast-wizard, he consumed the last of the frosthearts. Pillars of ice erupted from the ground, spears of frozen death aimed to impale. Shards rained down, splintering against the trail and cliffside, forcing the lizardkind to evade recklessly. He scrambled through narrow crevices and outcroppings, dodging death by sheer speed and desperation. Meanwhile, the golem, undeterred, smashed through all that the orich threw at it, its massive fists reducing any obstacle to rubble.
The lizardkind reached the avian beast, encased in a shell of ice against the cliff. Though trapped, the creature’s form was intact, not crushed. In a swift, calculated leap, the lizardkind launched itself onto the outcropping that held the beast captive. His front limbs shot forward, claws extending like bone spears and piercing the ice between the creature and the mountain. Once embedded, the claws erupted with bony protrusions that shattered the frozen shell, severing it from the cliff’s face.
In one single, violent fracture, the giant shard broke free. With the avian beast encased at its center, the massive chunk of ice plummeted down the mountainside. As the ice sphere fell, the orich conjured another wave of ice, attempting to snare the shard mid-fall. But the golem was faster. Ascending beneath the falling shard, it intercepted the ice with one arm, shattering the orich’s bindings with the other, and pushed itself off the cliff.
At that moment, the lizardkind lunged sideways, toward the voltera, chained to the mountain —but the golem intercepted and snatched him out of the air mid-leap. Together, they fell, the golem gripping the armour on the lizardkind’s back, while the creature, compelled by necessity, clung to the golem’s chest.
The golem rammed feet-first into the Snowtrail, with the massive ice shard pressed against on one side of its chest and the struggling lizardkind against the other. The creature tried to wrench free, but the golem immediately launched itself forward. In one seamless motion, the golem’s torso spun around on its fixed legs, flipping the lizardkind and the ice-shrouded avian beast to its back. Charging headfirst through the snow-laden trail, the golem now shielded its cargo with its own stone body. As it ran, its lower arms further enveloped and protected the lizardkind against any onslaught of shards from above and behind. Like that, it barreled forward, its form scraping against rock and ice, yet it maintained its momentum, never faltering, never losing its balance. With savage speed, it crashed through ice that had accumulated over centuries, towards the orich’s ledge.
The golem is not the wizard, said the voice that spoke for her.
Midnight had thought that the tranfer of energy from the wizard had granted him control over the golem, but now she understood differently. The golem was something alive, or at least aware. It was an entity driven by its own will, waiting to be fed with energy to act autonomously.
Both before the leap off the mountainside and just now, it seemed the lizardkind had wanted to free the voltera from his ice prison — but the golem had not. It had acted not as an extension of the lizardkind’s will, but as a force unto itself. The golem had decided. It chose to protect, but it also to confine the lizardkind, comprehending what the diminished wizard-mind had failed to grasp; that the lizardkind could not fight from a afar, that survival amidst the elemental onslaught was impossible in his current state, and that he could not sustain the golem for much longer. Unless the beast-wizard had hidden reserves of energy, his essence would not last another minute or two. Midnight perceived it unravel at an alarming rate.
And yet, despite his desperate state and his defencelessness against the orich‘s magic, the lizardkind had attempted to free both the avian beast and the voltera. It was unreasonable. Even if the golem somehow freed the voltera, how could it possibly carry him, the avian beast and the lizardkind to safety? It was unreasonable to such an extent that it made Midnight angry. Had there been any strategy at all, any foresight in his actions, or did the beast-wizard act out of mere incompetence and impulse? Did he not realise the imminent collapse of his own form —
Would Yves have left her?
The question struck Midnight with such sudden force that it disrupted all of her attempts at discerning strategies. It was one of those raw, intrusive thoughts that came without warning, like a whisper from deep within. It felt as though her mind had split, experiencing two realities at once Midnight had rarely experienced such moments — almost never before her transformation. She had always thought in the present, grounded in the here and now, observing and responding to her immediate surroundings. But now, increasingly, these foreign thoughts intruded and interrupted; abstract notions running parallel to the world she observed, feelings and ideas incongruent with what she was experiencing in that moment. It was disorienting, as if parts of herself were unfolding in directions she could not fully control, fragments of insight and emotion arising from realities she could not quite access.
As quickly as the thought had surfaced, others began to follow. With a peculiar sense of clarity, she understood the connection between the beast-wizard and the avian beast — they were wizard and familiar. The monstrous form he had assumed before becoming the lizardkind, though distorted and grotesque, had born an undeniable resemblance to the wingless creature.
Despite all the thoughts forming,
no answer emerged for the unexpected question,
only the awareness for the dualities of survival, sentiment and sacrifice.
Yet, deep within her most fundamental convictions,
she recalled that Yves, in moments if true consequence,
had proven to be a reasonable strategist.
From somewhere else
she unearthed the moment he had sent her away from the Vicha.
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