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Midnight was confronted with a barrier of a different nature. Anticipating a clash of darkness and light, she believed she needed a form. She needed mass to displace the surrounding light. It took her several minutes, but eventually, the ripples of darkness that were Midnight compressed and thickened. Traversing through the mountain wall, she had learned that she could, to some extent, spread and densify her form, expanding or compressing her presence. Thus condensed, her darkness emerged into the phantom presences of the countless undisturbed nets of light covering the mountain face.
She expected her emergence to be an act of force, a conflict between opposing elements. She anticipated needing to displace the light, to become a mass of darkness pushing against a mass of light fragments — like one beast trying to repel another. However, as she manifested outside the mountain, the light did not obstruct her like an external force. Nor did it pain her to exit the absolute darkness that had claimed the mountain. Midnight was there. The light fragments were there. They inhabited the same space, and yet, they did not touch.
As a beast, Midnight could not perceive light fragments in their complete alladharian existence or adjust her depth perception in peculiar extremes like the Lightshifter wizards could. Still, with her midnight stalker senses touching upon the Alladharian Dimension, she had always excelled at noticing even the faintest phantom presences. Now, as a being of darkness, she felt the world around her with a new body. From what she currently sensed and building on what she had already concluded about her transformation, she was yet again reminded that she no longer had ties to the Alladharian Dimension. No part of her was Rothar. And with that, no part of her existed where the light fragments were. Midnight understood that she was not there, but found the concept exponentially confusing the longer her mind dwelled on it. She decided not to dwell on it any longer.
She was an existence of no Rothar and no physical matter, yet when she had compressed her form, she had become a presence. She was not a phantom presence, not a dark shape or a shadow in this light-drenched environment, but she seemed to affect the Material Dimension. Midnight knew because even though she was nothing, the light started to flow around her. Beams of light, formerly prismatic reflections and straight rays, visibly bent in their trajectory towards her as if Midnight herself was attracting them. Unintentionally, she was pulling these phantom presences of light towards her.
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The beams were not like Yves’ attacks of light, not like spears that had touched her when she had been a beast. Instead, so gradually that Midnight could observe the changes, the light started to form ovals and rings around her. The omnipresent beams formed an intense orb of light with her at its center, encircling the ripples that extended from her essence. There was still no pain, but the phenomenon unnerved her. Midnight had always been a creature of stealth; regardless of the reason behind the disturbing spectacle, this light was a growing target on her.
Immediately, she compressed herself even more, condensing into the mass of ripples she had been during the fight against the shadebeast, who had aggressively reduced her to the size of a patherren — a cup-sized manifestation of her former self. This intuitive compression not only further reduced her size, or rather, her reach, but also made the beams of light bend even more strongly and from a greater distance. The denser Midnight became, the larger the orb grew.
And then, something more happened. Suddenly, the darkness tethered to her essence began to erode. She felt herself being expended, exhausted merely to exist in the light-filled environment. Immediately, Midnight retreated from the light, seeping back into the mountain. The moment she did, the circular orb dissipated. Enclosed within the rock but with her senses extended, she felt the beams thinning and straightening back into their natural form. She attempted to emerge once more, but as the orb reformed and condensed around her, she once again felt her form disintegrate and diminish further.
It was disturbing. Midnight was not much to begin with. She had been unable to regain her former size, to grow back. Even the darkness she had split from the shadebeast could not be assimilated; in the ice cave, it had remained as an external force she could control but not consume to reshape herself. After the fight, Midnight had absorbed the essence of the shadebeast, but she did not know if it had caused her to grow in any manner. She had been unable to discern at that moment, and she still could not. She had been too immersed in the intoxicating essence of the beast. She wondered if she would, over time, surpass this diminutive residue of her existence on her own, as she had once evolved from a mere patherren to a full pathera?
In the past, her growth had been fuelled by external forces: physical prey and the energy of Rothar. Without a tangible body, she no longer needed to hunt for sustenance. But what about the energy she had once derived from the moon? Could Sey still strengthen her, or had she lost that connection entirely? Was she still, somewhere, somehow, a midnight stalker, or had she become something else entirely?
Midnight now understood that her formidable abilities had been entirely dependent on her environment. In the profound darkness of the Albweiss, she had thrived, but in this world flooded with light, she felt weakened and vulnerable. Would she only be able to exist in environments devoid of light? The realm immediately beneath the Raja Siena stood in stark contrast to the subterranean world of the Albweiss. In the depths of the mountain, Midnight had manifested her existence without any cost or compromise. But beyond the underground realm, there were no expanses of uninterrupted darkness. Everywhere was bathed in light, day and night. Even during the darker hours, some source of illumination persisted, whether it was the moons or the stars — except, of course, during the witching hour, the period of absolute darkness. A question arose in Midnight’s mind: Would the dark moon affect the encircling light? Would T̰́̇ͦ̀è̸̷̸̬̤̗̊_̸̵̰̦̗̒͜ȟ̗̍ͤa̶͉͉͍̭̰̅̀̈͜ͅȓ̶̶̛̦͇͙̟̈̿͒ͮ͑̋̚͡u̟͖͔̖̙͙͆̄̿ͩͧ̃̽̓̈̌̀͟͞n influence her?--
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