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As Midnight observed the winged beasts, her understanding deepened. What she perceived was not simply the warmth of a living body, not the heat that emanated from flesh and blood, but something more profound — their essence. This realisation brought forth echoes of her wizard's words, surfacing from the depths of her altered consciousness. Essence was not bound to the physicality of the body, nor was it the ethereal Rothar. It was the thread that connected them, the force that tied body and energy together, and yet it was neither. Essence existed in a realm that was somewhere between, somewhere else entirely — somewhere she could access and act?
The teeming hunger and thrill of the hunt thrummed through Midnight. This was more than just a test of her newfound abilities; it was a reaffirmation of her existence, a reminder that she was still a predator at her core, even if she had become something more. The creatures she sought were not prey in the traditional sense; they were beings of essence, their lives holding the sustenance she needed to grow her own being.
As she closed in, Midnight expanded her darkness, letting it unfurl like the wings of a great beast, enveloping the unsuspecting creatures in her shadow. They remained oblivious to the nothing creeping closer, their breaths slow and steady in the deep rhythm of sleep. Still, Midnight knew she had to be fast before the bending light caught up to give her away. Sensible beasts would recognise the shift in phantom presences long before visible orbs formed.
Midnight reached out to the male nestled within the highest crevice, determined to touch his essence, to seize it, to consume it and make it her own. Her darkness surrounded him, occupying the same space, yet for all her reach, Midnight failed to gain a hold on him.
As she struggled to make her darkness denser, now repeatedly attempting to wrap it around different creatures, the winged beasts began to stir. Something primal within them sensed the predator in their midst. A tremor ran through the flock, a collective flutter of wings, sudden, frantic, flaring fear — the male far above her bolted, launching himself into the air with an impulsive burst of energy. Instantly, the others followed, their sleek forms desperately darting away from the darkness that had invaded their refuge.
The hunt was on. Midnight surged after the fiator who had first sensed her presence. He was fast, but Midnight, unbound by the constraints of a physical existence, moved with a speed that defied nature. She streaked through the night more elusive and swift than any pathera could ever hope to be. The bird’s panic was palpable, a sharp flare of fear mingled with the fierce determination to escape the unseen predator.
Despite his small size — barely four bites for a patherren — the fiator was a marvel of speed and skill. As a mountain glider, he was perfectly adapted to this harsh environment, racing through the treacherous terrain with a grace that belied the brutality of the elements. Darting through spontaneous and constantly shifting wind currents, weaving through fog, snow, hail, and rain, he navigated the jagged contours of the mountain with remarkable agility. The fiator’s evasive manoeuvres, his sudden dives and rapid ascents, were all observed, calculated, and countered. Repeatedly, he attempted to break away from the mountain face, to soar into the open sky, but the relentless winds and swirling snowstorms always forced him back, confining him to the narrow corridors of safety along the jagged cliffs. While he hugged the steep slopes and cliffs for fleeting moments of shelter, Midnight moved with an impossible speed, neither slowed or constrained by the forces that trapped him within her reach.
Midnight's pursuit of the fiator was an intense exercise in concentration, a test of her newfound abilities against the challenges of this unfamiliar terrain. The bird’s rapid, unpredictable movements demanded her full attention, forcing her to hone her focus with each passing second. Initially, she had merely recognised the bird’s essence, a vague sense of its presence. But as the chase continued, her awareness deepened. She began to distinguish between the different parts of the fiator — not just the swirling Rothar, the ethereal energy that animated his existence, but also the physical body that followed the directions of this inner force. Together, these components framed the whole being, yet it was the essence that Midnight came to understand as the true core of the fiator's existence.
Stolen story; please report.
In a sudden moment of clarity, a flickering image of an arachnid flashed across Midnight’s mind, a revolting comparison that startled her with its unexpected relevance. The essence of a beast, she realised, was akin to an arachnid spinning and spanning a web around its own eight legs. This web was both a part of the arachnid and something separate, a delicate yet powerful structure that connected its legs and claimed the space in between. Anything caught in this web belonged to the arachnid, to be grasped, encased, consumed, or even released at its discretion.
Yet, while all that the arachnid caught was indeed its own, yes, in the most primal and incontestable understanding of every respectable beast, of the arachnid, it was not the arachnid itself. The web, though inextricably linked to the creature’s existence, was not The Arachnid. Even if the web were destroyed, even if a leg were lost, the arachnid would remain, capable of spinning a new web, of eventually reclaiming its space in the world. Similarly, a beast’s Rothar and body could sustain damage, could be reduced or even severed, yet the essence — the core of its being — might survive, might continue to exist in some form.
This revelation struck Midnight profoundly, though she could not discern its origin; it was certainly not from her wizard, who had never conveyed such an analogy. It was an irritating yet strikingly apt metaphor, aligning with her evolving understanding of essence, body, and Rothar. The body might diminish, grow, break, or shift, and Rothar could be depleted, replenished, or altered. Wizards, for instance, gradually expanded their capacity to hold Rothar over decades, which incrementally changed their all with each passing day. Yet, the wizard remained the wizard, even if his Rothar was depleted or if his body was irreversibly maimed. It was the essence that remained at the core of these temporal extensions, the arachnid at the center of its web, enduring through the cycles of receiving and losing, expanding and contracting, while always defining the space that was of the arachnid, tying together the fractured parts that were its whole, that were its existence.
This existence-defining space, the web of life surrounding the essence, was what Midnight began to discern in the fiator. She sensed him with a growing clarity that was both exhilarating and unsettling. Like him, all that lived was not a singular entity but, in truth, a fractured whole. The essence was the immutable center around which everything revolved, yet paradoxically, it seemed that it could not exist independently.
With this revelation, the hunt had unexpectedly transformed from a mere physical pursuit into a profound exploration of life's very nature. Amidst the ruthless snowstorms and freezing heights, the pursuit of the fiator became an intellectual and existential challenge, an attempt to understand and claim the foundation of life itself. Moreover though, it remained a trial of patience and adaptation. With each moment of clarity, frustration mounted. Midnight wanted to entwine her darkness with the fiator’s essence, to rupture it out of him and make it her own. However, unlike the shadebeast, the fiator was not a being of darkness, and no matter how often she tried, she could not figure out how to reach and consume his essence.--
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image [https://glasswizardchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/The-Glass-Wizard_Fantasy-Adventure-Magic-Webnovel-by-The-Duckman_Depressed-Wizard_Psychological-Online-Webseries_Fantasy-Novel_Fiator.png]
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