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Why was this not working? Barbathera struggled to scale the toll her influence was exacting on his fragile body. His bones trembled, his veins pulsed erratically beneath her roots, a chaotic rhythm warning of his limits. He was weak, far weaker than she had anticipated. Already worn down by the cold and the battle, his body was incapable of sustaining both himself and her. And yet, though his body was so susceptible to her influence, his mind was not. It resisted. It rebelled. It refused to yield to the body, to its own failing vessel. He fought to the brink of total collapse.
Still, Barbathera pressed deeper, ever more damaging and draining him. She had simultaneously overestimated and underestimated him. His mind was surprisingly strong, far more formidable than his body. She was forced to apply her influence to its utmost intensity, stretching herself to the edge of her control. Later, adjustments would need to be made – she would have to temper her grip, to conserve his strength while maintaining her control – but for now, she had no choice. If his mind would not bow to his body, she would have to reach into his unconscious.
It was strange. In most of her past hosts, the impulses of the body and the unconscious were nearly indistinguishable, intertwined as one. For some beasts, they had been one and the same; with the body serving as the unconscious. However advanced a people, Barbathera had found the body to be a crude but reliable gateway to the mind. But here, with this ork, the boundary was stark. His conscious mind stood as an indomitable barrier, severing the ties between her manipulations of his body and the desires that comprised his sense of self. He had readily accepted all the pleasures, all the warmth she had given him, but such influence rendered him passive, useless. To subdue him into becoming her guide, Barbathera needed more than simple control over his flesh. If the unconscious rebelled against all reactions of the body that she provoked with her secretions, she needed to align his mind with her will instead. If she could not control the runt through his body, then he himself had to become the architect of his own submission, consciously believing that her will was his own.
With the Shaira, Barbathera had first learned to distinguish what defined a being’s mind. At its core, it was impulses — layers of them. The conscious consisted of what she could best describe as impulses of spontaneous feeling, appearing and vanishing in bursts. The unconscious, in contrast, comprised of a buried strata of ingrained impulses, which were embedded and always traceable within the core of a being.
Barbathera could not read minds, not like a witch. However, by honing her roots to an infinitesimal scale and threading them through the nerves of her host, she could send thousands of subtle stimuli — tiny provocations that elicited reactions she could study, interpret, and manipulate. It was a constant interplay of seeking and forcing, of probing, provoking and evaluating, until she could trace and master the impulses she wished to enforce.
It was demandingly delicate work. She was fighting against time and cold. The ork’s instincts, fragmented and disorganised as they seemed, were alive with a raw, feral vitality. Survival was imprinted in his kind — primitive, unrelenting, and deeply ingrained. Orks did not think their paths as wizards might. They felt them. Each step upon the mountain, each shift of the wind, each scrape of rock beneath their feet, was embedded into their bodies like a special sense. The runt’s connection to the Albweiss was almost preternatural in its intensity. Whether it was the urgency of Barbathera’s situation – her pressing need for freedom, the threat of freezing – or something unique about him, she could not tell. But it was there: stronger than anything she had encountered in an ork before.
She latched onto this instinct, diving into the currents of his deep-rooted awareness, seeking the inherited wisdom of a species forged by this hostile terrain. She did not try to dominate him outright. That would have been too risky, too blatant. She did not strike him with any more pain or sickness, nor with overwhelming ecstasy. Those were tools for brute control, not mastery. Instead, she made her will indistinguishable from his instincts. She blurred the line between her suggestions and the ancient, primal patterns that guided him; luring him with subtle sensations and truths that resonated in the marrow of his being: a fleeting warmth that whispered of solace, subtle euphoria that mimicked the gut-deep satisfaction of instinctual fulfilment. She no longer provoked reactions; now, she cultivated feelings in accordance with those deep-seated instincts that had harboured his people through generations. Barbathera did not make him react. She made him sense.
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Nagrak was slumped against the jagged cliff wall, barely able to hold himself upright, his head tilted just above the snowline. He had expelled more than he had eaten in the past ten dawns, his body utterly emptied, hollowed. The sickness had ravaged him, leaving him frozen to the core, unable to distinguish the numbness of his flesh from the empty that seemed to echo within. He was certain he was dying.
Then, in the suffocating expanse of the Full Dark, he felt it — a touch. It coiled around him like a mantle of wapa fur, enveloping him in warmth, a warmth that was alive. It seeped into him, filling the hollows where his strength had been torn away, replacing the emptiness with something sacred and overwhelming.
From deep within, Nagrak understood. This was the text image: "WERISS" [https://glasswizardchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/WERISS-2.jpg] [WERISS]. The sacred touch of the mountain.
Kneeling within the Full Dark, the wind shrieking around him without reaching him, Nagrak felt the weight of the mountain’s will. The dead warriors at his feet were his past, the staff in his grasp determined his chosen path, and the text image: "WERISS" [https://glasswizardchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/WERISS-2.jpg] that now coursed through him was a mark of transformation. He thought of ork traditions, of the walkabout every ork eventually underwent — a solitary journey to prove himself to the mountain, to earn its favour and return as warriors, as protectors, as krags.
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The mountain had chosen him. The mountain had armed and cleansed him.
Now, Nagrak needed to leave. A faint but undeniable pull had taken root within him. It called him away — from Gorak, from the orichs, from everything he had ever known. The compulsion was absolute. He was never more sure. He needed to leave. Right now. This was his orich walkabout. The staff, the mountain, the text image: "WERISS" [https://glasswizardchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/WERISS-2.jpg] within the Full Dark — it had all aligned to set him on this path.
Straightening, Nagrak tightened his grip on the staff, its gnarled roots writhing faintly beneath his fingers, as though alive. The faint pulse matched his own, a synchrony that steadied him. He did not falter. Keeping the cliff wall to his left, he began to walk. He followed the call, the pull of something far greater than himself.
There was no fear in him now, no doubt. The mountain’s will was absolute, and he trusted it with a faith as unyielding as stone. It was his purpose to make this will reality. He would follow where it led, and when he returned, he would not merely be an orich. He would be a master of all magic, a force to reshape destiny itself. Gorak, the orichs, the horde—they could never comprehend the enormity of what had happened here. But they would see. He would rise as the krag of all krags, the harbinger of the Era of Orks.
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Unfortunately for Nagrak, the mountain did not lay out his path as straightforwardly as he believed, in the most literal sense. In daylight, the Snowtrail was treacherous. Under the Full Dark, it was a death sentence. Blind faith got him as far as a hundred faltering steps. No destiny could compensate his clumsy steps, counter his malnourished frame, and cancel out his utter lack of awareness; it was gravity that took over before any divine calling intervened.
As he began to navigate the Snowtrail with a confidence that was not entirely his own, his foot caught on a loose rock, sending him reeling forward into an unexpected dip in the terrain. As he twisted to regain balance, his ankle buckled, and a sudden, lancing pain shot up his leg. Instinctively, he clawed at the ground, his fingers scrabbling for purchase, but the snow gave way and the ground beneath was of slick ice.
With a panicked scream, Nagrak toppled sideways, tumbling down the slope in a chaotic blur of flailing limbs. As he crashed through jagged ice and rock, the sharp edges tore through his leather clothing and sliced deep gashes into his skin. Each impact jarred his bones and wrung sharp gasps from him. Blood slicked his exposed flesh. The staff he had so proudly claimed was ripped from his grasp, its twisted form vanishing into the darkness. His head smacked against an outcrop, sending bright bursts of agony exploding through his inner eye’s vision. The world spun violently, leaving him disoriented and gasping for breath.
His descent came to a brutal halt as his body slammed into a narrow crevice carved into the slope. The jagged walls of ice and stone caught him mid-fall, stopping his momentum with a bone-shattering impact. The force of the collision broke through the surface beneath him, the ice groaning and cracking like thunder. A gaping chasm yawned open.
The staff crashed through the opening, disappearing into the cavern below. Nagrak did not follow. His larger frame slammed against the edges of the crevice, wedging him in place. The jagged rock caught on his ribcage, pinning him awkwardly against the fissure’s wall. His right arm was wrenched upward during the fall, the jagged edge of an outcrop catching beneath his elbow. The pressure twisted his limb at an unnatural angle, jamming it so tightly that every attempt to move sent stabbing pain shooting through his shoulder and chest.
He hung suspended, his legs dangled helplessly over the void below, offering no leverage to pull himself free. Sharp rock protrusions dug into his chest and back, holding him in place like a vice. He tried twisting his torso, hoping to slide out of the crevice, but the more he struggled, the more the jagged edges bit into his flesh, threatening to crush his arm completely.
Breathing heavily, yet only able to draw in shallow, stained breaths with his ribs pressing against the stone, Nagrak clawed at the icy walls with his free hand; futile attempts to find purchase. The icy surface was too smooth and ancient to give in. Somewhere during the fall, he had lost everything: the staff, his dagger, his entire belt — all gone. He had nothing sharp, nothing remotely useful, and his frozen fingers were numb and trembling.
The only sounds were his own ragged breaths and the howling of the storm above, muffled by the walls of the fissure. The bitter cold wrapped around him, seeping into his very bones. He could not feel the text image: "WERISS" [https://glasswizardchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/WERISS-2.jpg] anymore, only horrible, pulsating pain in both of his arms. And then, beneath the chill of the mountain, there was something else. A sound. A faint, unsettling noise that rose from the cavern below.
Nagrak twisted his neck, trying to face the void, but his position and the Full Dark left him with no view, only sound. It was a low, sibilant hiss, barely audible at first, but growing louder as it echoed through the jagged walls. Something was here with him. It shifted and slithered across the stone beneath him. Then it started to climb. And Nagrak, arm pinned and body trapped, could do absolutely nothing as the thing from the depths ascended toward him.
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