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Yves had spent years mastering glass and light magic, and he refined his illusions with every day. There were, of course, periods where he did absolutely nothing with his life, but Yves did well to omit these weeks from his memory when looking back on his training. He was not always good at life, but he was good at magic. In his reality, he was adept at compressing light and using the properties of glass to amplify and focus his magic, generating devastating attacks that could shatter the very fabric of an opponent’s reality. He would create complex illusions and that were both beautiful and deadly. The magic he used was not just limited to visual effects. He could create illusions of sounds, smells and touch.
Now he needed to adapt his knowledge to the unique properties and energies of this dimension. He was a Lightshifter. He was disposed to master this plane. This world was already fractured. All of this was shards and light. All of this was glass and light magic. All of this was possible.
Standing within the narrow tunnel, Yves raised his hands and touched the thick, impenetrable grey masses to his right and left. He would block the narrow passage that connected the lighthouse with the continent by pulling the solid sides to a close. To change and destroy the tunnel, he had to find a way to connect with the fractured barriers that were its walls, to feel them with his magical energy and influence them. He simultaneously needed to grasp and distinguish, mentally and magically, what was shards and what was light. Yves could extend his senses but struggled to do so with his energy. He recognised the walls, their weight, their texture, and their shape. But he could not get a hold on them. His magical energy slipped off them like water off a duck’s back. It was so difficult because this was not his original body. He was physically reduced to a fractured shadow being. Like an infant, he had spent years learning to see and to walk. Like a child wizard practicing to cast magic for the first time, Yves had to re-learn how to consciously direct his innate energy and how to extend his range of influence beyond this altered physical form.
He tried again and again, centering himself, listening, feeling, visualising, growing his awareness for the energies within him and reaching out for the world around him, making his energy pulse within his chest and from there expanding the radius ever so slightly with every beat until it reached and then exceeded his hands, and whatever else you would suggest to the frustrated child wizard who was at the brink of throwing a tantrum because he was just not getting it. After an eternity, Yves could feel his directed stream of energy pushing against the weight of the grey walls just below his hands. With every ounce of his magical strength, he compressed his energy to impact and alter the reality within the mirror world. He pushed his condensed energy into that of the wall, penetrating the structures to feel and grasp the shards that were the grey tunnel walls. But nothing was as he expected. The shards were there, but as he tried to merge his energy with them, they moved. They did not resist, not in a conscious or directed attempt to evade his influence, but they were in constant movement.
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Shards did not move, not by themselves. In Yves' world, shards were magical substances given physical form. They were constructed by wizards. But in the mirror world, everything was fractured. In this plane, they were the world. They were, for the lack of a better word, the elements. Yves could not believe what he was thinking. In this plane, these shards that framed the passage between the lighthouse and the mainland correlated to waves.
There was a mesmerising order in their chaotic dance. Yves focused and felt, until he recognised circular patterns in their movements. Painstakingly slowly, he adapted the flow of his energy to this pattern to then imbue and infuse it into the shards as they moved. He meticulously adjusted and expanded his grasp until he gained control over their movement, and then he pulled. The resistance was staggering, the strain alarmingly painful. He could hear a faint hum, akin to the sound of the rushing sands but resonating much deeper, growing louder and louder until it was deafening. The pressure on his arms intensified, the strain became excruciating, threatening to rip them from their sockets before he would shift the grey masses. Pain and exhaustion closed in on him at an alarming speed. Yves dreaded to lose consciousness, but he could not stop. He needed all his senses to fixate on what he was doing.
As he manipulated the thick barrier, the mirror world retaliated with unprecedented power. The forces of this plane sought to compromise his very essence. They bore down on him with unprecedented strength, distorting his fractured, shadowy form. The more energy he expended, the more he depleted himself, the less substance and resistance he posed for the surrounding forces. They surged towards the vacuum that he created, the vacuum that he became. To separate his essence from the mirror world energies that tried to fill the emerging void, Yves needed to uphold a protective barrier around himself, a fragile shield against the encroaching chaos.
The dense, impervious walls began to shift and converge before him, closing off the narrow passage ahead. What took mere moments in his world was millimetre work in this plane. The pressure grew suffocating, the strain pushing him to the brink. Panic threatened to overwhelm him, but he knew he was on the verge of success.
With the tunnel narrowing, Yves prepared to interlink the opposing sides and weave the shards shut. However, the sudden clash of shard-waves caught him off guard. Instead of harmoniously aligning and melding together, the two parts of the wall violently repelled each other with astonishing force. Yves was thrust backwards, losing his footing and control over his fragile barrier. The sound of the collision was a deafening clash of crystal, its echoes reverberating through the tunnel and hammering in Yves’s head. In that instance of vulnerability, the mirror world’s energy, which had so fiercely sought to fill the void shell that was his shattered silhouette, broke through.
It was the most undulated energy that Yves had ever felt, raw power that he did not know existed, a torrent pushing into his fractal body to the point of bursting him. He fought to channel, capture, incorporate and control it, he fought to restore the barrier between what was him and what was not, but he was an unstable vessel amassing unsurmountable forces. They broke out of him within seconds. The surge did not stop. In and out, the immense river of energy now ran through him in a deadly cycle that ripped him apart from the inside. Yves could not breathe in this world, he had no air to scream. The world was screaming for him, the rushing sounds of sands now roaring within his mind, churning and shattering his consciousness.
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