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Yves froze.
It was the faintest of sounds, barely audible amidst the everlasting noise of rushing sand and mechanical clicking, but to Yves, who had heard thousands of mirrors break during his lifetime, it was unmistakable. It was the most dreadful sound.
Looking down without moving or shifting his weight, he observed how his faint shadow flickered across the mirror, but could not recognise any distortions in the glass. Yves looked back up, looked around intently, and then carefully stepped down from the mirror. He bent down to examine the glass closely. There it was. Edged in the smooth surface was the faintest of hairline fractures.
This should not have happened. This mirror was extraordinary, designed for ethereal travel. His ritual had been flawless. He had executed his spell precisely, as he had done countless times before, and yet he was looking at a breach in the unbreakable. Was it his new form that had caused this? Had the infusion of mirror world energies, as opposed to his native plane’s energy, caused this damage? Had it altered the spell itself? Would the mirror shatter again if he attempted another crossing? Oh gods, why did he know fucking nothing about otherworldly energies?
Yves broke the emerging downward spiral of petty and panic before it could trap him in a labyrinth of his own ignorance, and forced himself into meditation. He kept his eyes open.
Could he reverse his transformation by depleting the mirror world energies within him? Would that leave him with enough of his original energy to sustain his existence? And atop of that, would he have enough left for his ritual? Or would this reckless act of expelling the vast majority of his energy just invite another torrent of mirror world energy, either further distorting his being or shattering his form and existence?
As he knelt and stared, both inwards and outwards, he suddenly recognised faint ripples of light and dark greys atop the mirror's surface. Had it always done that and he just never saw, or was this the mirror breaking right before his eyes? Alarmed, he dislocated the crystal half ball from its socket, upon which all erratic movement stopped.
His focus shifted. He did not dare deplete his free-flowing energy, so instead he attempted to forcibly undo his transformation. He tried to deconstruct his altered form, stripping away the mirror world's influence and reduce his body to something built only from his original energy. It was an audacious effort.
The foreign energy was woven into his new existence like tendrils of smoke that had infiltrated every corner of a room nearly void of breathable air. Yves felt as if he was trying to breatheo---just these faint traces of air--------------that had not been enough to begin with,--------------------that were insufficient to sustain life,-----------------------------without inhaling any smoke.
The struggle was suffocating,-------------------------------------the process seemingly suicidal.
It was-------------------------------------------------------------------------------senseless
-------and------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------downright stupid.
With each
-------------------futile attempt,
------------------------------------------------------Yves realised
he could
----------------------------------------------not
-----
-----
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------do it.
------
He needed
------------------------------------------------------------------to stop
---------------------and breathe
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------the smoke.
--------He conceded
---------------------------------------------------to the inevitable.
----------He couldn't strip away
--------------------------------------------------the mirror world energy,
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------couldn't reject
the essence that now
------------------------------intertwined with his very being,
---------------------------------------------------------------------couldn't resist
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------the transformative tide
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------that had already claimed him.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------The mirror world energies
--------------------------------------------------------------------had intertwined with his existence.
--------------------------------------------Depleting himself from the only force
---------------------------that now held his ethereal existence together
----------------------meant destroying himself,
--------ripping himself apart from within.
And as he caught
---------------his metaphorical breath,
he realised that his existence now
had become akin
to that of one of the most petty races in his world.
Humans, a primitive and mortal race,
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sustained themselves solely through food and drink.
Unlike wizards, they could not absorb world energies.
Wizards could certainly partake in eating and drinking, but they also had the potential to exclusively nourish their life force with energy. There were numerous records of wizards surviving without physical sustenance for decades. Already during his time at Emery Thurm, Yves had learned that his kommilita had a sheer endless supply of great-great-grandfathers who had apparently set or broken all those legendary records. Yves didn't see the point of such pride. It was not an accomplishment; it was a choice. If Yves practiced his magic or engaged in quests and duels, he depleted himself of world energy through spellcasting. If there was not enough left to sustain his body, he needed to eat and drink, simple as that. If, in contrast to that, he were to hide out in the farthest corner of the world to do absolutely nothing with his life, he could comfortably and safely sustain himself on world energy. He failed to see how that counted as an achievement. Mastering magic was an achievement, and so Yves used the world energies he harnessed for spellcasting and anything but his own body. Also, eating was far more pleasurable.
Well, the key distinction was that humans had a physical body they could only maintain by consuming the tangible world. Some could go for weeks without food, depending on their physical build, but their bodies would decline and consume themselves with every day. More striking was access to liquids. Several independent studies confirmed that there was hardly a human who could survive more than four days without water.
In Yves' dimension, he had a physical body too, but he could sustain it through the non-physical — world energies. He could do so willingly. Humans ate, and then their body digested their food on its own. His body did the same when he ate, also on its own. But what he could control was energy. He could actively control when to channel these non-physical world energies to nurture his physical form or, alternatively, to utilise them for casting magic, such as the manipulation of shards and light.
Now, the mirror plane was a world of shards and light. There were no other tangible components. Yves' mirror world form had become just like that, a body constructed entirely of a substance that in his dimension was non-physical energy. He wasn't composed of flesh or bones; he was made of shards, crystalline and insubstantial. Yes, he had proven that he could mold and reshape his form, but distinguishing his original energy from what he had absorbed within the tunnel seemed an insurmountable challenge. These energies had merged, intertwined, and become an integral part of his being. He had consumed and incorporated them, just like the human body consumed food. They now were his body.
Unable to deconstruct the microscopic shards that constituted his current form or differentiate the absorbed energies from his original essence, Yves could not isolate these energies after they had merged.
Instead, he turned his focus towards the free-flowing, so to speak non-digested currents required to cast the Somsaraa, the intricate ritual for activating the ethereal mirror. He sought to consciously segregate the mirror world energies from the small fraction of his original essence that remained, a task that felt like trying to sift grains of sand in a relentless desert storm.
It was like telling a human: Well, you drank a glass of water. Then you vomited up all the water except for one drop. Then you drank five full jars of poison. Now make it so that your stomach does not digest the poison, but don't even think about throwing anything up. You see, that last, inconsequential droplet of water is all that stands between you and certain death on your journey home. Lose it, and you might as well start counting out your four days.
A mere drop of water and shitloads of poison. The analogy was far from perfect, but who was there to judge? Only the most useless of wizards would venture into the realms of literary arts. If one aimed to shape or subdue “the minds of the people”, it was a Transcender wanderer they would seek, not a poet. Regardless, the crux of the matter was clear: Yves possessed a minuscule trace of energy crucial for his spell, alongside a colossal reservoir of energy that could potentially shatter his ethereal mirror.
Forced to cast aside thoughts of regurgitation and poisoning, Yves urged his body and mind to relax. He envisioned a radiant stream of light cascading from the top of his head, coursing throughout his body. It attracted his original energy while repelling the newfound energy he had absorbed in this dimension. He imagined his own energy following this luminous path to his chest, where it condensed into a compact sphere, with the mirror world energy forming a separate, darker sphere enveloping it.
During this intricate process of energy manipulation, the two energies began to take on distinct qualities. The disparity was stark — his original energy, though familiar, felt frail, while the mirror world energy was wilder and denser, exuding raw, unspoilt power. Every fibre of Yves' being revolted at the insanity of intentionally evoking such instability, and his instincts screamed against shifting the most sparce and fragile parts of his essence into his core, but he knew that he needed to maintain, direct and apply only his original essence for the ethereal spell.
It did not suffice to separate the energies when they were stationary within him. To prepare for channelling only his original energy into a spell without touching upon the foreign energy, Yves delved into the arcane art of Shyftinge of the Cathalyste, a branch of magical study that he was well acquainted with. To cast magic, a wizard drew energy from his core and then channelled in accordance with the desired spell’s requirements, commonly to your hands or eyes. Altering or affecting his catalyst allowed a wizard to adapt to such requirements — but this was neither the time nor the place to again get distracted with lectures on theoretical complexities.
The requirement set by Yves was that he needed to channel the meagre remnants of his original energy through his body without touching the mirror world energy. He needed borders, and for that, he built a glass shard barrier within his core. These shards were directed inwards, their surface structure designed to capture and consolidate his own energies. He used them akin to a filter which only permitted the metaphorical pure air to pass through, while shielding his core against the overwhelming onslaught of mirror world energies. Yves could not alter his mirror world form, but his past experiences of separating and condensing free energies through glass shards allowed him to prepare a barrier gateway right from his core to what were his hands. He knew the Somsaraa by heart, so he knew exactly which path his energy would have to take, but barricading and sealing off every last microscopic segment of this path was difficult, delicate and demanding work. He failed several times. It was straining. It needed to be perfect. Foreign energy must not get drawn into the surge of his own energy once he initiated the ritual.
Without pause, Yves placed the crystal half ball back into the socket and stepped onto the mirror. Standing once again on the mirror's surface, he channelled the core of his being, the scant remains of his original essence, into the Somsaraa. He could not change his form. His form did not change, but he did. He became something smaller that lay within, something that did not exist without momentum, something that could only emerge with and through the spell, to pass through the gateway between two dimension. And while that which was Yves detached from its form, the spell took shape. In this altered state, Yves felt his movements stiffen, his vision blur, and his senses grow dull. And then he felt his surroundings shift.
Every time Yves returned from the mirror world to his own dimension, he was subjected to a moment of unfathomable horror. During the transition between planes, as the worlds around him began to shift and twist, the grey and fractured mirror world fading away, there was an instant where he was suspended in absolute nothingness. In this harrowing moment which was too short to measure but too intense to not imprint on all of his senses, Yves experienced an overwhelming fear and dread, as if the entire world had ceased to exist, leaving only himself as both a solitary entity and the entirety of creation, both the only thing and everything that existed.
And while he suffocated from the horrendous feeling that the universe imploded into his soul, a reflection of himself would appear. He would see his fractured mirror world silhouette, which was at the same time HIMSELF looking at his tall and slim human form. But because he was everything that existed and there was nothing else – meaning there was not anything more – the other him did not appear in front of him but within him. And yet, for this inescapable eternity, he would witness himself through the senses of both existences — looking into the hollow fractured eyes of the silhouette while simultaneously perceiving his own green eyes, which were spotted but not entirely consumed by silver. Only this time, the once fractured form had become much more substantial, a creature of ashen light looking back with silver spotted eyes as well. As he recognised the transformation from the outside, Yves perceived his own reality while simultaneously witnessing his reaction through the eyes of his mirror world self.
His very essence was torn apart, cleaved between two dimensional existences. He was being pulled apart with the disappearing mirror world, and put back together all at once when nothingness was replaced by the world he knew.
Yves emerged from the mirror plane, his return this time more intense and prolonged than ever before. Returning was always an unsettling experience, leaving him shaken and disturbed for hours, but now he fought to stay conscious, the sensation of something drastically altered within him lingering. As the immediate intensity faded, he stepped off the mirror, feeling a sense of uneasy relief wash over him. With his second step, he collapsed onto the ground, exhausted and drained, yet relieved that he had successfully returned. He knew that he had pushed his abilities to his absolute limits. He had exhausted his energy and felt that he took none of the mirror world energy back with him. He needed time to rest and recover before attempting any other feats of such magnitude.
Lying on the floor and breathing heavily, he turned to look back at the mirror and swiftly removed the crystal half ball. Now there was nothing, just a finely crafted piece of glass on the dusty wooden floor. Its surface reflected the spider-infested ceiling and part of the elegant black pathera that lay on a cushion nearby, though not touching the magical object. As he teetered on the edge of losing consciousness, Yves saw Midnight’s massive body cross through the mirror image. She rose to grab the energy crystal which Yves had prepared and positioned on the table prior to his departure. Carrying it in her mouth, she placed the crystal in his right hand. She nudged Yves with her paw until he responded and began absorbing the crystal’s energy. Then she lay down by his side.
“I made sure that we are difficult to find,” Yves curled up next to her and placed one hand across her shoulders. She did not object, allowing him to draw comfort from her presence, while he listened to the stormy sea crashing against the lighthouse's foundation, which sounded much too similar to the rushing sands of the mirror world.
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