----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
Eight, use the feathers.
----------You won't even --Eight, act.-You will not feel a thing
notice that you die-----------------
Yves gathered all available energy, drawing from chains and his last ring, from crystals in his bags and the sparse environment around him. He depleted everything but one crystal — an odd habit, perhaps, but practiced one. If you needed everything you had, it was never enough. So, you might as well give everything but one. That one might be your lifeline in the aftermath. It was also a silent pledge, a promise to himself. This last crystal was dedicated to ending the witch that had fed the Vicha.
-------------Who are you trying to fool?
------Do you even believe your own words?
With that, he began to build.
Within the crater, Yves covered the ground with a transparent array of shards, aligning them with the natural contours of the rocky terrain. Having depleted the Lightgiver Wand, he relied on the Bow of Light to transform his energy into a condensed light arrow, which he in turn harnessed with his light magic abilities. He infused his shards with so much light that they were better described as materialised light, a radiance crafted into an almost imperceptible, reflective surface.
The stony terrain of the Northlands was severely saturated with salt and riddled with deep fissures, so that the heavy rainfall seeped away instead of building up. The depths of the unnatural crater featured the same rock structures as the surface. Where Yves stood, the ground held little earth, all but a knee-high mess of mud. Filling the depression with a few layers of shards was sufficient to prevent him from sinking in. Atop this foundation, he created vertical supports and interconnected them through horizontal structures. They spanned the width like a scaffold of glass growing far and further into the sky.-
No monsters emerged. None would. Until now, Yves had spotted no creatures in his vicinity. Midnight, too, had sensed nothing the entire time she had been with him. He forced himself not to dwell on Midnight.---Oh how she must loathe her decision to be your familiar
------------She knows that you are too ashamed to die in front of her.
-------------She knows that you gave up.
It was impossible. When Yves was not actively thinking about something, intrusive thoughts crept in like alien voices, disrupting, disturbing and distracting. The problem with an illusionist’s vivid imagination and versatile thinking was the struggle to reduce all those strings of thoughts to one. Whatever Yves did, there was always an endless array of images, memories, and voices demanding his attention. The quiet was too loud. And if it was too quiet for too long, the elf noise emerged. Yves needed to occupy his mind to avoid distraction, so he focussed on reciting his own conclusions, basically lecturing to himself, as he so often did to suppress the clamour.
The very existence of Vichae defied the established laws of reality and the doctrines of wizardry — the laws that you were officially taught and the understanding that you were given, that is.
At Emery Thurm, Yves had been taught that reality comprised physical matter and energies, the latter perceptible through second sight. A wizard could consciously take in Adhar, raw energy, and use it to realise the abilities predestined by his spectrum and disposition. These abilities, the diverse strains of magic, manifested in varying degrees of matter and energy. Worldbender elementers, for instance, wielded control over the tangible elements of water, fire and air, which were in essence purely physical. Lightshifter illusionists, in accordance with their disposition and skill, could materialise illusions spanning from the entirely physical to the solely visual. Meanwhile, light fragments had no matter. They bore the purest of world energies, which is why they allowed unimpeded passage. While both lifeless and living entities could not touch them, Lightshifter light wizards had the unique potential to manipulate these fragments, a magic devoid of any physical substance.
Beyond the instructions in magic, Emery Thurm propagated that the world cradled energies beyond the grasp of wizards. Witches harnessed not the raw and free energy that was Adhar but that confined within nature or bestowed through Teharun.
At least, that was the doctrine every diligent student internalised, and what got the average wizard through the average wizard life.
Yet, in the face of Vichae, this bastion of knowledge crumbled into implausibility. Based on this foundation, it seemed impossible that witches could conjure something that passed through light magic while it partially or fully absorbed all other types of magic. Why did a Vicha absorb energy conveyed into physical matter but, in turn, pass through lifeless and natural things that were fully physical? And in the haunting absurdity that transgressed all that was logical and real, why and how did it selectively touch and consume the energies and bodies of higher life forms?
While absorbing energy from his crystals and continuously gathering light from the bow, Yves expanded the field of shards, stretching it far beyond the confines of the crater. With him at the centre, he spanned a sprawling shard floor, its diameter extending for several kilometres across the plateau, reaching out toward the encroaching curse. To prevent any absorption by the Vicha upon contact, the whole structure had to be saturated with light fragments, with only the faintest traces of glass magic.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
The black mountain pressed forward, its ominous advance over the threshold unfolding with alarming speed.
If such an enigma could persist within the framework of your reality, then the very foundation of this reality must be flawed, misconstrued instead of uncovered through academy teachings — unless you made the forbidden recesses of underground libraries your teachers:
Physical matter and energies were not mere components of the world; no, they formed two distinct dimensional planes.
One dimension held the tangible, where all physical existences were anchored. The second plane interwove with the first and contained all those energies perceivable by wizards through second sight and sensed by other beings in various ways. The arcane tomes offered a variety of enigmatic names for these dimensions, but Yves simply labelled them the Material Dimension and the Alladharian Dimension, alladharian being his own neologistic shorthand for the obvious this is where all the energies are.
There is more. Your body, contrary to the doctrines of your academy masters, was not an “outer layer” or “shell” that encapsulated your Rothar, the energy that was you. No, as a wizard, you existed dually within the two dimensions. You were both the tangible substance comprising your body and the amalgamation of energy that comprised your Rothar. The former was anchored in the Material Dimension, the latter in the Alladharian, and somehow, they were linked. The continuum of your existence relied on the integrity of this link. In other words, you did not just die when your body got killed. The entity that was you faced demise if either part was depleted or destroyed.
“Yeah, about that,” Yves panted, his breath frozen amidst the charged air, “I need more energy.” He spoke not just to himself. He spoke to the Jabarrah, the familiar that had merged with him fifteen years ago. “About everything you have, if you don’t mind.” His words fell heavy. He was burning up from the strain that came with handling such an unreasonable amount of light. He discarded his coat and pushed up the sleeves of his undercoat and shirt, thereby exposing the Jabarrah’s long silver beak fused with his lower arm. The two halves of the beak ran from elbow to hand, encasing his left arm like armour. It was the only visible remnant of the avian beast, all that was left after the elf attack.
They had no conscious bond like the deep connection Yves shared with Midnight. There were only a few instances where Yves had ever sensed the Jabarrah within him. Yet, he knew he was there, an integral part of all that Yves had become after the attack. The familiar was an essence bonded with him, but he also was a foreign mind and energy existing alongside him. Are you with me on this one?
Yves’ body could harbour only a limited amount of energy; a capacity defined by birth, expanded through training, and currently exhausted. The silver beak, however, held more energy than Yves could safely amass in his entire body — an inaccessible reserve, unless the Jabarrah permitted him to draw from it.
When you absorbed Adhar, the energy that was you incorporated the energies that surrounded you, be they free, encapsulated in energy crystals, woven into artefacts, or lingering in the physical remnants of a familiar’s existence. You drew energy across the boundary between what was you and what was not. This transgression of boundaries occurred in the Alladharian Dimension.
This ability to absorb stray energy was not what rendered you a wizard; several races could tap into Adhar. What set wizards apart was their capacity to transform and realise this energy across dimensions. This was the true essence of wizardry —
This was Magic.
So when, in the Alladharian Dimension, Yves absorbed Adhar to then create matter, like in the form of physical illusions, the conveyed energy became anchored in the Material Dimension. Such magic, anchored in the Material Dimension, then affected an enemy’s physical body.
Now, this distinction was crucial for Yves' theory on the Vicha: not all magic operated in the Material Dimension. Unlike magic that manifested matter, light magic did not traverse dimensions. It only affected the Alladharian Dimension. When Yves compressed and directed light fragments into an attack, they remained there. Although a visible light beam traversed the physical world, the true target of the assault was an enemy's Rothar. Light magic, along with any seals rooted in the purest of energies, exclusively influenced the Alladharian Dimension, leaving the Material Dimension untouched.
The Jabarrah’s unrestrained energy surged through him. From the outer rim of the shard-strewn ground, excluding the path of the advancing Vicha, Yves wove a dome. Layers of structure emerged from the edges of the shard cover, extending skyward above the Vicha, finding support in the glass pillars rooted in the crater scaffold. Channelling the Jabarrah’s vast reserves, he fortified the dome, adding stratum upon stratum of condensed light, each layer pressed to its utmost limit.
Shards embodied an extraordinary versatility, possessing a rare duality that allowed them to influence both dimensions simultaneously and in varying degrees. As an ordinary student at Emery Thurm, left blissfully unaware of the underlying principles of reality, this duality was distorted and presented to you as the — indeed, very logical as long as you were ignorant — Theoriye of Magick Densitiye.
Consider, when defending against potent physical assaults, your instinctual response to craft denser shard walls by increasing your energy input. You engaged in your craft under the simple belief that a higher energy input equated to a stronger shard structure, when the deciding factor was, in truth, not the amount but the ratio of energy transferred to the physical dimension. For the most effective shields, you needed to transfer all your energy to the Material Dimension while retaining just enough in the Alladharian to sustain and control the shield. How could you come up with that on your own without an awareness of the duality of reality? You could not. Consequently, you lost half your energy creating a shard wall in the Alladharian Dimension, an absolute waste against any physical assault. The knowledge to consciously control the energy-matter ratio of shards made the difference between a wizard who could block a handful of beasts and one who could halt even the King Brothers' army.
Conversely, when launching shard projectiles towards distant enemies, a novice's natural inclination was to craft lighter shards in order to gain speed and range. Yes, the slim and transparent shards that you crafted for such purpose were less dense and, respectively, likely to travel faster and farther. However, if you simply used less energy in both dimensions to conjure them, they also became utterly weak and difficult to control. But of course, you accepted this as the natural limitations of your craft, because your masters said it would be so, and because every other glass wizard in your grade had the same experiences as you. And because it made sense. With a mind restricted to one dimension, you would never imagine that the knife you threw at your enemy could or should be as heavy as the massive shield you used to protect your body. However, if you understood how to adjust the ratio of transgressing energy, you could create impeccably dense shards that were close to all energy and no matter.
When such a projectile struck another wizard, it penetrated both his material body and his Rothar. You still saw the body suffer or die, but rarely because of a direct impact on the physical form. Rather, it succumbed due to the disruption or destruction of the Rothar tethered to it. Mind you, this secret was well wasted on your petty wizard duels. This world harboured entities who seemed untouchable, immortal even, unless you knew that they, too, bore a dual existence. There were rumours that the purest of energy shards might even inflict harm upon an elf —
To sum this up, everything had changed when Yves found out that glass magic implied he was, in fact, acting on two dimensional planes. It marked an unparalleled breakthrough in understanding the possibilities of his disposition, in transgressing common limitations. The moment he truly internalised that his shards did not need to be less dense but only less bound to the physical dimension was the moment he discovered the potential for extraordinary conjurations, from blade discs that decapitated sea beasts to enormous structures such as the dome. Yves had taught himself to create shard structures immeasurable in their density yet almost completely anchored in the dimension of energies — shards infused with light fragments.
Yves suffered from the strain of directly channelling, of ceaselessly absorbing and immediately draining the raw, concentrated energy from the Jabarrah. The familiar's previous bond had been with a master Transcender, and as familiars accrued power and abilities while aging alongside their wizards, the Jabarrah possessed formidable strength. A wizard of Yves’ age and experience could not ordinarily endure this level of energy rush without incurring severe consequences. He did not care. He was not done. To complete the dome, Yves directed the expanding structure to descend from the ceiling and to grow left and right until all parts connected behind the Vicha.
The curse had breached the dome fully, its immensity occupying over a third of the entire enclosed space. Yves stood at the heart of the defiant structure, drawing in ever more energy. If he could not control what the Jabarrah held, he would not survive what was about to come.
Yves was about to stake his life on nothing short of a revolution in his understanding of the fundamental nature of reality — a theory formulated, postulated, unwritten, and untested by an academy throw-out who would have to endure another hundred years before hoping to sprout the first stubble of a respectable wizard beard. This daring proposition was grounded in the belief that the Vicha existed beyond the dual dimensions that constituted matter and energy.
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------