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The presence circling Yves was a being of the brightest ashen light. But only at first glance; then Yves realised that everything was fundamentally wrong. The Stalker appeared distorted, roaming amidst the shard structures emerging behind the colossal Vicha, at a greater distance than the voice implied. He was not much taller than the wandering entities but lacked their geometrical intricacy of shards and light. His form had the fluidity of smoke, which in this fractured world appeared surreal and false. Yves felt him more than seeing him; his presence was raw energy compressed into a fluid form, not insubstantial like mist, but a silhouette so potent that it seemed severed from the world, now expanding and rapidly obscuring everything around Yves.
“𝔈𝔵𝔱𝔢𝔫𝔡 𝔶𝔬𝔲𝔯 𝔩𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱 𝔱𝔥𝔯𝔬𝔲𝔤𝔥 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔳𝔢𝔦𝔩,” the Stalker said.
As this energy enveloped him atop of the Vicha, Yves faltered under the pressure. The weight of the Stalker’s presence bore down on the Vicha, the sole barrier between them. Through brute intensity, the heavy liquid energy forced the rotten mass further into Yves. Yves strained to maintain awareness, to perceive his form in its entirety, to delineate the boundary between the energy that was him and what was not, what was within his control and what tore into him. The Breath of Light was long suffocated and his voice again reduced to horrid screeching. The compressed light within him burned through his core, out of his core, where pain took its place.-----RUN!
“ℜ𝔢𝔞𝔠𝔥 𝔬𝔲𝔱, 𝔴𝔦𝔷𝔞𝔯𝔡,” the Stalker said.-RUN!
---------NO!-RUN--
-----RUN
The raw energy emanating from him was so powerful, so intense, that it disrupted all that surrounded Yves. He fractured shards. He bent light. He forced the Vicha into Yves. He was watching Yves die.
“ℑ 𝔴𝔦𝔩𝔩 𝔣𝔯𝔢𝔢 𝔶𝔬𝔲 𝔣𝔯𝔬𝔪 𝔦𝔱,” the Stalker said.-------NO!
---RUN!----------------RUN!
Everything in Yves screamed.--NO!
------RUN!
He had no time to struggle with words. No time to justify himself or seek answers. He had the mirror world stalker around him, the Vicha between them and within him, and only seconds until the curse would breach his last outer shard layer, pierce through his many layers of light and touch his core. And he had his mirror right below him.
Stolen story; please report.
--RUN NOW!
Yves initiated the Somsaraa ritual. Fears surged through him that his mirror might shatter upon attempting to return with mirror world energy, but reducing his form was impossible. He was breaking, he was losing his mind under the pressure and the pain, and yet, he pushed himself further to forge a path for his original Rothar like he did last time. It was crude, unfinished, insufficient, but it directed the ritual to first draw what was truly him, his core and the Jabarrah before pulling on the mirror world energies comprising his form. His senses constricted drastically. The process was messy, rushed, and wrong, yet he felt his essence surge, the Vicha reach his core, his mind fracturing, and his reality shifting.
During the dimensional transition, the stalker's lingering presence pressed upon Yves. The return to his reality, the shift from one form to another, was more disorienting than ever before. As his consciousness split, his ethereal form, now a towering distortion of broken light, bathed the void in disturbing radiance. It stood in stark contrast to his frail humanoid body. In a fleeting moment, Yves glimpsed the injuries inflicted by the Vicha's veins — visible on exposed arms and part of his neck where clothing and the Jabarrah’s silver form offered no cover. The sight and sensation were jarring; Yves no longer recognised himself, neither in this distorted figure of a wizard nor in the ethereal amalgamation falling apart above him.
All the strength and power that surged through him moments ago now abandoned him, replaced by a mess of exhausted energies and flesh that felt painful and wrong — the aftermath of the Vicha's touch.
Brought back to the muddy crater, Yves found the dome, shelter and shard platform gone. He had left nothing energy-sustained, wary that lingering foreign energies would attract beasts after the shift. The mirror lay in the mud and rain, the unstable ground shifting under the additional weight as Yves appeared on top of it, from where he slipped and fell right off.
The pain from the fall was nothing against what was already there. Agony radiated from flesh wounds where the Vicha had touched him. His dual existence bore the marks where the veins had ruptured flesh, muscle, and insides, inflicting deep damage just before the shift. A dimensional shift did not erase or fix injuries, and the pain had never relented; Yves returned to the exact same body he had shifted out of, as if frozen in time. His body screamed as Yves hastily scrambled to his knees and dug for the mirror in the mud, but his fear screamed louder. The stalker's presence loomed right above him, his appearance discernible in the shattered mirror. Yves tore the crystal half ball from the socket.
While the Stalker's presence vanished, the dark aura of the Vicha persisted. It had not shifted with Yves; yet he still felt it surrounding him, in its full, expanded size from the Mirror Dimension that reached far beyond what had been the cliff behemoth. Overwhelmed, Yves collapsed at the epicentre of this unsettling mark of a witch’s touch.
A cascade of sensations had shifted with his transformation. His shard body did not register sensations the same way as his wizard body, but everything translated into pain. Pain from being torn apart by the Vicha during the shift. Pain from the Vicha surrounding him, rotten blackness that just kept ripping and ripping and ripping him apart. Pain from shifting shards within himself, of filling himself with terribly compressed, burning light and reshaping his body. Pain from suffocating in the presence of the stalker, a force even more potent than the Vicha.
Yves had screamed in the mirror dimension, from within the confines of his mind and manifested in the anguished screeching voice of his ashen form, and the scream continued now, lost within the confines of the crater, met by the storm that screamed back at him with haunting indifference. Everything was wrong with him. The Jabarrah beak had extended over his arm and shoulder and chest like flat silver armour to intercept the Vicha’s first touch, but the curse had broken through. Grotesque external wounds marred his body — deep furrows like ripped-out lightning-strikes, missing flesh exposing bone.
He had been ruptured as he shifted to the Dimension of Shards but survived because he had fixed, filled, and fortified his mirror world form with energy. He had been strong, ethereal, and radiant, but now reverted to a weakened, frozen, broken, and dying body that had been even further damaged by his faulty ritual, now twisting and trashing in the mud, in the desolate plateau, in the torrent; a body that could not stop screaming and cramping and bleeding and vomiting blood. Then he felt more. He realised the Jabarrah shifted, extending into his body, its silver beak melting into his wounds. It stemmed the bleeding and sealed his wounds, saving him for the moment. And then he felt someone else —
Amidst the anguished cries, Yves’ attention suddenly shifted — a grand barthar familiar and a rider appeared climbing up the crater around 60 meters away. They struggled against the elements, slipping and breaking rocks in their fall. A witch!
image [https://glasswizardchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Glass-Wizard_Fantasy-Adventure-Magic-Webnovel-by-The-Duckman_Depressed-Wizard-Online-Webseries_Witch-Shaman.png]
Without hesitation, Yves threw a physical illusion at them, an undefined mass that hurled the witch off the familiar, both falling back into the crater. Shards followed the very second, imprisoning them separately where they landed. The witch he impaled, shackled by shards through her left thigh and both arms from shoulders to hands, binding her against the crater wall. The familiar he left unharmed. The animal sat up without resisting its ethereal cage.
Yves drew himself up, his senses on high alert, wary of potential traps, illusions, or any form of sensory distortions associated with witches. He scrutinised the surroundings, feeling for hidden presences, but the overwhelming sensation of the Vicha drowned out any other subtle nuances. He approached.
“I am sorry. I am so sorry for fleeing, Sir, but your sudden appearance frightened me before I realised you were in pain.”
She looked young and weather-worn, clothed in the furs of beasts. Her barthar, a muscular beast with thick fur, was fitted with saddle and travelling sacks attached to it. She fought with the pain of the impaling shards and still asked him: “Are you all right?”
Yves fought with his own pain, still feeling the Jabarrah settling within him, supporting his stance. In his right hand, he clutched his last remaining energy crystal. He did not speak.
“Please, Sir. My name is Halia, Halia from Valdin Mountain,” she said, “I meant you no harm. I am a beast shaman.
I travel here, or sometimes in the Albweiss Mountains. I travel, and sometimes I collect rare plants for medicine.
I … I understand why you are wary ... and why you don’t speak, Sir. Please know, I am no witch, I don’t belong to any coven or mother or kingdom, I only live with my beasts. I do not have my horns yet, but please look here, at my arms, my arms, Sir, I carry the marks of the Shamans, I started my transition. I have renounced any witchcraft and anything I did was an accident, I am so sorry!
I saw this unfamiliar black creature. It was so feeble, so weak, I thought it was dying. I am so sorry, Sir, was this your familiar or companion or something you fought? I mean it did not look … conventional, but I am not one to judge. I did not know– I did not expect to find another person — I mean, I just wanted to connect to it, so I reached out in spirit like I do with the beasts, and I could feel that it responded and regained its strength. I thought I was helping. It started to move again, away. But it was not running from me. Its path was so determined that it almost seemed that it wanted to lead me somewhere, and so I followed until it ate the Underferl, and still I followed until what must be your light magic appeared and then, along with the creature, suddenly disappeared. And then we found all these artefacts in its path, and when I reached the crater there was no-one, and when I climbed down I suddenly felt the spirit of a dangerous beast appear, and I fled before I saw that it was not a beast but you —”
Her hasty, trembling words broke off. Yves trembled, too, but his stare did not weaver. He was well aware that she did not cry.
“Sir, I promise, I will leave. I will go the other way from you. I wander from ruin to ruin, I will just go back, Sir, and never bother you again. Or if you like, I can show you safe passage, I know these lands, but then I’m sure that you don’t need me for that. I can just go back, and if you are here because you needed to be alone or unseen, I swear, Sir, I will never mention it, not to my beasts or anyone, Sir, I already forgot that I ever met you, Sir."
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