Book One – Chapter 14

Yet it was the golem that unnerved her the most. Within its massive stone body, Midnight detected an essence that felt alien, unfamiliar. It threaded through the construct like the roots of a fungal network, spreading and intertwining, knitting the stone together into something alive, yet not alive.

Was this the same existence that had so briefly touched upon her when she had been drawn into the golem? Midnight was certain it was not a remnant of the wizard. No trace of his essence lingered in this strange presence that threaded through the golem. It was something other. The threads constituted an existence, yet utterly alien — a foreign entity that wove itself through the construct like Midnight’s essence had embedded herself within the darkness that thus became of her.

More unsettling still was the nature of the stone itself. Midnight’s senses had shifted far beyond the conventional, beyond even what she had once understood through her darkness. The golem’s surface no longer felt like inert, unyielding rock but something else entirely. As disturbing as it was, Midnight was sure that it consisted of the same essence she now recognised as flowing through the Albweiss itself. The veins of the mountain and the golem’s form shared the same origin. The entire moving monolith was one big entity of raw essence. It was as if the Albweiss had lent its own being to the creation of this construct, splitting off a fragment of the mountain, an accumulated, condensed part of itself, and then shaping all that essence into something deliberate and potent.

And within that form lay the stranger existence; an intrusion that had settled and steered the construct. Midnight was sure. It was this presence, not the wizard, that had truly animated the golem, using the wizard’s life force as sustenance to enact its will. Midnight could not identify the entity, but she could feel its presence, its threads entangling the raw mountain essence. It was as though the monolith of mountain essence and this alien presence had fused but not fully merged into one existence, almost … almost —

Almost like the other one who has fused with my wizard, said the voice that spoke for her.