Book One – Chapter 13

Still, the shadebeast had touched upon Midnight as well when she had also been something, when she had still held her midnight stalker essence. He had torn at her Rothar with his teeth, like one beast attacking another. At the beginning of their fight, when she had jumped him with her claws, her paws had slid into him without touching any matter. Yet, as her material body entered the space his darkness occupied, her Rothar had been ripped apart. There was no other way to describe it.

This had not happened with the fiator when Midnight had sent her darkness to rip him from the air. Unlike the shadebeast, she had simply slipped through the bird, seemingly without affecting him at all. If, in her current state as a beast of darkness, Midnight passed through all that had matter, then affecting a beast’s Rothar required conscious effort. She needed to actively alter something within herself, something in her approach, to touch upon a natural beast’s Rothar.

And if the shadebeast could do it, so could she. She had reached the mindset that she would surpass all that he had been. Yet, her convictions and conclusions were not a matter of understanding magic, abstract thinking, or logically deducing dimensions. Rather, this knowledge was embedded within her, all that Yves had imparted over the years. Midnight accessed it intuitively, much like her senses, which absorbed countless stimuli and made sense of them through intuition. She understood that she should be able to affect natural, living beings — even if she did not consciously recall individual facts about dimensions, magic, and related considerations.

But no matter how she tried, she could not touch upon the wizard’s essence. However, the spell or artefact did, and she tried to discern how.