Book One – Chapter 13

When the golem reached the path beneath the orich’s actual perch, the orich’s attacks ceased completely, but his gnarled hands remained raised, not in aggression, but in preparation. Midnight, her darkness flowing through the storm, touched upon him. She recognised that he was speaking.

The ambient noise of the Albweiss was muted to her. The howling winds, the grinding of the mountain — none of it reached Midnight in the way it once might have. Her transformation had rendered her senses alien to the world of the living. Yet through her darkness, she had learned to make sense of it anew. What she could not hear, she could perceive. While she had failed to grasp Rothar or matter, she could touch upon the everything that lay outside of her own nothingness to such degree, that she recognised sound — distortions of the almost nothing that was air; swirling waves that created an echo, not unlike the ripples of darkness that had defined the existence of the shadebeast.

With the sprites, communication had been instinctual, a shared understanding of the dark. Midnight had simply understood them, because they had known how to speak the language of darkness itself, how to convey meaning to nothing. But with the orich, his words were beyond her grasp, their meaning lost to her transformed senses. And yet, she felt their weight, the sheer gravity of each syllable. His voice, though inaudible to her, radiated power. Midnight recognised the gravity of what must be incantations, a slow and methodical rhythm building into something grand.

This was not right. What was he drawing from? Her darkness swept across the Snowtrail like a searching tide. It seeped into the mountain’s every crack and crevice, probing the ground around the orich for any hidden frosthearts or other potential conduits. Orichs, she had been told, were shackled to the materials they manipulated. Unlike wizards, they could not channel magic through their own bodies. Their magic was a parasite, utterly reliant on artefacts like frosthearts to function.