Book One – Chapter 7

The transformation into the ashen being marked not an endpoint but a crucial juncture, the one chance to survive this horror. With this ashen form, Yves gained heightened senses, particularly attuned to light fragments. The Mirror World held no true matter, only more material and more ethereal shard formations. All else was light fragments and raw energy. As soon as he could perceive them past the black mountain that engulfed him, Yves honed in on these fragments and immediately set to harnessing them. Drawing on his Lightshifter abilities, he infused light into the dense shards that comprised his being. If he could become entirely ethereal, like the Jabarrah — No, he could not infuse his entire form at once, not in the immediate struggle for the ceaseless growth required to stave off the Vicha. It was too much pressure, the challenge too complex, his own sickening screeching too distracting. Yet, Yves managed to alter the outermost layers of his form, those about to be devoured by the invasive veins.

In this metamorphosis of layers, the Vicha faced a limitation — it could not touch upon light, neither in the dual reality that was Yves’ origin nor in the ethereal expanse of the Mirror World. Yves had hoped for this. He had suspected a link between the energies of his reality and the Dimension of Shards after realising that shifting the grey wades of the latter impacted waves in the former. His hopes held true. In a critical turn of this battle, the Vicha continued its relentless consumption of Yves’ shard body without touching on the light he incorporated. And with that, the curse suddenly became his greatest asset. Because now, it extracted only the most material elements of his being, the least ethereal shards. Veins, finer than hairline fractures, carried away these impurities, leaving behind the purest forms of compressed light as they breached further inwards. While the Vicha progressed, Yves prepared subsequent light-infused layers of shards to be purified. Simultaneously, he pulled in the purified light structures, building them up around his core. It was mentally gruelling. A relentless endeavour that threatened to overwhelm him with each passing moment, yet he continued to pull and purify, to expand the ring of pure light around his core while thrusting ever new layers of condensed ashen shards outward, toward the Vicha.