Book One – Chapter 2

During his student life, the events from the enigmatic encounter with the witch mother to the discovery of this first hidden room within the academy had set the path for Yves’ artefact hunter future. From an early age, the trajectory of Yves’ life had irrevocably shifted. Beyond the rigors of his standard curriculum, he had learned to translate arcane languages, decipher long-lost sigils and decode riddled spells. Most of all, he had learned what power may lay infused in artefacts. He learned that there were dark forces in the world, entities driven by avarice that coveted these relics for the supremacy they bestowed – without ever considering himself as such a force.

Would others? Yves considered the possibility that the mirror world stalker saw him as a threat. But who would go through the effort of hunting him in the mirror world instead of in their dimensional reality?

He discussed this thought with Midnight, but could not come to an obvious conclusion. When they talk, it is usually Yves who speaks his mind and Midnight who listens. She does not talk back, but Yves likes to imagine that she listens a bit more intently whenever she agrees with him.

More horrifying would be the possibility that the presence he felt was not another wizard, but a mirror world existence, one of the many moving, shattered entities that Yves had encountered while exploring the equally fractured plane. But they had never emitted any noticeable presence, let alone intentions to communicate. Yves traversed the confines of the lighthouse’s chamber, his vivid memory recreating the malicious presence standing right in front of him, in its intensity to be felt even across planes. What if his use of the crystal half ball and his frequent travels through the ethereal mirrors had somehow caught the attention of something dangerous. He couldn’t ignore the possibility that his presence had disturbed and caused an unknown entity to consciously seek out him, his mirror and, with that, the dimensional barrier between their planes.