Book One – Chapter 3

He tried again and again, centering himself, listening, feeling, visualising, growing his awareness for the energies within him and reaching out for the world around him, making his energy pulse within his chest and from there expanding the radius ever so slightly with every beat until it reached and then exceeded his hands, and whatever else you would suggest to the frustrated child wizard who was at the brink of throwing a tantrum because he was just not getting it. After an eternity, Yves could feel his directed stream of energy pushing against the weight of the grey walls just below his hands. With every ounce of his magical strength, he compressed his energy to impact and alter the reality within the mirror world. He pushed his condensed energy into that of the wall, penetrating the structures to feel and grasp the shards that were the grey tunnel walls. But nothing was as he expected. The shards were there, but as he tried to merge his energy with them, they moved. They did not resist, not in a conscious or directed attempt to evade his influence, but they were in constant movement. 

Shards did not move, not by themselves. In Yves’ world, shards were magical substances given physical form. They were constructed by wizards. But in the mirror world, everything was fractured. In this plane, they were the world. They were, for the lack of a better word, the elements. Yves could not believe what he was thinking. In this plane, these shards that framed the passage between the lighthouse and the mainland correlated to waves.

There was a mesmerising order in their chaotic dance. Yves focused and felt, until he recognised circular patterns in their movements. Painstakingly slowly, he adapted the flow of his energy to this pattern to then imbue and infuse it into the shards as they moved. He meticulously adjusted and expanded his grasp until he gained control over their movement, and then he pulled. The resistance was staggering, the strain alarmingly painful. He could hear a faint hum, akin to the sound of the rushing sands but resonating much deeper, growing louder and louder until it was deafening. The pressure on his arms intensified, the strain became excruciating, threatening to rip them from their sockets before he would shift the grey masses. Pain and exhaustion closed in on him at an alarming speed. Yves dreaded to lose consciousness, but he could not stop. He needed all his senses to fixate on what he was doing.