Book One – Chapter 3

As he manipulated the thick barrier, the mirror world retaliated with unprecedented power. The forces of this plane sought to compromise his very essence. They bore down on him with unprecedented strength, distorting his fractured, shadowy form. The more energy he expended, the more he depleted himself, the less substance and resistance he posed for the surrounding forces. They surged towards the vacuum that he created, the vacuum that he became. To separate his essence from the mirror world energies that tried to fill the emerging void, Yves needed to uphold a protective barrier around himself, a fragile shield against the encroaching chaos.

The dense, impervious walls began to shift and converge before him, closing off the narrow passage ahead. What took mere moments in his world was millimetre work in this plane. The pressure grew suffocating, the strain pushing him to the brink. Panic threatened to overwhelm him, but he knew he was on the verge of success.

With the tunnel narrowing, Yves prepared to interlink the opposing sides and weave the shards shut. However, the sudden clash of shard-waves caught him off guard. Instead of harmoniously aligning and melding together, the two parts of the wall violently repelled each other with astonishing force. Yves was thrust backwards, losing his footing and control over his fragile barrier. The sound of the collision was a deafening clash of crystal, its echoes reverberating through the tunnel and hammering in Yves’s head. In that instance of vulnerability, the mirror world’s energy, which had so fiercely sought to fill the void shell that was his shattered silhouette, broke through.

It was the most undulated energy that Yves had ever felt, raw power that he did not know existed, a torrent pushing into his fractal body to the point of bursting him. He fought to channel, capture, incorporate and control it, he fought to restore the barrier between what was him and what was not, but he was an unstable vessel amassing unsurmountable forces. They broke out of him within seconds. The surge did not stop. In and out, the immense river of energy now ran through him in a deadly cycle that ripped him apart from the inside. Yves could not breathe in this world, he had no air to scream. The world was screaming for him, the rushing sounds of sands now roaring within his mind, churning and shattering his consciousness.