Book One – Chapter 3

When Yves got back to his feet, it was as if he had transformed himself from a broken reflection into a being of condensed ashen light, a creature that was too substantial to be penetrated or moved. And while he gained substance, his connection to the mirror world deepened. His core was no longer the essence and energy that he brought with him, no longer a foreign body, but in its origin an essence of the mirror world. This new being was no longer a fractured shadow but a creature of light, with ashen glass skin that caught and reflected the dim glimmers of light from the surrounding structures. Yves had managed to stop the immense flow of energy that was surging through him. He had succeeded in controlling it, and he had emerged from the experience stronger and more powerful than ever before.

He also for the first time realised that he had a shadow; flickering fractures of dark grey that lay at his feet and scattered across the glass. It was an observation that was as odd as it was random, yet it made him pause. Had he always had a shadow? Was he just never able to see it with his old vision? Or did his transformation, the intake of mirror world energies, change how his physical form was affected by this world? The surrounding shard structures emitted distorted, fractured streams of light, which touched upon the eerie grey mist emerging from the towering waves and now also on Yves. At his feet lay the dark overlay that he called shadow, hardly visible amidst all the fractured chaos, and yet more attached to Yves than to this world.

Looking at the tunnel walls now, Yves could see. This was the most overwhelming change for him.

Without touch, he recognised the wave-shards’ structure and pattern of movement. And for the first time since childhood, Yves could see true light fragments. This changed everything. Fixating his vision just right, he recognised their incredibly dense and stale constellation and further noticed how some of the longest and most complex chain structures were anchored to the wave-shards right and left, some even passing in and out. With that, he understood that not the two walls of shards had clashed against each other, but that Yves, unseeing and unsuspecting, had compressed, pierced and ruptured those anchored light fragments that could not make way. He knew quite too well about the destructive forces of compressed light.