Book One – Chapter 7

Brought back to the muddy crater, Yves found the dome, shelter and shard platform gone. He had left nothing energy-sustained, wary that lingering foreign energies would attract beasts after the shift. The mirror lay in the mud and rain, the unstable ground shifting under the additional weight as Yves appeared on top of it, from where he slipped and fell right off.

The pain from the fall was nothing against what was already there. Agony radiated from flesh wounds where the Vicha had touched him. His dual existence bore the marks where the veins had ruptured flesh, muscle, and insides, inflicting deep damage just before the shift. A dimensional shift did not erase or fix injuries, and the pain had never relented; Yves returned to the exact same body he had shifted out of, as if frozen in time. His body screamed as Yves hastily scrambled to his knees and dug for the mirror in the mud, but his fear screamed louder. The stalker’s presence loomed right above him, his appearance discernible in the shattered mirror. Yves tore the crystal half ball from the socket.

While the Stalker’s presence vanished, the dark aura of the Vicha persisted. It had not shifted with Yves; yet he still felt it surrounding him, in its full, expanded size from the Mirror Dimension that reached far beyond what had been the cliff behemoth. Overwhelmed, Yves collapsed at the epicentre of this unsettling mark of a witch’s touch.