Book One – Prologue

The darkness crept in like a thief, stealing away the light and leaving in its wake only fragmented shadows. It was an absence that swallowed everything, an all-consuming abyss, a sinister chasm of bewildering proportions. And within this shrouded phantom, a terror lay in wait, an enigma of nightmares.

Spawned from the very heart of nothingness and nourished by the essence of the forsaken, the creature took shape in perpetual flux. Its grotesque form contorted and writhed, a macabre dance of defiance against the laws of sanity, a maelstrom of chaos crystallised into corporeal shape, a primordial terror clawing given form and voice.

Sorcerers who sought it were blind to their instincts, and those who saw it were blinded by fear, for once the creature had captured their gaze and set its sights on them, escape became an illusion. It would pursue across the tapestry of dimensional planes, manipulating the threads of reality to entangle its quarry within an inescapable snare.

And as it closed in, it unfurled arcane secrets, revelations incomprehensible to the frail mortal mind. Echoes of ancient deities and forsaken realms wove through its whispers, tales of power unfathomable to the human psyche. Those who succumbed to the allure of its voice it lured, captured and kept in the ethereal world behind the mirrors – in the realm of shards. Here, madness lay siege to their mind, trapping them in a nightmare of their own making, rendering them broken, fractured creatures. Legends whisper of its eternal existence, an everlasting sentinel that has observed the ebb and flow of reflections since the birth of luminance, a lurking malevolence observing yet unbroken existences across the ethereal divide. Across epochs, it lay in wait yearning for the moment they dared breach the barrier, the siren call of the unknown. With each reflection it ensnared, it grew stronger, more terrifying, more relentless, no longer a thief but a predator.