Unable to deal with these thoughts, he snuck out of the blanket and sat cross-legged several paces away in the pitch-darkness. Maiya snored softly, unaware. There was something about his old home that brought with it a measure of peace and familiarity. He hadn’t expected that.
Ruminating on the injustice of the world made him feel weak and small. The only thing he could do to counter that was to get stronger. And that meant training.
Vir thought back to Shardul’s memory, now faint and half forgotten. As he’d done dozens of times over the past days, he focused on the moment Shardul activated the ability. The man had sucked prana up into his legs, and then…
And then what?
He hit the same wall he’d struggled with. Shardul had somehow slipped into the shadows, but Vir didn’t know how.
To wield Shadow prana to its fullest, one must be partners with tragedy. Shardul’s words echoed in his head. He’d certainly seen his fair share of tragedy, but what did that have to do with Shadow prana?
The wooden floorboards shone brightly to Prana Vision, filled with Earth and Life Affinity prana, and Vir’s thoughts wandered to old memories. The rickety boards always creaked and sank under his weight. Rudvik was much worse—the man had to avoid some floorboards entirely, lest he risk falling through.
Wait… Loose floorboards that give… The ground gives way!
It clicked. He understood what he’d been doing wrong. The difference was slight, but profound.
Vir always tried to push himself into the ground when activating Dance of the Shadow Demon. Shardul did the exact opposite. He allowed the ground to pull on him. To suck him inside.
Functionally, they were the same, but mentally? They were complete opposites.
He got to his feet and mimicked Shardul. Vir sucked the prana out of his legs as usual, but this time, he resisted the prana that wanted to rush into his body, stopping it from entering. He concentrated instead on allowing himself to sink, to meet the prana where it lay, instead of asking it to come to him.
It felt a little like death. Like the souls of those who had passed were grabbing him, pulling him into the world of shadow. Into their world.
Vir found himself surrounded by pitch-black darkness. Not the darkness of his home, but in a world defined by its lack of light. Trapped.
What have I done! Vir screamed, but his voice ceased to function. He flailed his arms in panic, but found his body bound and immobile. He couldn’t even breathe.
Because in this place, he had no body.
Out! I want out! he thought, frantically trying to escape this nightmare. Yet no matter what he did, he met with failure.
Panic turned into dread as a horrifying possibility dawned on him. Was he trapped here, forever? Where no one could find him? He’d always known that delving into the secrets of prana was dangerous. That it could very well kill him.
Finally, his luck had run out. He’d reached beyond his means and landed himself in a place from which there was no escape. This time, nobody would save him. Nobody could possibly find—
And just like that, Vir found himself right back where he was, standing in his home, silent apart from Maiya’s snores. Sweat and chills broke out belatedly, as if his body had forgotten it needed to match his panicked state.
What in all the Realms was that?
He’d known what to expect—after all, it was the same as the memory fragment. Shardul had sunk into a realm of shadows. Vir just hadn’t realized doing it alone would be so terrifying.
He took a few moments to stabilize his breathing before returning to the memory fragment again. He wasn’t quite ready to attempt the ability… not until he had a firmer grasp of how it worked.
This time, rather than focusing on the technical aspects of the ability, he watched Shardul sink into the world of darkness—of Shadow. Once inside, it took the man only a few moments to pick out an exit from one of the many blurry motes of prana that surrounded him. Vir had completely missed them in his panic.
Once Shardul had selected a glob of Shadow prana, he’d popped out into the world again.
Okay… So that’s how it works.
Vir took a deep breath and went for it again. He sunk into the world of shadows, and this time, he didn’t panic. The clusters of Shadow prana shone brightly to his Prana Vision, but since Shadow prana was gray and this world of darkness black, he’d failed to pick them out earlier.
Now that he knew what to look for, he saw them everywhere. Dozens of possible exits. He reached out to a closer one with his mind and emerged several paces from where he’d begun.
This… This is kinda fun? He did it again, focusing on exiting at the farthest prana cluster he could find. He emerged outside his home, about twenty paces away.
Then he did it again, and again, invoking the ability over and over until the Ash prana in the area was almost dried up, which didn’t take long.
He learned a great deal from those repetitions. For one, he was tapping into the powers of Shadow prana—rather, the entire world of darkness was the domain of the Shadow Affinity.
And yet, every invocation consumed Ash prana instead. A lot of it—the ability hungered for prana far more than his other Talents. It made him wonder… Ash prana always looked different from the other elements. Denser, more profound.
What if it’s not an affinity after all? He thought. What if it’s more like a meta-affinity?
Something that could leverage the traits of the other affinities, though so far, he’d only been able to use Ash prana to power Earth and Shadow abilities. Perhaps it was restricted to affinities that lived within the ground? That would explain why he couldn’t use orbs. It would not explain why, in Shardul’s memory, Ash prana populated both the air and the ground.
Regardless, he’d uncovered a few other details regarding the ability. The maximum range was limited. The most distant clusters of Shadow prana he could see while in that shadow world were just about twenty paces. Beyond that, there was nothing. This didn’t feel like a barrier he could overcome with more practice—it felt more like a natural limitation of the ability itself.
Shardul had gone much farther, but then Shardul had a tattoo. Maybe those tattoos helped amplify the ability’s properties?
Another discovery was that the prana clusters gave Vir a glimpse into the world if he focused on looking through them. While inside the world of shadow, it was as if he’d gained a thousand eyes in a thousand places.
Unfortunately, there was a time limit he could stay in there before it kicked him out, like it had done when he panicked. About ten seconds was the limit. Either he had to choose an exit, or it would boot him out back where he entered—namely, his own shadow. Darkness counted as a shadow, which would mean that, at night, he’d have almost free rein to disappear and appear wherever he wished. During the day, he could still use the ability, but after venturing near the village’s lights to experiment with it some more, he needed hard shadows for it to function—the stronger, the better.
Which meant the ability was nearly useless on gray, overcast days.
Despite this, Vir was giddy. The potency of this Talent far outstripped High Jump and Leap. He wasn’t even sure it was a Talent—while it operated on the same pranic principals as Talents, this had so much more depth than the other two that it felt fundamentally different. It even gave him access to a realm he never even knew existed! The realm of shadows.