INTERMISSION / ANNEX
Through first sight, all wizards perceive the same. However, their second sight varies significantly, contingent upon their spectrum and core disposition. Lightshifters, for instance, see light fragments, while the common Worldbender elementer does not. In contrast, water elementers may adapt their second sight to distinguish foreign energies of beasts within hundreds of meters of water, an ability beyond the grasp of a Lightshifter, who cannot discern anything below four or five meters of depth.
The energies of foreign beings appear vastly different through the eyes of different wizards. Yves likely perceived the elf quite differently than what Raidenbarl or the academy masters would have seen if they had dared to use their second sight on the creature. Yves was among the few wizards who survived an elf encounter, and one of even fewer who saw an elf through second sight.
During the initial weeks of his recovery, several wizards pressed him to convey what he had seen. Yves' fractured memory had been distorted by fear, pain, and anger. His mind tried vehemently to suppress the traumatic experience for the sake of mental survival, leading to varying accounts in each retelling — within the initial weeks of the encounter and years ter, when meditation allowed him a more controlled approach.
As a novice wizard with only basic skills, he could not reproduce and visualise the horrendous elf energies in the material world. The perception of energies is a sensory experience of its own. In the same way that sound or smell cannot be painted on paper, energies cannot be conveyed to the material dimension. Illusionists learn to create energy overys over years and decades, involving the creation of illusions of Rothar in the Aldharian Dimension. When creating an illusion to deceive another wizard, Yves must create both a physical copy in the Material Dimension and an energy overy — an energy illusion — in the Aldharian Dimension. Otherwise, his illusions may be easily discerned by switching to second sight and finding no corresponding energies.
The creation of such energy overys demands advanced illusionist magic. Given that all humanoid peoples and even wizards of different spectra perceive energies differently, an illusionist must learn how those he aims to deceive perceive energies. Based on this understanding, the illusionist can create illusions that adhere not to his own perceptions but to their expectations.
Over the st fifteen years, Yves had attempted only a handful of times to create an illusion of the overwhelming, complex Rothar he had seen, to somehow reproduce the horror he had witnessed. He never came remotely close, his failure stemmed from both ck of skill and abundance of unwillingness to remember.
As a fledgling wizard, he had possessed none of the necessary illusionist skills. His mind had been exceptionally warded against any Transcender attempt to intrude into his subconscious and access his repressed memories firsthand. The Jabarrah, for an unknown reason, had fiercely resisted against any attempted intrusion.
Therefore, when pressed to recount what he had seen, Yves had resorted to creating pictures. Over weeks, he had, in the most literal and material sense, produced several drawings. While all of them differed, each sketch featured golden rings, erratically shifting spheres of what he could only describe as eyes of light, Rothar far more compressed than even the extraordinarily dense structures that created lightning. In the end, however, all his sketches were nothing but crude phantom presences of the harrowing images etched in his memory.
The_Duckman
