Entry 2: First Vision
Age 16 - The Shadow-Step Awakening
I can’t stop shaking, but not from fear - from excitement.
It happened during combat training in the Crown Circle. Bright-Claw had me pinned against the ancient bark, blade at my throat - a perfect trap I’d walked right into while showing off for the younger cadets. The Reachguard Elders were watching from their perches, probably ready to lecture me about overconfidence.
Then suddenly I wasn’t there anymore.
One moment pressed against rough bark with my face in the moss, the next I was behind Bright-Claw with my practice dagger at his neck, grinning like a loon. The look on his face - pure shock mixed with something that might have been terror - almost made me laugh out loud.
But in that instant between here and there, I saw them. Enormous shapes moving beyond the veil of reality. Things with too many angles, too many eyes, pressing against the boundaries of our world like water against a dam about to burst. And the waterfall - always that upward-flowing waterfall - but now I understand it’s not water at all.
It’s reality itself, flowing backward, breaking down.
Elder Thornwick’s face went pale as winter bark. “Shadow-stepping is impossible,” he declared, but his voice shook. “Our people don’t have aether magic - it’s corruption, the source of all evil in this forsaken age.”
But it felt so right. Like finally using muscles I’d been born with but never knew existed. Like the shadows themselves had been waiting for me to figure out how to dance with them.
The Reachguard Elders called an emergency council. I could hear them through the living wood walls of the Crown Circle: “We’ve never had one like him before.” “The scouts need his abilities, but if he’s touched by corruption…” “Watch. Wait. Pray to the Last Wolf Pack that we’re wrong.”
Whisper-Steps found me afterward, sitting alone on my favorite branch, watching the bioluminescent fungi pulse like infected heartbeats. He didn’t speak for the longest time - just sat beside me in comfortable silence.
“The dreams are getting stronger, aren’t they?” he finally asked.
I nodded, surprised he knew. Last night I’d dreamed of Thornhaven Reach burning while something vast and patient watched from the spaces between stars. When I woke up, I found claw marks on the bark beside my sleeping platform - marks that definitely weren’t there before.
“Show me,” Whisper-Steps said quietly.
So I shadow-stepped to the branch above us, silent as death itself. This time, his hand didn’t go to his weapon. Instead, he smiled - the first real smile I’d seen from him since this all started.
“I’ve been waiting for this conversation for months,” he admitted.
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Journal Entry 2 of 10 - The awakening of power