Anri groaned, feeling his head heavy with a migraine after passing out.

  "Imagine I'd feel worse if I'd drunk that Hangman Ale." He groaned and blinked, gasping when the sight before him was not what he had expected.

  His surroundings were too bright with vivid colors, stirring up more of a headache. The grass was a sickly candy-green shade, the sky too blue, and the meadows looked like they were a painting on a canvas. A sweet stench of musk and myrrh wafted up his nose to make him gag. He swallowed down his urge to vomit.

  The last time he had been dropped into such scenery was when he was in the Fade.

  "Well, shit. If this is the Fade, I'm done." He slapped a palm to his forehead and realized it was one he shouldn't be able to use. "Wait, my anchor arm! It's... all here?"

  He examined his anchor hand, waving it about, feeling strange it was a part of him again. This fact alone made him realize he was no longer in Thedas. Or, more like, he had entered a domain within the Fade. But whose domain and how he got there was his worry.

  "The world is fading." An ominous voice rang about his senses, drawing in the feeling of timelessness.

  The world reshaped around him, rapidly churning and changing into many scenes. So swiftly it was making his eyes bleed and his mind about to explode. The ever-changing scenes blurred into an indistinct form, which began fading from existence.

  "Shadows rise to bring form to the world's light."

  Just as the pain of bursting was upon him, it stopped. Anri felt his entire being (spirit, soul, and body) thrust up like a shooting arrow aiming for the starry sky. His eyes widened with fear when the edge of a burning star nearly melted his face.

  "Shadows reverse the world order."

  As swiftly as he rose to the heights of the heavens, he plummeted fast to crash into the world's core and split it into two paths of light and darkness. Between the two paths, a third was being drawn as a shadow cast or inverted on both. This shadow path wrapped around them like a snake enclosing their prey.

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  The snakish shadows bound and manipulated the light's direction to make the darkness obvious. It relented and shrunk back to allow the darkness swift strikes and wins over the light. This balancing game between the obvious Light and Dark fed the snakish shadow so it grew fat with power to become its own lasting path, one that reached out to a cosmos beyond the world's imagination.

  "Shadows need light to tell the darkness."

  Once the shadow path had mastered its own form, it stole more of the light to create new forms and rules and bring life into meaning and determination. It pulled upon the dead and forgotten from out of the darkness to fight the light's corruption and the stagnation of the old world order. Forcing change when change was needed.

  Finally, it gave the Light a new definition so they could reform the world into something beyond stagnation. The Dark Path was manipulated to match the Light's, keeping the world turning. Any resistance was absorbed into the new world rules; there was no escape from change.

  "You are the shadow to guide the beings of Light and Dark along a new way. Take the in-between and never waiver."

  Anri huffed as he suddenly found himself back in his manor, like he had woken from a nightmare. A piece of silk parchment magically materialized before him, shimmering with an unworldly green tint.

  "Little Bird, a gift. Start the change now. Change to change the world away from a future of impending destruction or stagnant life cycles."

  Silverish magic words appeared and were gone along with the parchment as soon as it had touched his lone hand. But knowledge rushed into his mind with the way to rebuild the missing part of his arm.

  Hmph. Like he would listen to some vague entity about starting change. Well, actually, it aligned with what he wanted to do anyway. If the knowledge that was forced into his head was truly a means to rebuild his arm, he had to repay the gesture.

  "I declare this, spirit: do not betray me, I will not betray you. If you accept this, we are aligned." Anri shouted with his voice rebounding through the hallways.

  His answer came in the form of information toward his next step. He caught the magical parchment that disappeared in his hand to be embedded into his head and gave a cordial bow to acknowledge their standing agreement.

  Still, just his luck to be on the verge of abomination. Dorian was gonna kill him if the spirit didn't first. He felt it was best to share this with him when they talked next. The last thing he wanted to be was one of the demon-possessed. He had killed a lot of those.

  As if to reassure Anri's fears, the surrounding air was charged with healing energies.

  "Creepy." He shivered and cursed when something hard knocked him back to the floor.