No reason to panic. The manuscript said this would happen. I just have to keep it from taking everything.
Then came the unexpected.
The portal's edges pulsed, then extended tendrils in all directions! Lightninglike extrusions of power began spinning out from his carefully-wrought framework, waving aimlessly, as if they were searching for something.
Then, as a thread of fear traversed his spine, they reacted as if they felt that fear, and began groping after him! And he was paralyzed with weakness, unable to move from his chair!
Gods and demons! No!
He couldn't tell what had gone wrong, or even if this was somehow what was supposed to happen -
No, this couldn't be what was 'supposed' to happen; if those tentacles touched him, they would suck the rest of the power from him before he could even blink. He could tell by their color, they had to be kept from him. Something had gone wrong - very, very wrong. This was worse than when he had touched the node - for this thing he had created was part of him, and he could no more cut himself off from it than he could cut off an arm. What now?
The life-energy tentacles reached blindly for him, threatening to create a power-loop that would devour him. All he could think of was that an Adept would know what to do if this spell was going wrong. At this point, he would gladly have welcomed any Adept; Hulda, an Eastern mage, even one of the disgustingly pure White Winds
Adepts. Anyone, so long as they knew what this thing was and how to save him from it!
At that moment, the groping tendrils stopped reaching for him. They hovered and flickered, then responded to his panicked thoughts and reached instead into the void, growing thinner and thinner....
What - ?
Suddenly there was no strength to spare even for a thought; his strength poured from him as from a mortal wound, and he collapsed against the back of his chair. His head spun, his senses began to desert him, and it was all he could do to cling to consciousness and fight the thing he had created.
Then, between one heartbeat and the next, there was a terrible surge of energy back into him and through him. Soundless light exploded against his eyelids; he gasped in pain.
That was too much; he blacked out for a moment, all of his senses overloaded, all of his channels struggling to contain the power that had flooded back into him.
Finally, he took a breath. Another. His lungs still worked; he had not been burned to a cinder after all. He blinked, surprised that he could still see.
And as his eyes focused again, he realized that he was no longer alone in his tower room.
There was something - some kind of not-quite-human creature - collapsed at his feet. The portal was gone, and with it, the back and shelves of the empty bookcase.
His first, fleeting thought was that it was a good thing that he had chosen an empty bookcase for his experiment. His second, that whatever it was he had created, it had not been the means to tap into the nodes that he had thought it would be.
His third - that he had somehow brought this creature here. Was that why the manuscript had called the construct a portal? Was it a door to somewhere else, not the nodes? If it was, this creature he had somehow summoned through it was from a place stranger than he had ever seen or heard of. It was unconscious, but breathing. He turned it over, carefully, with his foot.
It? No, indisputably 'he,' not 'it.'
Whatever he was, this strange creature, he was in very bad condition; in the deep shock only handling too much mage-energy could produce, the shock that Ancar himself had only narrowly escaped just now. He was manlike, but had many attributes of a huge and powerful cat - a golden pelt, manelike hair, the teeth of a carnivore - and the more Ancar examined him, the more certain he became that those 'attributes' had been created. This being had somehow been involved in changing his own shape, something that Ancar could not do, and had only seen Hulda do once. This was a more useful ability than a spell of illusion, which could be detected or broken.
Wait a moment, and think. He might have been born this way, and not something changed by magic. Or he could even be a different race than mankind altogether. This could be the creature's natural shape.
That thought was a trifle disappointing, but if it was true, it still meant that the creature was from so far away that Ancar had never even picked up a hint of anything like it before. It had to be involved in magic to have gotten into that void between the Planes. And together, those two facts meant that it must know many things that were not in the magic traditions that Ancar had been using.
