In the days following his revelation in the Spectrorium, Ethan felt unmoored. His grip on reality seemed to shift and kaleidoscope around him at any moment when his focus wavered.
One second, he'd be sitting across from Ava as they ate their modest meals in Obsidian's austere refectory hall. The next, his vision blurred and fractaled outward - no longer seeing his sister before him, but infinite refracting iterations and tessellating instances of her across impossible dimensions.
Just as quickly, the waking dream would shatter, leaving Ethan blinking rapidly with a pounding headache as his consciousness snapped back into its singular track. But the afterimages and metaphysical vertigo always lingered like a hangover.
"Easy, bro," Ava would murmur, reaching across to squeeze his clammy hand. "You're still in there, right? Just...breathe."
It was her grounding presence that helped tether Ethan through the mounting disassociation. But even she looked troubled by the distant light flickering behind his eyes in those tenuous moments. As if he risked slipping permanently into the abyssal vistas he kept glimpsing, leaving behind an empty vessel.
Cerulean had warned that Ethan's mind would struggle to adapt as his cosmic senses awakened fully. That the strain of encompassing realities far beyond any mortal frame of reference danced a fine line with the obliteration of one's fragile psyche.
"Think of it like forcing a torrent of pure data through an outmoded processor," she'd explained with a thin smile during one of their daily lessons with the Seven Sacred Hues. "Something as infinite as light itself cannot be so easily contained or perceived unless the proper...recalibrations are made to one's inner matrix."
So Obsidian and his elite Prismancers had Ethan undergo a strict regimen of meditations and rituals all focused on reinforcing his cosmic resonance. He spent hours sitting in vaulted chambers, bathed in pulsating color-mapped frequencies calibrated to each of the Sacred Hues.
First the deepest carmine waves of rubicore saturated his primordial nerves with passion and zeal. Then came azullion's oceanic trances to instill serenity and soothe the spark of consciousness. One by one, Ethan opened his transcendent sight to the veneran emerald flows of living fractals, the brilliant lambda-streams of intellect, the obfuscing quindigo penumbrae and so on.
Each hue revealed new hyperdimensional perspectives and alien geometries to him, while eroding away the rigid boundaries of his naive corporeal perception. It was the quintessential recalibration Cerulean spoke of - a complete shedding of human limitations in order to encompass the infinite scope of existence's true chroma.
But with each expansion of his inner eye, Ethan felt his anchoring memories and identity slipping further away. Faces grew hazy, names indistinct - everything dulled and abstracted behind the cascading influx of sacred colors and symbols bombarding his mind.
All, that is, except his bond with Ava. The thought of his sister became Ethan's singular lifeline in those times, a fragile strand of self to cling to amid the synaesthetic maelstrom churning through his very neurons. He cherished her worry-lined looks whenever they met between lessons, or the comforting squeeze of her small hand in his own.
Without Ava's concrete tether firmly clasped, Ethan knew he would lose himself completely to the fractal unfolding of his burgeoning Reflector's sight. His identity would diffract into those infinite, reiterating vistas forevermore, unmade by the very truths he struggled to enlighten himself with.
It was to stave off this existential disintegration that Obsidian eventually introduced Ethan to the concept of attunement anchors. Physical, metaphysical, or psycho-spiritual talismans to steady one's resonance and provide a focal lens to navigate the chromatic tides without being swept away into oblivion.
For some Prismancers, their anchor took the form of sacred mantras or isolastic rituals. Others used fractal icons or tangible artifacts resonant with their soul's unique frequencies. Cerulean, ever the overachiever, had bonded her spirit with a hyperdimensional symastry woven from pure theoretical math - a breathtakingly complex construct which she wore as a kind of metaphysical fiber wrapped around her body.
Obsidian himself arrogantly claimed to require no such crutch. That his brilliantly ordered mind could plumb the abyssal oceanic fathoms of infinite light unaided.
As for Ethan...his anchor proved shockingly humble - a simple obsidian shard around his neck on a tarnished chain. When Obsidian presented it to him, the headmaster claimed the fragment fell from the ancient soul mirror of Aricamerum, a Reflector demigod from an antediluvian age. Its facets held eternal mathematical residue that could resonate at the core frequencies holding Ethan's attenuated selfhood together.
"Find your focus through this talisman, boy," Obsidian had growled. "For if your cosmic sight remains shattered and scattered, all our teaching shall be for naught. You are a lens being slowly, painfully ground toward perfect perception - and the process would unmake anything less than an iron will."
As always, the headmaster's words rang with truth. From then on, Ethan took to clutching that obsidian shard desperately whenever he felt the kaleidoscope madness threatening to cleave apart his sense of self once more. The shard's edges would bite into his palm, cold and keen - a singularity keeping the spiraling immensities of his fractal sight converged on the here and now.
It became his meditative pose during световые купели - the rituals of light-submersion Ethan underwent daily. Brow furrowed in intense concentration, fingers clenched around the obsidian anchor until its edges cut calligraphies of focus along his skin in viscid beads. Forcing the cosmic torrent of his awakened Reflector's eye to channel through that single, purified lens of sharpest clarity.
It was a Sisyphean struggle, but the only way to keep his unstable psyche from dissolving entirely into the riotous, infinite light flooding his senses.
Whenever Ethan wavered on the edge of losing himself once more, he'd catch Ava watching him from wherever she hovered nearby. Worry and something deeper etched in the tightness around her eyes - as if she could glimpse the desperate essence of him slowly eroding beneath those sacred Hues.
Her silent, steadfast presence only heightened Ethan's resolve to persevere through Obsidian's tempering trials.
Because without the ballast of who he was, he knew there would be nothing left to keep Ava safely anchored in this realm beside him as it all finally slipped away.