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It was if the pieces were not put back correctly. It took a while after the battle for some of the symptoms to appear but when Stephen had gone into his astral form it went to hell.
Everything was in a fog. As soon as he was free of his body, it was as if he were back in the soul stone. Everything was orange and he was honestly terrified. What if he had imagined the fight being over and he was still trapped in here? The soul stone had been destroyed but Stephen had spent an eternity trying to hold together the slippery pieces of a dimension that held half the universe.
Stephen was frozen in his trance until Wong had noticed he was out of it for twelve hours. It had taken some wrangling but Wong finally corralled his astral form back into his body. Stephen had his first panic attack that day. Dormammu was bad and he would occasionally zone out but this?
Wong called it Soul Sickness. There hadn’t been a record of something like this happening before but honestly no one had been in a situation like it before either. His astral form looked like a shattered mirror: cracked and echoing images but still relatively put together unless it was touched.
Stephen was forbidden from entering his astral form without a minder.
He tried one time to prove Wong wrong only to nearly starve as he had tucked himself away in a forgotten corner of Kamar Taj and nearly starved to death.
All there was for him was the orange fog.
No one knew if it would get better but Stephen didn’t have a lot of hope. He was also terrified of dying and ending up in that terrifying place. For now though, all his soul had was that fog.