kraken soulgaze

I looked down through the dark water and saw the kraken spreading out beneath me. It was . . . vast, its eyes gleaming with feral awareness, throwing back the light of the flare like eerie mirrors. For a second, I hovered there, meeting that gaze . . .
. . . feeling a dark, horrible awareness suddenly swelling unbearably inside my head.
What happened next would haunt me a while. The eyes are the windows to the soul. And wizards, if they meet your gaze for a moment, can sometimes get a peek in there. In the frozen dark of Lake Michigan, in the blazing, limited light of the flare, I soulgazed a kraken.
Soulgazes are serious business, because whatever you see there gets burned in. It never fades, never diminishes in horror or awe. If you see something bad enough, such as the n—
—something bad enough, it could do horrible things to your head.
I don’t even know what I saw that night. A blur of images, alien and strange and somehow nauseating. I felt my limbs, spread out and floating in the water. I sensed other creatures like me, writhing in obscene embraces on the floor of the ocean, amid broken columns and ancient statues of things that somehow seemed to bend themselves into more than three dimensions. Sensation flared through my thoughts, so absolutely alien to anything in the human experience that it might as well have been pure agony.
I heard myself screaming, felt the bubbles pouring up over my face.
But here’s the thing.
When a wizard looks into your soul, you look back into his. You see him the same way he sees you, clearly, a gaze that pierces veils and deceptions to see the world for what it truly is. The kraken stared back at me, and its warty hide began to ripple through fluttering bands of color, the skin distorting, becoming spiky, its tentacles coiling and curling in upon themselves.
I ripped my gaze away from the thing, my brain screaming in protest, but somewhere deep down, the instinctive part of me that almost enjoyed the benefits of the Winter mantle recognized something crucial.
Whatever it had seen when it looked back inside me had, for that moment, terrified it utterly. And something abruptly changed inside me, like a switch had been flipped.
The not-squid, the kraken, was afraid.
I was still stunned by the soulgaze, and so was the squid.

Battle Ground Chapter 2, Page 12-13