You wonder if you can shape the light. Perhaps use it as a means of ethereal restraint. You try to, but you feel pushed back as you attempt to manipulate its form. It’s as if the light is fighting you.
Probably best to look at alternatives, then. You could try creating your own ethereal boundary, but it would be hard to both maintain it and move. Especially as you have a mass of ether to hold in the coffin.
Could the light help with that? Well, it seems to have a strengthening effect on ether, so it could perhaps make a weaker boundary more viable. Is there another alternative?
Use the right magic.
You can’t help but think about that phrase. What would be the right magic? Time magic could potentially restrain them by slowing their movements too much to do anything, and perhaps that message is mainly a warning not to do that.
So what else could work?
Well, there’s the ethereal tether already attached to the two of you. You’d forgotten about it for a moment because you only sent part of your mass out of the demon. The mass that remained still had the tether.
Could you strengthen that with the light? A little focus suggests that you can. It should be harder for the other wizard to break now.
Then you loop around the ice a few times. The tether now surrounds it like a rope. When you’re satisfied with its shape, you use the light to melt the ice.
The other wizard is confused, giving you time to tighten the tether around them.
I apologize for the heavy-handed tactics, but I need to ask you some questions, and I need to be sure you can’t just run off in the middle of our conversation.
Before they can respond, you rush out of the demon. You quickly move the mass of ether you’ve been gathering into the coffin, and then move the restrained wizard in. You issue the young man the order to close it just as you get the light to weaken the tether on your side enough to break it.
The coffin is shut. Now it’s time to get this interrogation started.
But before you think of your first question, they make the words “SAVE ME” appear on the surface of the coffin.
You’ll need to think carefully about how to respond.
Suggestions:
First of all, dismiss the guy helping with the lid, if he saw the letters save me, tell him this wizard is stingy and doesn’t pay.
Next, reassure the wizard you’ll help them if you can, in response to his saving plea, you just need to know some stuff first.
Question the wizard about this light, why was it in a memory space and why does it seem to have special ether properties, who made this?