Tsaimath

Chapter 1043

Just the idea of getting lessons was enough to thoroughly intrigue Daniel, to the point that he suddenly resembled Silva when the last piece of roasted meat was up for grabs. Just his transition from a somewhat serious student of the writings I had put on the wall into an eager puppy, begging for a special treat managed to break my usually solid poker face and made me chuckle. 

“What would those lessons be about?” Samantha asked, turning away from Alex’s scribbles about found...

Chapter 1042

Knowing that there was a group of survivors moving into our tower, I made my way downstairs, moving as fast as I could while remaining quiet. I didn’t want to appear hurried, I wanted to project an image of control and command, not one of urgency. Just as I made my way down the last set of stairs, a familiar voice reached my ears.

“Now, who might you be?” Luna’s voice was filled with a calm, curious tone, making it obvious that there was nothing bothering her, projecting just th...

Chapter 1041

Instead of taking a closer look at the camping party, we quietly decided to continue onwards to our tower. From there, I could use a scrying construct to covertly observe these people, without taking any risks, just in case they were a lot more powerful than they appeared. Or incredibly sneaky, cunning and deviousness could easily compensate for raw power, especially in a situation where the cunning party had time to set up and prepare. Alex was an excellent example of that, their traps and c...

Chapter 1040

After yet another exciting night of careful exploration, we were heading back to our tower. It was quite fascinating just how diverse the conglomerate city was and how many different parts there were to discover. By now, I had noticed that it wasn’t just the cities of Denver and Colorado Springs which had been combined, there were other, much smaller, places in the mix, too. Sadly, my geographical awareness was lacking and I wasn’t able to place the few names we had come across, so I had ...

Interlude: Eye of Sauron

Walking along one of the walkways they had installed between the partially crumbled buildings, Jack was staring into the distance. Something, a small part of his mind insisted, had changed about the mountains and the forest covering them. Something beyond the original weirdness, where the very mountains themself had shifted in an impossible manner. Mountains didn’t just move around, shrink or rise, at least not within a humanly appreciable timescale. And yet, after the Night of Insanity and...

Chapter 1039

Careful exploration of Denver Springs’ outskirts failed to reveal any serious or organised threat. What we managed to explore during the night, I repeatedly scanned with the Oculus, adding visual observation to the scouting we performed. The range I could cover thanks to the Oculus was simply too good to pass up, it allowed me to scan wide swathes of the city without any danger to myself or to one of my companions. In some ways, it was even better than my scrying constructs, though those ha...

Chapter 1038

Approaching Denver Springs, or whatever name I was supposed to use for this strange amalgamation of cities, was a little weird. Given our recent experience with hive-minded Shattered, we moved towards the town with an abundance of caution and vigilance bordering on a serious case of paranoia, even if my observations with the Oculus hadn’t shown a real need for that vigilance. Similarly, scrying with magical constructs had been fairly successful, though I could cover only so much ground that...

Chapter 1037

Sadly, just detecting that torch in the night didn’t help me much. At a vague guess, there were some twenty kilometres between my tower and that torch, so while I could observe it easily, thanks to the Oculus, doing anything about the torch was an entirely different challenge. For a few minutes, I used the Oculus to scan the area around the torch and noticed a few more flickers of light against some of the walls, most likely caused by other torches, only that those were mostly hidden from m...

Chapter 1036

The Oculus, as I had dubbed the addition  Lady Hecate had put atop my tower, was an incredible construction. Even knowing that Luna had only been an instrument for Lady Hecate to work through, I was incredibly impressed by the sheer complexity of the magical construct. Once again, I was reminded that divine magic was complete and utter bullshit, as it wasn’t really the mortal who actually used the spellwork. They merely ordered something from a menu provided by their deity and the deit...

Chapter 1035

Standing atop the tower, I couldn’t help but smile as my eyes gazed into the distance. It was finished and, if I admitted that little bit of pride, it was excellent work. The tower itself was just forty metres high, with three spires jutting out at the top, almost like a crown but in reality, these three spires held three statues, one of Luna in her guise of the Child, one of myself in the role of the Mother and, lastly, one of the Grandmother, taking her place as the Grandmother. In the mi...

Chapter 1034

There was something poetic about the way my new construction rose from the field of stone and rubble. Slowly, step by step, the devastation was pushed back and the chaos was turned into something orderly as I used the quarried rocks one after another.

At first, I simply prepared the foundations, letting some of the new rock push away the soil covering the stone beneath, fusing these new rocks into the old bedrock to create a solid foundation for the tower I was planning to build. Parts ...

Chapter 1033

As so often, reality was sadly a far cry from my imagination. Instead of starting out right away and pulling whatever building I desired from the ground below, I had to stay realistic and ascertain the conditions around our chosen location. Not only did I have to make sure the ground was solid enough to support the building that was slowly crystallising in my mind, but we also needed some sort of temporary shelter, or Lia and Alex would be in trouble quite soon. Furthermore, there was the que...

Chapter 1032

Our hunt for the perfect location to make our temporary home ended quite abruptly as if it had fallen off a cliff. And, to be fair, a cliff was involved at the end of our search, mostly because we almost ended up falling down said cliff when we stumbled upon it, making our way along the slopes of the mountains above the city. We didn’t want to get into the city proper, not with the unknown dangers lurking in the streets and we didn’t want to use some open area, where we were exposed to th...

Chapter 1031

Over the next few days, I kept trying to find a different spot to prepare our winter quarters. There were a few possible options but they all had something that made me a little leery about them. In one case, I considered the spot due to the powerful emanations from the Astral River, making me think that the location was host to a particularly dense intersection of streams within the Astral River, a place just below a Nexus in regards to the powers one could wield there. However, while that w...

Chapter 1030

As our journey continued north, we could cover more ground every night. The days were rapidly getting shorter, meaning that the nights were getting longer in turn. Additionally, the weather was incredibly bad, with a thick layer of clouds blocking the sun almost entirely out while repeated rain made the ground a slippery and soggy mess. We managed to stick to the decayed remains of the old roads for most of the time but those remains were only helping so much, partially because of their decay...

Interlude: Survivors 605

The more things change, the more they stay the same. At least that held true for trudging through the muck and mud of the swamp their group was exploring. The world had changed, their bodies had changed, everything had changed and yet, exploring a muddy swamp was just as annoying as it had been some forty-odd years before, when Mrs Wu had been trained to navigate terrain like this. Sure, some things were different, her body, for example, was a lot more capable, despite the many years that had...

Chapter 1029

Contrary to my original intention, we didn’t leave the area right away. Once again, my daughter’s curiosity mirrored my own but, for once, her tools were better suited to sate that curiosity. Where my mind was completely boggled by the amount of magic that lingered around the town and had turned into Wild Magic, Luna could use her connection to Hecate to gather some information. Sure, I could poke and prod the Wild Magic but my experiences on Mundus made me incredibly cautious around this...

Chapter 1028

Waking up after falling asleep from exhaustion, be it magically caused or not, was not a fun experience. Maybe I should consider redesigning my throne into some sort of lounger or maybe turn it into a straight-up bed, just so I could rest comfortably after pushing my body beyond what was reasonable and falling asleep afterwards. 

Now, I had to deal with a body that was sore all over, even in places where I wouldn’t think I ever would be sore and I could easily feel that my seated...

Chapter 1027

The biggest disadvantage of the method I used to attack the Shattered was my complete and utter ignorance of the progress it was making. I had no idea whether my spell was actually achieving anything. Sure, I knew that the clouds were dumping a few thousand tons of water on the town each hour, all of it holding a faint trace of my Astral Power. By itself, a single drop would do just about nothing, but with each drop holding that faint trace, things were rapidly adding up to an absurd amount o...

Chapter 1026

Ultimately, I decided that I would take a single shot at taking out the Shattered in town and if that shot didn’t work, or rather, if it missed, we would move on and try to find another place to explore. There was a whole world out there, just waiting for us, or maybe some other enterprising explorer, to discover and exploit its mysteries and I wasn’t about to wait for weeks and months on end to finally figure out a way to overcome the local troubles. There might be a great reward if we p...

Chapter 1025

With one of my plans to gather information shot, I focused on other options. Sadly, when I began to work in different mediums to create my scrying constructs, I quickly began to run into trouble. The biggest problem, at least to my understanding, was that I lacked the affinity for the other materials. Sure, I had managed to gain some affinity for them, thanks to a few of my traits, but compared to my affinity and understanding of Darkness and Ice, these were greatly lacking. That, in turn, ma...

Chapter 1024

The biggest problem with the plan to take out the Shattered in town and investigate what made them special was that we needed to know where they actually hid. Currently, we only knew that they could rapidly appear in the streets, on rooftops and within buildings, with the assumption that they had some sort of large-scale tunnel network under the streets, maybe an expansion of the existing sewer system or something along those lines. But that was all an assumption and relying on it could easil...

Chapter 1023

“Maybe we should try going in hard,” Lia suggested after we had tried to scare up a Shattered or two without completely exposing us in the process. By now, after a little over a month of repeated acquisitions, the Shattered didn’t dare to leave their underground lairs, though I wasn’t willing to trust their behaviour just yet. They had acted like this before but when I used a humanoid Ice construct to investigate, the construct had been torn apart in an ambush, The sheer speed and fer...

Chapter 1022

Capturing more Shattered for experimentation turned out to be an ongoing challenge, as they adapted to the different methods I could employ to capture one of their number. Soon, the only way to get more test subjects would be by wiping out groups of them, keeping only one or two of them alive for later testing. The problem with that was twofold, one was a lack of speed, meaning that while we fought with the group, more Shattered would arrive, making the whole thing incredibly risky and the ot...

Chapter 1021

“Fascinating,” I couldn’t help but mutter, as my eyes scanned the strange plant Luna and Alex had made. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before, both from a purely optical point of view and on a deeper, arcane level. Sure, there were plants I had never seen before, I was hardly a gardener or botanist, but the deep, almost light-absorbently black petals with silvery teardrops decorating them, just didn’t seem natural to me. What’s more, the seeds sitting in the middle of the bl...

Interlude: Sheeping Troubles

“What the hell could have done this?” the man now only known as Helos asked his leader, Lorgar, or, as they had started to call him, Legate Lorgar. He had been the one to forge the original, disparate group of people, none of whom had a real idea of what was going on, into a somewhat cohesive unit, guiding them to the place that later became New Dawn. Sure, there were other legacies in the burgeoning town but Lorgar and his courageous nature helped many to push past the initial horror, a ...

Chapter 1020

Sitting comfortably in our lair, after I had returned without the Shattered I had planned to bring back as a test subject, I was thinking about my earlier failure. The behaviour of the Shattered and, more importantly, its meaning, was something surprising, I hadn’t thought they had the ability to work at that level. It was easily comparable to the Withered and their structured hive-mind, though with some additional cunning thrown in.

Before, I had thought Shattered to be at the same i...