Tsaimath

Chapter 1206

“Mooooom,” Luna’s voice pulled me from my musings as we were walking along an old game trail. These paths had been our best bet for the last few weeks, essentially ever since we had left the area around the burned land. There might have been roads in these parts in the past, or even trails, but the strange decay of civilisation that had happened since the change had already made those disappear, leaving nothing but these rough paths. Luckily, this one was leading in the right direction,...

Chapter 1205

If there was one thing that stood out when travelling through what used to be northern Canada, it was the incredible landscape. The forests stretched seemingly forever, and even in the single year since the change, they had regenerated from what damage humanity had managed to cause. Animals were thriving; bears, moose, and all kinds of critters were plentiful and, quite frankly, frighteningly large. However, it looked like the trees were doing their best to keep up with the relative size of t...

Chapter 1204

“Mother,” Luna immediately greeted me after I dropped from the sky, using my wings to catch myself just before impacting the ground and landing in a crouch. “It’s good to see you again.” 

“It’s good to see you, too, Luna, Lia,” I let my wings fade away, stepping forward to give my daughters a quick hug, “Same goes for you, Silva and Sasha,” I added after kneeling down and thoroughly fluffing Silva’s pelt and giving a simple pet to Sasha who had been a little h...

Chapter 1203

Making contact with Luna and the others was a bit of a challenge as I was unwilling to approach the village, regardless of whether I was using a scrying construct or going in person. I had no desire to run into Angelina or get exposed to prayers to the Pale Lady, not with the incredible agony I had suffered due to that connection. After all, pain was generally a signal the body sent to tell the mind that something was wrong, and you should stop doing this. Which meant, avoiding pain was the s...

Interlude: Follow the Moon

“So, that happened?” Jerry, one of the locals, remarked after their mother’s sudden and quite rapid exit from the house she had conjured. Luna wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, though she could readily form some hypotheses and draw conclusions from them, but without a somewhat reasonable starting point, those ideas were bound to be flawed. 

“It did, though I’m not quite certain what ‘that’ was. But let’s focus on the scrying mirrors so we might be able to figu...

Chapter 1202

Discussing the oddities around me and my possible divinities with the Grandmother was a wonderful experience in its own right. Not only was the Grandmother a brilliant and knowledgeable being, she also had a massive advantage over any other mortal I could discuss these things with, in that she shared some of my own experiences and was widely studied in arcane and divine matters. That allowed her to compare events in her past, or even just things she had read or heard about, with the things ha...

Chapter 1201

Taking a second to create a simplified avatar, I placed myself in front of the Grandmother’s, idly taking in the incredibly elaborate nature of hers. It was a lot more complex than I could whip up at a moment’s notice, life-like and detailed to the point that most observers would likely be unable to identify it as an avatar, not her actual physical body. That thought brought with it a mental note for later, namely that I might be able to use an avatar like this to explore dangerous areas,...

Chapter 1200

After a somewhat short day, I was once again sitting on my throne, my mind continuing to run in circles, trying to understand the events of the previous day. Everything I knew about deities and apotheosis told me that it only worked if the entity who wanted to ascend had to be worshipped across dimensional boundaries. That was why the Grandmother had gifted me the Zevarra Agha, letting me bind it to my soul so it would be pulled into this world, almost like a Trojan horse. That gave her a min...

Chapter 1199

It was late afternoon by the time I awoke from some fifteen hours of deep, restful slumber. Sure, some of my biological processes were demanding attention, and I had to make haste to attend them, or things would have gotten messy, but after that, and a long, drawn-out and freezing cold shower, I was feeling like an entirely new elf. Or dragon, deity or something in between. 

By now, I had stopped to question just what I was biologically, beyond the fact that I was Morgana, beloved ...

Chapter 1198

The internal world formed by the complex interactions between my Body, Mind and Soul was strangely unchanged. Given the earlier agony, and its likely connection to Lenore’s sudden appearance, I had been certain that something would have fundamentally changed, but there was nothing of the sort. No shining lights, no new, inexplicable connections to a higher power, nothing but what had been there a few days before, when I had last tried to work out how I was connected to the different shrines...

Chapter 1197

“Luna, can you take care of things here?” I asked, my voice a little hoarse from the brutal headache I was now suffering. “Bring the locals back to their village, we’ll meet up somewhere, I’ll find you,” I added, knowing that I’d be able to find my daughters without trouble, even if there was some distance between us.

However, given the brutal pain and the weird feedback I had suffered when that girl, I believe Angelina was her name, somehow managed to connect to the Pale ...

Chapter 1196

Conjuring the required stone to make a shelter was a lot harder than expected, though I probably should have. Usually, I simply pulled up stones from the ground below, either individual rocks or grabbing parts of the bedrock wholesale if the soil was shallow enough, leaving me with ample material to work with. Here, I was unable to do so, as the burned land was covered in the disgusting goop from the Bitumen, forcing me to expend a large amount of power to make do.

Afterwards, I was res...

Interlude: Dungeon Revelation

With the massive, burning form of the Molten Lindwurm bearing down on the party, Oliver immediately took charge, as was his duty in times like these. With a loud voice, he commanded his group to remain mobile and stay on their feet, infusing the shout with the power bestowed upon him by his class and turning it magical. Thus, it wasn’t just a positive motivation that supported the group; it was a magical effect that enhanced their Agility greatly, allowing them to dodge attacks they’d usu...

Interlude: Dungeon Crawl

If the group of five who had descended into the depths of the Molten Core had been asked to fill out a survey regarding their experience, the predominant sensation they would have reported was one of stress. The environment was hot and dark, mimicking what an oven might feel like quite well, only that you wouldn’t have to worry about some strange monster made of dark stone jumping out of the wall to shank you while in the oven. So, maybe an oven would actually be a more welcoming environmen...

Interlude: Dungeon Descend

“Ok, guys, this is it,” the quiet but intense voice of Oliver, the guy chosen to lead and anchor the group destined to head into the depths of the dungeon, began speaking, trying to psyche up his comrades. “This is the big one, the one we’ve been training for.”

Sadly, his intense pep-talk was interrupted by a soft chuckle from George. He was one half of a pair of twins who were chosen for their uncanny ability to coordinate, a connection so strong that it had even garnered som...

Chapter 1195

Once I was reasonably confident that we wouldn’t get burned by the heat rays if we approached the central area on the ground, we started the last stretch forward. Just as earlier, the group planning to head into the dungeon proper was taking the lead, while the rest of us followed behind. The only difference was that the group in the back was now within a few metres of the one up front, instead of keeping almost a kilometre between us and them so that we wouldn’t interfere with their batt...

Chapter 1194

Two days of travelling through the burned land proved, beyond any doubt, that the escort we provided to the group destined to head into the dungeon at this land’s centre was utterly necessary. During the day, we travelled after them, my magical bags allowing us to carry a lot more luggage than otherwise possible, and at night, we made sure to treat their wounds and guard their rest. It was exhausting, especially as we got closer to the burned land’s centre and the ground started to get ho...

Chapter 1193

It was a strange dichotomy. On the one hand, neither the Chief nor any of my family wanted the group we had trained to raid the dungeon to come to harm. After working closely with them for over a month, first in an attempt to contain the burned land, and then during the dedicated training we had given them, we had all grown close in different ways. On the other hand, we were fully aware that we were sending them into danger, and they needed all the preparation, confidence, and experience, bot...

Chapter 1192

After two weeks of testing new ways to scry for information and finding countless ways that didn’t work, at least not in the ways I wanted them to, I was finally able to observe Lia’s training by borrowing the group’s senses. Their training had gone fairly well, focused on reinforcing the damage I had done to the burned area by conjuring up that storm and slowing down its recovery. They couldn’t completely stop it, there was far too much ground to cover for that, but they were good en...

Chapter 1191

My scrying constructs were helpful for a variety of purposes. Finding and observing my enemies was only the most obvious one, and, admittedly, the one I used the most. Knowing your enemy was half the battle, and my ravens excelled in scouting, unless they were getting destroyed by massive waves of burning goop or deadly heat rays. 

Now, however, I hadn’t used them to find an enemy, not even to seek out some sort of hidden or concealed information. No, instead, I had used them to ...

Chapter 1190

Delegation was such a wonderful thing. The Chief had, after some discussion, agreed that a raid on the burned land’s central dungeon was a necessity. Despite knowing that the chance that everyone who went into the dungeon got back out okay was slim, with a solid chance nobody would survive at all. 

Due to those chances, he had added a few stipulations to the raid, mainly regarding communication and training. The big one was that there needed to be a way for those outside the dung...

Chapter 1189

While Luna gave the locals an abbreviated lesson on the deities they made idols for, I had to figure out just what this might mean. Everything I knew about the divine told me that I couldn’t be a deity for people on Terra; their faith couldn’t bring me to apotheosis. At least that was what I had thought, what the scant information I had managed to find, mostly thanks to the Grandmother’s grimoire I was still using, suggested. Not that there was all that much to find on the process, the ...

Chapter 1188

“I’ve got to admit, I did not see that one coming,” I couldn’t help but mutter, even as I tried to make sense of the information presented to me by the System. Just to confirm it wasn’t some sort of glitch within it, I repeated the Inspection of the different idols, the additional information I gained only increasing my confusion.

There was a total of three idols focused on me as a person, with a further five depicting me as part of a triad composed of Luna, the Grand...

Chapter 1187

For a moment, I was torn between my curiosity and a faint sense of responsibility, one pushing me to go report to the chief and get his buy-in to attack the central structure, while the other was tugging me towards the newly established shrine and the idols carved in my image. I wanted to know if those idols were depicting me or if it was merely a case of Lady Hecate using my image, as She was wont to do, though I was still ignorant of Her reasons for that usage. She had Her own face, I had s...

Chapter 1186

“You guys alright?” one of the locals who had remained in their village asked the moment we got close enough to him to talk, “That was one freaky storm last night. Came from nowhere and a few guys who were up top said it looked weird, almost like a wedge in the sky,” the guy added, making me snort softly, especially the part where the storm came from nowhere. It hadn’t, but these guys didn’t know that just yet. They likely would learn it soon; I doubted the locals in my daughters�...

Chapter 1185

The way back to the village was filled with enjoyable conversation between Luna, Lia and me. The rest of their groups obviously listened in, and a few even added a few words, at least when we didn’t focus on complex magic and the storm I had conjured the night before. Just the confirmation that I had kicked the storm off made more than one of the locals look at me with an amusing combination of awe, fear and even a bit of disbelief, though hearing that it hadn’t been in a direct, or rathe...

Chapter 1184

As one would expect, Lia noticed my approach before I got too close to them. The moment she heard my wings, she called out a warning to the others before turning around alongside some of her companions, while the rest focused outwards, just in case the approaching flyer was only a distraction from an attack on the ground.

Then, I could see the relief, though mixed with a bit of caution or annoyance, on the various faces looking up at me, and now, I realised that their group was quite la...

Chapter 1183

While my scrying constructs were flying towards the strange structure I had spotted in the distance, I continued my way towards the village. The progression I could see on the ground was quite interesting, allowing me to judge the severity of the storm I had, partially inadvertently, created and how it dropped off over the distance. It was quite obvious that the strongest winds had been around the mountain I had hit beneath, with a focal point around the boundary of the burned land, where the...

Chapter 1182

Given the gale-force winds I had accidentally caused the night before, I wasn’t quite certain what I should expect outside of my deeply buried bunker. Some devastation, sure, but when I conjured up a scrying construct outside, I was still surprised by what I saw. 

The entire landscape had changed, literally. Sure, the major features were still there, the storm hadn’t been strong enough to erode away entire mountains, but I was fairly certain that a few of the hills in the area ...

Interlude: Century Storm

Not even trying to suppress a long yawn, Luna looked at the motley crew she was working with in order to contain the Bitumen of the burned land, to keep them from burning their way clear to the village. It was hard work, especially as her dear mother had decided to spend her time elsewhere, working on some arcane project in an attempt to push the burned land back on a larger scale. A worthy goal, one Luna could readily support, but it sadly meant that her sister, Lia, their furry friends Silv...