A Jaded Life

Finding Luna and the others was trivial. During the previous night, I had used a scrying construct to send them a message, little more than a simple confirmation of my ongoing well-being, allowing me to ascertain their position. Thanks to my cloak, I could easily overcome difficult terrain and make following my tracks just about impossible, so I didn’t have to worry too much in that regard. While I didn’t try to fly the entire way, running on the ground allowed me to move a great deal faster than flying did, I made sure to avoid any areas that might leave easily identifiable tracks. If they managed to follow a trail that was repeatedly interrupted by areas and obstacles I had flown over and was partially arboreal, as I had been jumping from branch to branch, they deserved to catch me. Not that I wouldn’t fight them if that happened, but if they managed such an impossible feat, they deserved the fight they’d get. I doubted it would happen, but if it did, I would be suitably impressed. And kill them, but that was a different problem.

No, if they managed to follow anyone, it would be the people I had given directions to different locations up here, alongside different times to meet up. Following one of them, or even convincing one of them to tell them about my offer and the time and location of the meeting would be a lot easier than trying to follow the disjointed trail I had left while moving back up and into the mountains.

It took a little over two hours until I reached the cave the others were using as shelter, taking advantage of a small brook that made its way down the mountain nearby, even if Luna had learned to conjure water by now. She wasn’t really good at it, nor particularly fast, but with enough time and effort, she could provide enough to sustain herself and the other. Maybe not enough to give everyone a daily shower but enough to keep everyone hydrated.

To my surprise, neither Lia nor Alex had a desperate need to replenish their Astral Power, they had been out hunting and sustained themself by draining their prey before killing it. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant method according to what they had told me before, with Lia likening it to a human surviving on raw fruits and vegetables, but it worked, at least in the medium term. They might need to drain power from sapients on occasion but we hadn’t experimented with that yet, it might be possible for them to survive on a diet of beast-blood.

However, where exactly the boundary between beast-blood and sapient blood was for that calculus was an interesting question. I certainly didn’t regard Silva as any less intelligent or sapient than any of us, nor would I ever suggest that Ylva or Lenore had been anything but highly intelligent beings. And yet, when simply looking at them, all three of them would be considered animals, leaving me with a bit of uncertainty. It might simply be decided by attributes, that the donor, unwilling or not, needed to have a certain level of Intelligence, Intuition and Charisma or something like that. Or maybe it came with a concentration of Astral Power, but that would make a magical animal a better source than a human on the martial path, which didn’t feel right. I couldn’t explain why I had that feeling but thinking that some powerful fighter would be worse than one of the experiments created by Luna and me didn’t sit right within my mind.

Maybe that was something we could test at some point, how the infusion of elementally biased Astral Power into an animal changed the sensation of a vampire drinking that animal’s blood. An interesting experiment, if nothing else, and it might even allow us further insight into the creation and reproduction of Vampires. For now, Lia could create new vampires with a bit of effort but that was at least partially thanks to her traits and class, not something we truly understood.

The rest of the night was spent cuddling Luna, quietly talking to all of them and discussing our next steps. They agreed with me that getting some test subjects was a good thing, both Lia and Luna shared my interest in trying to see what would happen if we used some of our refined techniques to improve a being on a human, though the glimmer in Luna’s eyes made a familiar worry resurface within my mind. Was I teaching my daughter the right path or was I guiding her down a path that would bring her pain and suffering later in life? I wasn’t sure and I doubted that there was an informed answer out there, so I could only go with what I considered right. And, in this case, the right thing to do was to give Luna the tools to deal with the changed world we found ourselves in, allowing her to thrive no matter what happened. Part of that was helping her to develop and ultimately master her magical powers, even if that meant she would see a few people die.

Seeing human bodies die was, sadly, something all of us had long since grown used to, at least if one considered the destruction of a Shattered or Undead their death. Arguable but not really important, especially as our experiments would almost certainly kill somebody. The number of critters we had killed during our experiments was quite large and there was no reason to think that a more complex being would be easier. No, if anything, I had a feeling turning a person into a magical being like the critters we had changed would be a great deal harder, if not outright impossible.

Thinking back, the first person we were expecting would be somebody I was planning to turn together with Lia, so Luna’s input would mostly be to stabilise our experiment so the person wouldn’t expire before we were done. But even that was something I wanted to avoid if at all possible, the additional Life Magic introduced if we had to go down that route would make the experiment harder, though having a more difficult experiment compared to one that ended prematurely wasn’t that much of a loss.

Another thing I did during the night was to check the various places I had told the test subjects about. Originally, I had discovered them when scrying the environment around New Dawn but now, I was looking for escape routes, possible ambush positions and similar potentially problematic locations. The people here had to have certain information about the general area and I had no desire to get caught in a trap because I hadn’t done my due diligence.

Finally, just before the sun was coming up, I sent one of my scrying constructs back towards New Dawn. My plan was to stash it in the shrine I had set up there, so I would be able to see, and maybe hear, their reaction. I had a feeling that Lorgar would throw a most amusing tantrum, the guy gave me the impression of being quite high-strung and convinced in the superiority of his own Goddess, which, in hindsight, made the fact that he had been smacked down by an ostensible ally all the more amusing.

Even now, a part of me wondered what would have happened if Lorgar hadn’t done the intelligent thing and backed off but kept pushing. While I might not have been able to strike him down, not during the day and with his entire party present to defend him, I had no doubt that Frigga would have given him something to think about for the rest of his life. Guest Rights were serious business, especially when they had been promised in her name by one of her priests.

Getting into the building was surprisingly simple. The scrying construct was made of nothing but shadows and magic, merely held in its shape by my will. The shape was a feature that allowed me it move it with a lot less effort than I’d need otherwise while also providing a great deal of stealth, it wasn’t an actual necessity. So, shifting its shape into a formless blob of shadows meant I needed to expend additional effort to move the construct but it also meant I could slide it through the gap under the door.

As soon as my construct breached the shrine, I realised that I should never, ever, try to do something similar with a shrine of another deity. Hel, even a different shrine of Hecate might cause my construct to unravel and the shrine would absorb the power as a sacrifice. It would be even worse if I tried it with the shrine of a hostile deity. In that case, I’d open myself up to some form of retribution, something I would prefer to avoid, especially for something this unnecessary.

Another surprise came when I reformed the scrying construct as a bird and flapped its wings, looking for a place to land. The statue of the Mother, the one wearing my own face, started to move, raising its arm and providing a place for my construct to land but as soon as it did, I felt the power it was composed of shift, turning rigid. I could still see through its eyes, still hear what happened in the area around it, but I no longer controlled the construct. It had become part of the Shrine, likely controlled by Lady Hecate.