A Jaded Life

“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 ferocity of that attack made me leery to investigate the town with the group, far too big a chance to get ambushed. Hel, an ambush was even possible if I moved alone, their tremor sense was that formidable, as was their ability to detect magical emanations. No, the only way I could imagine going into town was by going in hard, as Lia was suggesting, by using my formidable magic to clear out all the nooks and crannies. Or, in other words, to conjure up as much of my deadly mist as I could and have it roll over town, letting it seep into the underground lair the Shattered had built so it could tear away their lives.

“We wouldn’t get any additional test subjects,” I groused, as previous tests had shown that trying to knock out larger groups of Shattered was nearly impossible. Something about their nature made them resistant to the effect, or maybe the effect weakened when applied to a large number of targets, I wasn’t quite sure and it didn’t really matter at the moment. Either way, I couldn’t just send them to sleep for disposal, at best, I could use the deadly mist I could conjure to kill them all. Or at least a large number of them.

“But we might be able to find out why these Shattered are so much more advanced,” Lia argued, getting a nod in return. She was right, I had been wondering why these Shattered had their high levels and, maybe even more importantly, why they were as smart as they were. There didn’t appear to be a hive mind at work, at least not one that remained linked up if a Shattered was separated from the hive, but they were far too smart to be simple beasts. And that was without going into the somewhat strange effects our experiments had produced, especially those Lia, Luna and I had used to alter their Souls and Minds.

There were so many different results, it was almost maddening, to the point that we started to wonder if these experiments had any real point, other than to increase our skills. Because if there was no reproducible result, what use did the experiments have?

The only real result we had managed to get was the creation of the Soul Dust, as we had started to call it, the result of a Soul discharging its energy into the host body as it passed on. At least that was what we thought was happening when we tried to remove the Vampirism from a previously Shattered and their mishappen vampiric Souls went wonky, resulting in a body turning to strongly infused dust. The resulting Soul Dust had some fascinating properties, both magical and alchemical in nature, meaning both Luna and Alex were fascinated with it.

While I had no idea what Alex was doing with it, I knew that Luna had managed to create permanent magical plants with it, but lately, she had been trying to use the dust to create living creatures, greatly stretching her abilities. So far, she hadn’t been able to succeed but I had a feeling that part of that lack of success was her fundamental process. She had been trying to use Blood as a starting point and while Blood was vital to life, at least for the usual animals she was using, it wasn’t really part of the reproductive process. Maybe she needed to use something that would, eventually, grow into a living being, something like an egg or maybe even an embryo. So far, I had not talked to her about my ideas but if I ever came across a suitable test subject, I was planning to pass it on.

“It could work,” I mused as I stared into the distance, towards the town, trying to guess how many Shattered could still be there. It was quite odd, the town seemed to have a disproportionate number of them, given that, as far as I knew, Shattered had only come into existence during the Change, from souls unable to adjust to the influx of Astral Power and, well, shattering in the process. There shouldn’t really be any environmental factors influencing the strength of a Soul before the Change. To the best of my knowledge, there hadn’t been any awareness of Magic and Souls before the Change, at least not as a serious consideration. And yet, it looked like this town had, somehow, produced more than twice the number of Shattered I’d have expected from a town of this size unless the town had a far higher population than the number of houses suggested.

“We’d have to go slow, make sure every step of the way is cleared and that we always have a path to retreat,” I continued, going over potential situations in town and ways to resolve them, without paying a price I wasn’t willing to pay. Because at the end of the day, there was no way I could accept to lose any of my companions, just to clear out the town. Sure, I wanted to find out why these Shattered were special, there might be something interesting hidden within, or beneath, the town but ultimately, it didn’t matter. Not compared to the life and well-being of my family, compared to that, nothing really mattered.

If we decided to move on, to forgo the chance to find out what lurked in this town, there’d be another mystery we could try to figure out somewhere else, especially given the limited time that had passed since the Change. Sure, back in the day, it had taken centuries, or millennia, depending on how you were counting the time, for the many, disparate communities to link up globally but part of that was ignorance, part of that was ability and part of that was necessity. Now, pretty much everyone knew the rough layout of the globe, or at least they did before the change.

For a moment, I was gripped by a scary thought, wondering just how much the world had been changed geologically, did the continents look as they did before? Going by a mundane understanding of physics, the continents couldn’t have changed all that much, the amount of energy had to go somewhere and dissipate after the movement was done, so any continental movement beyond a few dozen centimetres within a year, if that, would cause catastrophic earthquakes and destruction on a global scale. But with magic in play, I suddenly had no real idea how that might work or what the limits were.

Had the mountains we were travelling through now changed, grown, shrunk or moved about? It was such a ridiculous thought and yet, with the way the old infrastructure had been affected by the change, I couldn’t be certain. The roads and the signs decorating them, which I would have used as an easy guidepost to compare the old landscape to the new, had largely disappeared but had they disappeared because of the change making them erode at insane speeds or had they disappeared because the land they had been build on had shifted around in some insane game of continental twister?

Shaking off these disturbing thoughts, I focused back on the conversation between my companions and the potential plans to attack the town, slightly amused that an assault on what could easily be compared to a horror movie setting was less disturbing than the thoughts in my head. What did that say about me, compared to the situations we found ourselves in? I wasn’t quite sure, but at the same time, hearing my dear, chronologically six-year-old adopted daughter suggest the use of the equivalent of a chemical weapon on the town made me wonder. Alas, the old world had been changed and in this new world, a new morality and new norms were needed.

After all, now, after the change, there weren’t just humans who were able to think and use tools. While I didn’t think that the number of legacies was enough to introduce a stable population of the different races that had populated the world of Mundus, some of the different biologies would take hold and who knew what those influences might evolve into, given enough time. Or what the Shattered might become, or something like the Withered. There were so many possibilities I could imagine and, undoubtedly, many more that I could not, the old rules simply didn’t apply any longer.

Sadly, I had no idea what rules the rest of the world would find acceptable, especially as I doubted that those rules would be the same everywhere. So, for now, I would have to simply go with what my mind, heart and gut told me, especially in regards to teaching my children. Who, again, had claimed that being a mother was a simple thing?