Tsaimath
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Chapter 1081
🕑 Added 2024-11-09 17:31:07 +0000 UTCAN: Mucked up the posting, this is the correct chapter for tonight. Enjoy.
After the celebration of the Longest Night was over, regular life at Jademoon Tower resumed. By now, the name for my tower had stuck to the point that even I, the ‘Jade’ in the name had started to think of it by that name, a development I wasn’t quite sure how to take. There was something about the name that made me just a little giddy, likely the fact that it made the close bond with my daughter all that more obvious, but at the same time, there was a bit of apprehension within me about it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to have things named after me, if only because I was well aware that there were beings out there who wanted nothing but my head on a stake, or my body bound to a pyre ready to be lit, or some other way to make me die in as much pain as they could manage. Though maybe I wasn’t giving Sunna enough credit, maybe she would be just as happy to have me die without any pain, but I wasn’t quite confident about that part. Only about the part where she wished for my demise, both the curse placed upon me and the treatment I had received from those worshipping her made that quite obvious.
So, having the tower named after me was both a blessing and a bit of a curse, even if I was fairly certain that nobody would travel in the area during the winter. Not with the amount of snow in the mountains, it was enough to make me happy and content, which said quite a lot considering that the Firn Elves I knew about came from places that could only be described as arctic, so giving me that instinctual feeling of home and contentment had taken almost a metre of snow on the ground with snow-drifts large enough to cover the average house.
Other than those small considerations, I continued to teach and made sure to help people travel between my tower, Maggy’s enclave near a park called Riverside Park and, lastly, the community Jack and his group had come from. Those treks weren’t completely painless, especially as they necessarily took place during the day, but making sure that there was a certain amount of rotation amongst the people learning at my tower helped a great deal when it came to quelling any sort of conflict. If people couldn’t get along or disrupted the learning environment, they were simply sent home and wouldn’t be able to return, a threat excellent at keeping the peace. By now, after some two months of studies, all students had learned that learning under my guidance was their best bet at getting stronger, not only to make sure they were safe and secure in this insane world but also to make sure they were comfortable.
After all, physical danger was only one aspect of this changed world. We all had been living an incredibly comfortable life with easy access to running water, food, shelter, and a wide variety of comfort and entertainment that even the kings and emperors of old couldn’t even dream of. From that blessed existence, we had gone back to a simple, some might say primitive, existence, trying to eke out the bare minimum to survive in this changed world. Magic was a fairly easy way to regain the comforts of old, at least on an individual level.
Compared to classical science, and alchemy to some extent, magic was a far more individualistic approach, advancing at a personal level with only limited impact on a larger scale, at least until there were enough magic users to spread their personal level around. Science, on the other hand, relied on a large number of individuals contributing to the same cause, all creating a very limited personal impact on their immediate surroundings but once the impact was achieved, it could spread daily easily, at least that had been the case before the change. It would be interesting to see how long it would take for a similar system of knowledge transfer to arise, though given that Lady Hecate had been pushing Luna and me to create the foundation of one, I doubted it would take all that much time. But we’d have to see.
In addition to the continued progress of my students, I had been making some progress myself. Sadly, not so much when it came to Mind Magic, I was, once again, a bit stuck with that particular subject, but when it came to Ice Magic, or rather, when it came to the project of creating my Wings and Breath.
The session with Lady Hecate during which I was allowed to observe her turning the combination of Astral Meditation, Mind Magic and a bit of Darkness Magic I had used to project the Astral River into reality in a semi-illusionary way into a ritual with far less strident requirements for the user had been a bit of an eye-opening experience. The sheer confidence and the complete and utter ease with which Lady Hecate manipulated reality on a level I hadn’t even considered to be existent was stunning and while I was well aware that I’d need a lot more experience to reach Her level of ability, I could tell I was a little too focused on the senses I was accustomed to.
As a human, the primary sense I used to explore the world around me was my sight, with my sense of hearing a close second after which all the other senses followed. Even now, after I had shed my humanity, I still focused on what I could see first, even if my senses had expanded so much, to the point that I’d be able to glean more information about something by using my magical senses or my soul sight. The world was so much greater than I had ever experienced before but due to my old experience, I still focused on the world as I knew it, unless the task at hand was something explicitly focused on another sense.
Additionally, I realised that I might have been overambitious. Trying to form an entire dragon’s body from Ice and have it act like an actual body while remaining in the centre of the body and controlling it might just be a little too ambitious, maybe it would be a smarter idea to start with what I knew I could currently achieve, namely, getting the Wings and the Breath and go from there.
So, what did the wings I was seeking were supposed to do and be? Obviously, the answer was that the wings should grant me the ability to soar through the skies, hopefully better than I currently could fly with my cloak. In addition, the wings should scale to the point that even if I managed to achieve a full draconic form, the wings would be powerful enough to carry it through the sky, meaning they needed to have some magical component. I might be able to create a construct strong enough to lift my body with purely physical means but achieving the same for a draconic form likely having multiple times my mass? That would be a lot more difficult and would need absurdly large wings if it were possible at all.
With my previous experiments trying to create the entire dragon, I was well-equpied to start working on nothing but the wings, though, as I had learned from my experiences, I made sure that my tests were done in a suitable place. Usually, that’d mean somewhere in or on top of my tower but given that this wasn’t a sedentary activity, nor one that I necessarily associated with Lady Hecate, the teaching of magic and Her growing over my activities and group, I decided that the tower wasn’t a suitable location.
Given my needs, the obvious answer was that I needed a mountain top, as remote as locally possible, with at least one sheer cliffside and as much snow and ice as possible. Seeking for such a location was fairly simple, though during my search I decided that it wasn’t quite what I was looking for and used another location I stumbled across.
It, too, was on top of a cliff, but a cliff that cut off a valley with a river running through it, only the river was now covered in ice. Curiously, even the waterfall supposedly crashing down the cliff was frozen over, which was the reason I decided to investigate as it wasn’t something I had seen before. Plus, there was an entire valley filled with incredible amounts of snow, thanks to the mountains on either side sending a sizable amount downhill. Compared to using a mountaintop, this area had a lot more to offer, which was all the reason I needed to make the decision. It helped that there was a small, nagging voice reminding me of the dreams I had of Sigmir and the fact that in the various I had she was always represented by a mountain so would making another mountain emotionally significant to me count as cheating? It wasn’t a question I could easily answer, so I decided to avoid it and simply set up my small camp on one of the slopes and get ready to work some serious magic the next evening.
