A Jaded Life

The biggest disadvantage of the method I used to attack the Shattered was my complete and utter ignorance of the progress I 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 of power I was projecting and shaping. Without my throne, Luna’s blessing and the support from my Titanic Ambition, I wouldn’t be able to channel such massive amounts of power, certainly not over such a long time.

A part of me considered sending out Lia to check if I was actually getting anything done but without a way to provide backup to my daughter, I wasn’t about to take that risk. Especially as my indirect method meant I had no control over the attack or where the rain fell. Sure, the area in which the clouds were affected was defined by the runes I had prepared earlier but once the raindrops were infused with my power, they simply fell, landing where they would, the power inside them flowing into the physical world to form the deadly mist I wanted to spread. Most of the rain would fall on the city, but the attack itself was indiscriminate and would harm Lia just as it would a Shattered, though Lia would likely be a lot more resilient to the effects, thanks to her vampiric traits and generally high attributes.

So, given that I had no idea about the effect of my attack, I simply kept going. Breathing in while drawing in power from the Astral River before breathing out and pushing the Astral Power I had drawn from the Astral River into the runic formation around me. Over and over, again and again, each breath following the same cycle. It was, in a way, relaxing but at the same time, I could feel a part of my Body, Mind and Soul tiring, even if the cycle itself wasn’t particularly strenuous. The exhaustion was more along the lines of that ache you got when repeating the same movement again and again, no matter how simple and easy a single repetition would be. Doing the same repetition a few thousand times over a couple of hours would tire anybody out, even if the movement was nothing more than a wave.

But regardless of my slowly mounting exhaustion, I kept waving, kept breathing in and out, drawing power in and fueling the formation, just to keep the rain going. If the rain was still there, that part, too, I had no feedback of, by now, the clouds I had originally used to anchor my runic formation might have dissipated without new clouds entering the area, leaving my magic with no target to affect. Idly, while continuing my exhausting cycle, I began to wonder what might happen if the clouds dissipated. Would the magic I kept channelling form into some sort of mist, as it was supposed to once the rain hit the ground? If so, what was the difference between banks of mist, high in the sky, and clouds? Was there actually a difference between the forms of atmospheric water, or should the mist be considered a cloud once it rose high enough? And if so, why did people differentiate between mist and low-hanging clouds, especially if the clouds were hanging low enough that they touched the ground?

For a bit, my mind was chasing its own tail. There was no focus, no direction, simply thoughts going where they went, scattered by exhaustion and my drifting thoughts. Ideas started to pop in and out of my mind; some of them were reasonable and possible while others were complete and utter fantasies, impractical and impossible in equal measures. Amusingly, some of these ideas were both, practical and possible despite being a complete fantasy while others, seemingly reasonable, likely suffered some fatal, impractical flaw.

One of those ideas was the idle thought that the spellwork I was currently using was quite familiar, at least in concept. Part of it was a simple, scaled-up version of the spell I had used to destroy the Withered, well, scaled-up and altered to fit a new purpose. Would that mean it was still close enough to count or had the alterations, both in concept and in scale, changed it on some fundamental level and made it something new?

Not that it really mattered, as the much bigger, both in similarity and in scale, comparison was with the Fimbulwinter summoned by Nidhögg. Just like I was using the clouds to spread my magical rain, the Dark Striker had used the jetstream that surged around the world to spread his influence, allowing him to project power without using his own energy to propel it across the distance. The further you had to send your power, the more you would lose in transit, unless you had some medium to carry that power. That much I had realised early in my magical career, the need for a medium to carry your effects.

Sure, you could also use a pure medium, as I did when conjuring Icicles, Hailstones and similar weapons made from Ice to strike my foes, but that was, in essence, simply projecting a physical force using a conjured material as the medium. But if I wanted to project something like the effect of the Cold Rune, I needed to use a medium, and more often than not I had to conjure that medium first, using valuable Astral Power in the process. That problem was one of the biggest advantages Runic Magic had, the possibility to tie the conjuration of the medium directly into the effect, making things seamless and a lot more efficient.

Using natural phenomena as the medium allowed for more magic to be used on the actual effect but, in turn, it sacrificed control. The rain fell where it would but as long as it started its journey to the ground within the area of my runic formation, it carried with it a deadly payload. The jetstream blew where it would but as it was surging around the globe, it carried with it a deadly power. Natural means, imprecise but allowing for such incredible effects. It was something to keep in mind for the future, especially when thinking about ways to imbue magic into the shadows. After all, shadows were, amusingly, faster than light, unbound by the supposed limit its speed imposed on reality.

Visions of runes, carved into monuments all around the world, allowing me to influence the shadow cast by Earth itself as half of it turned away from the Sun, a veil of influence spreading across the globe as the world kept spinning and moving around the Sun. Sure, I would need some way to power the grandiose, and likely insane and impossible, spellwork I imagined in my mind, but just the idea held a great deal of attraction to my tired mind. Nobody would be able to escape. People could hide from the Sun, I was an excellent example of that principle, but to hide from the Darkness, to evade the shadow one cast? That was impossible, there could be no light without shadows but there certainly was darkness without light.

Grinning, I pushed the thought aside, forcing my mind back into a semblance of order, as difficult as it was. I had lost all sense of time as I kept channelling Astral Power into the formation beneath my feet and by now, my stomach was loudly complaining, reminding me that I needed more than Astral Power to fuel my body.

For a moment, my mind drifted again, questioning whether there was a way to use Blood Magic to sustain myself, to use the Astral Power within my blood to fuel the body my blood was flowing through. It wouldn’t, couldn’t, work completely, there was a need to introduce the fundamental building blocks to the body, the nutrients the digestive system used to produce the various parts but did the energy needed to keep it all fueled have to come from that same source? Lia and Alex didn’t need to feed on regular food, though they needed to imbibe these same raw materials in addition to the infused Blood that supplied them with Astral Power and, likely, energy. So there had to be a way, right?

Noticing my drifting thoughts, I quickly marshalled them again and started to disengage myself from the constant cycle of power I had been caught in for some unknown amount of time. Not too fast, not too slowly and soon, my breathing wasn’t matching the cycle of power, the runic formation around me started to die down, its glow fading away as my power stopped infusing it.

Finally, once I was completely disengaged, I noticed just how tired I was. Without rising from my throne, I reached into my bag and pulled one of the few energy bars we had looted and carried with us, starting to eat, but before I managed to finish the precious morsel of the old world, exhaustion caught up with me and my mind faded away as my body snored softly.