A Jaded Life

Contrary to my original intention, we didn’t leave the area right away. Once again, my daughter’s curiosity mirrored my own but, for once, her tools were better suited to sate that curiosity. Where my mind was completely boggled by the amount of magic that lingered around the town and had turned into Wild Magic, Luna could use her connection to Hecate to gather some information. Sure, I could poke and prod the Wild Magic but my experiences on Mundus made me incredibly cautious around this kind of power, especially as I had originally unleashed it.

The tale of Ice Queen Sally sprung to mind. She was one of the entities locked up by the Grandmother, imprisoned in her personal dungeon, and turned into a boss. Or maybe saying that she was buried in the dungeon would be more apt. However one described Sally’s fate, the path that led her to it was what I was concerned with. According to the Grandmother, and corroborated by some tales I had stumbled across later, Sally had unleashed powerful magic, turning the capital city of her kingdom into a place of Wild Magic that eventually morphed into a dungeon. The people within the capital were turned into Undead of some kind, seeking to subdue the world for their Queen. Their crusade had only ended when the Queen, the Ice Queen Sally, had disappeared, likely because the Grandmother dropped by and imprisoned the somewhat immortal queen and limited the Undead to the area around the dungeon. Or one could be a consequence of the other, I wasn’t sure. But whatever the case may be, I had no interest in getting trapped by the magic I had unleashed.

There was too much for me to control, mostly because I had channelled a vast amount of power for hours on end, power that didn’t fade back into the Astral River as I would normally expect but that was now lingering here, with enough intelligence that I was considering whether I might be able to use Mind Magic on it. It certainly sounded like an interesting idea, though given the circumstances, I was a little scared of the possible effects.

On the other hand, Luna could, just like she had when we investigated the Charlands, channel the power of Hecate. Only this time, the Goddess hadn’t given us direct quests to investigate, so Luna couldn’t simply go to a nearby location and let Her deal with the rest. Instead, Luna herself needed to guide and channel the Divine Power she was employing, though there was still some interplay because Lady Hecate was the Goddess of Magic after all. So, where a normal cleric or priest would have been completely out of their depth, Luna could get a start, though even for her the entire thing was a difficult challenge. One I couldn’t help her all that much, though we did team up to interpret some of the readings she managed to take. The concepts and methods used to gather the current data were similar enough to those used around the Charlands to let me understand some of it and, luckily, Luna understood other parts, meaning we could mix and match our understanding and draw some plausible conclusions.

And what we found was fairly fascinating. There were some similarities between the readings we had taken near the Charlands and here, allowing us to compare and contrast to the point that we noticed some similarities. Sure, these similarities were mostly conceptual, along the lines of the similarities between the Great Lakes and an ordinary puddle, but they allowed us to draw some fascinating conclusions about the nature of magic. Just like somebody studying the Great Lakes and a puddle would realise that water follows the pull of gravity, how ripples spread across the surface and get reflected by the ground below, we managed to observe some fairly foundational aspects of magic.

Amusingly, we even received confirmation that we had observed something important by way of a divine revelation, or something along those lines. At one point, as we were trying to make sense of the data we had gathered, just as Luna and I were rambling along, our words slowly starting to mesh as an idea was starting to coalesce, Luna stopped speaking and, a minute later, told me that she had received a new trait called Curiosity of Innocents. The name was enough to make me laugh and hug my daughter, partially because the trait was somewhat similar to the Mortal Hubris trait I had received on Mundus, only somewhat less powerful but also without the detriments that trait had but also because the System continued to regard my daughter as ‘innocent’. Just that confirmation was enough to take a weight off my heart, as I had been worried that my actions were corrupting her in some fundamental way that I didn’t understand. After all, before the Change, there had been stories, fantasy stories, sure, about the corruption of innocents. In those stories, searching for forbidden knowledge or learning things that mankind wasn’t supposed to understand was frequently the source of that corruption, quite possibly to keep people from questioning common cultural narratives. Now, I could rest somewhat easy in the knowledge that the System didn’t consider Luna corrupted, which was good enough for me, the System was about as objective an evaluator as I could imagine.

The next step, once we had a whole lot of readings taken and information gathered, was to set up yet another shrine. By now, the process of building these neat little caves of knowledge for Lady Hecate was, amusingly, turning into a routine operation. There were some alterations to make the shrine fit the local geography or to adapt already existing features like the caves we had used to house our captives and experiment on them but the overall theme was one I almost knew in my sleep.

I wouldn’t even try to set one up while sleeping, that would be quite disrespectful to a being who had demonstrated that She was willing to give the occasional hand and who I actually wanted to emulate. To the best of my understanding, Lady Hecate had become a deity due to Her immense knowledge of the Arcane, not because She had a large following of mortals who were donating power to Her. Where some other deities became Gods in a process I considered amusingly similar to the political elections before the change, Lady Hecate had gained Her status by reaching the top of the Arcane Path. Though, I had no idea how that achievement turned into a divinity. If I followed the mental path that likened most Gods to politicians elected in a large-scale popularity contest, it would follow that Lady Hecate was akin to a scientist who somehow managed to become popular due to their scientific work. Hopefully, She would never need to use a speech synthesizer or something like that.

Curiously, as we were building the temple and filling it with the research we had conducted alongside a basic primer for magic, the Astral River and the elements, there were moments during which I briefly felt as if somebody else was there. Somebody reading over my shoulder and while I wasn’t able to accurately sense the presence, there was the faint, by now fairly familiar impression of Lady Hecate’s power. The realisation that the Goddess, despite having walked so far on the Arcane Path, retained her curiosity was an uplifting one. It indicated that, no matter how far one reached, there would always be more to learn, more to study on my path.

In the meantime, while Luna and I were building yet another temple, Lia and Alex were out there, committing a few more crimes against the natural order. They were roaming the area, mostly looking for critters that might wander into the Mists of Oblivion, as we had dubbed the Wild Magic effect, trying to study their effects that way. Sadly, it seemed that no critter was willing to go in there and when they decided to throw one in after capturing it, the rabbit never made its way back out.

Additionally, they were looking for Shattered that might have managed to leave the area during the rain or that might have been out at the time. Sadly, there didn’t seem to be any such subjects, it looked very much as if all Shattered that had been out and exposed had died, while the rest was missing, maybe forced to hide in their tunnels, though those should be filled with deadly mist.

There was a small, somewhat niggling, voice that suggested I might have accidentally given them the perfect shelter, once they managed to adapt to the deadly effects of the mist, but if the Shattered were that adaptable, maybe they deserved the shelter. Finally, after a little over an additional week of work and studying, the shrine of Lady Hecate was done and there were no more crimes against nature to be committed in the area. It was finally time to move on, reaching for the second divide. Luckily, helping Luna with her research and the building of the Shrine had been enough to grant me yet another level, bringing me to level ninety-four.