As our journey continued north, we could cover more ground every night. The days were rapidly getting shorter, meaning that the nights were getting longer in turn. Additionally, the weather was incredibly bad, with a thick layer of clouds blocking the sun almost entirely out while repeated rain made the ground a slippery and soggy mess. We managed to stick to the decayed remains of the old roads for most of the time but those remains were only helping so much, partially because of their decayed state, partially because they didn’t quite fit together any longer.
A part of me wondered just how the old Interstate system looked like now, had the complex marvel of engineering become an equally complex puzzle, with its numerous parts scrambled and scattered across the land by some strange element of the change? I could easily imagine it, especially when we noticed that some of the road signs most emphatically didn’t match their original locations, both when it came to directions and when it came to distances. Posts that, according to their signage, were a mile from one another were sitting side by side and signs that spoke of crossings or other artificial features, they were all scrambled and scattered. There had been highway markers in the middle of the wilderness and trees growing in gaps that looked like the highway had been cut away with some sort of real version of the good, old copy&paste tool. Or maybe the old eraser for image editing, leaving nothing but the smooth layer below. It should all be utterly impossible and yet, reality obviously thought differently.
Curiously, the more time passed, the worse the scrambling of the artefacts from before the change was. Back, right after the change, there had been some damage to them, but not more than could be accounted for by the earthquakes and the fires. Sure, the earthquakes themselves were an abnormality of the highest order, at least where I had lived, but they weren’t an impossibility. They could have happened, if somebody just put enough energy into the tectonic plates. Granted, doing so ‘manually’ would almost certainly cause about as much destruction as the earthquakes would but that was an entirely different thing. It was somewhat plausible, at least if one employed enough nuclear weapons.
On the other hand, the scrambling that was happening now was not plausible, unless one took magic on a scale far beyond anything I had seen in account. Compared to the scrambling, even the destruction of the Elder Tree by Nidhögg and the subsequent devastation of Mundus paled in comparison. The powers invoked might have been on a similar scale, it was difficult to tell, but the finesse and control of the scrambling were far beyond the Nidhögg’s actions. Maybe by design, the dragon hadn’t been concerned with controlling the powers unleashed, merely with the destruction he could cause, but even so, to scramble and disrupt a system as large and widespread as the highway system without causing as much collateral damage as the Nidhögg had caused on purpose? It sounded so incredibly unlikely, yet it seemed to be exactly what was happening.
“Mum, how long do you think we’ll be able to travel? If the weather gets any worse, we’ll be in trouble, magic or no magic,” Luna asked after slipping on the muddy path once again. Only Silva’s care had prevented her from taking a dive into the muck and I had a fairly good idea that the poor dear was suffering. Her endurance was the lowest among us all, with only Alex having similarly low attributes, but Alex had the advantage of fur and their diminutive size that allowed them to hide in Lia’s clothes occasionally. Luna, on the other hand, didn’t have those advantages and while I had tried to enchant her clothes with some Fire and Wind Magic so she’d be kept warm, those didn’t work quite as well as I had hoped.
“We’ll keep our eyes open. Hopefully, we can find a good place, maybe somewhere with a nice community or something like that,” I told her, knowing that winter was coming. While I had no problems with the cold and had enough magical tricks to travel in almost any weather conditions, the others were less fortunate.
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“You could use your ravens, couldn’t you?” Lia suggested and as she spoke, I noticed that she, too, shivered a little, likely from the wet cold. Or maybe it was disgust for the conditions of our path, it was bad enough that only preternatural agility and a dollop of magic made it somewhat traverseable.
“I can try, sure. But we’ll need some sort of shelter for that, I have no desire to leave my body in the mud while my mind is flying about,” I shook my head in disgust at the idea. The cold, wet rain was bad enough, but adding the clinging mud to that, I wouldn’t feel clean again. Even as things were, I had to take an hour every day to carefully launder our clothes, a chore that now needed all elements, wielded in harmony. Sometimes, magic wasn’t about the great works, the storms to destroy cities, the cleansing of an entire river or the restoration of life to those who had it. Sometimes, magic was just about the clean clothes, the warm shower and, thanks to Luna’s practice with her Life Magic, the freshly grown food.
We didn’t have to go far to find a suitably intact building, though intact was stretching it. The house was partially crumbled, multiple rooms exposed to the elements but other parts were still fairly solid, allowing us to rest in comfort without having to dig a shelter, something the soggy ground made a lot harder than I would have liked. Drying, solidifying, hardening, there were a dozen steps I needed to take so a freshly dug shelter wouldn’t collapse on us. If I was even a little careless, water would drip in during the day, making the entire thing fairly miserable. Luckily, making sure that the damaged house didn’t collapse any further was a lot easier.
Later, while Lia prepared some food together with Luna, I made myself comfortable and sent out a raven, the scrying construct allowing me to explore without endangering myself or leaving my daughters behind. Additionally, I was a lot more comfortable sitting on my throne than I would have been if I used my cloak to fly. While there was no mud in the sky, there was more than enough rain, and even a bit of hail on occasion, to make things uncomfortable.
Looking for a place that would make a suitable spot to spend the winter wasn’t an easy thing to do. I needed to cover as much space as possible, so the scrying construct needed to fly high into the sky but, sadly, the sky was filled with thick clouds. Sure, that meant there was no Sun to trouble my construct but at the same time, it meant I had a very clear maximum altitude, limiting the distance I could see.
To make matters worse, the mountains acted as obstacles, greatly limiting what I could see. From their outlines, I could easily see that there was space between the peaks but whether those areas were filled with trees, lakes or the remnants of the old world I couldn’t see unless I moved my scrying construct there. Overall, I couldn’t observe as much of the world as I would have liked, though that was only compared to the world before the change. Back then, I could have pulled up a map on the computer and gotten as much information as I wanted.
Finally, after my construct was drifting along the mountains, following their outlines and the wind, I noticed a large area covered in concrete. Pushing my construct towards that direction, I soon recognised the area as part of an airport of some sort and by the time I could see that much, I could also see a fairly large city, just sitting at the foot of the mountains.
Keeping my construct high in the sky, I started to take in a few more details. The city itself didn’t look all that special but even from up high, I could see that there was some movement in the streets. Whether it was survivors, undead, Shattered or something else entirely, I had no idea but at the end of the day, it didn’t matter all that much. This might be a good spot to explore, so it would be a good idea to head in that direction, not that we had to change our direction all that much, the place was almost on our path. Well, almost, on a geographical scale, meaning it might be a detour of a few dozen kilometres, so a couple of days extra. As always, it was a matter of scale and perspective.
Shaking my head, I decided to do what I always did. Get more information.