A cold wind was blowing and I was standing atop a hill, overlooking the village we were targeting. The others had taken up positions nearby just in case something went wrong, but I doubted it. The night was as dark as a night ever got, clouds kept the little light from the stars away and, luckily for us, it was even a new moon night. Thus, not only was the night dark and very unpleasant, my classes’ bonus even kicked in, boosting the darkness-magic that would be involved in the ritual. Even if someone stumbled outside, it would be nigh impossible to find the source of the ritual, unless they had a powerful spellcaster who happened to move outside. But, in that case, we would either run or the others would intercept them and fight.

The last few hours had been interesting, Lenore and I had closely worked together, to create the ritual circle we were planning to use, with me, from time to time, allowing Lenore to guide my body, incorporating runes that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. Those runes were runes she had started to understand thanks to crossing the first Divide, runes that signified her existence, runes of Death and Air. It had taken us hours of effort to incorporate them into the ritual and even that was an experiment.

Finally, the circle was done and I shed most of my clothes, keeping only a minimum covered. Normally, I wouldn’t have even used that minimum, doing the ritual skyclad, according to Lenore’s suggestion, but I was planning to use footage of the ritual in the advertisement and had no desire to be bared for the whole internet to see. And Pantheon would likely have pitched a second fit, besides the one I was already expecting. So, with only my chest wrapped and a thin skirt, I was standing in the snow, feeling the wind flow around me.

I pulled up the control-menu for the various recording-orbs I had placed, activating them all at once. It was show-time.

Within me, reached out to Lenore, letting my mind join with hers, so that our thoughts flowed directly between the two of us, allowing us to cast magic as one. With a deep breath, I started to move, slowly at first, my steps gentle, almost hesitant, as Astral Power was flowing out, into the world.

It was the first part of Lenore’s and my dance, a slow start that would only expend as much Astral Power as we were regenerating together. We reached for the Astral River, letting our minds drop into a meditative state while my feet continued their slow dance and dark, cloudy mist started to billow around us. But the mist didn’t stay near, the other part of the ritual, Lenore’s contribution, slowly blew it towards the village, where it sunk from the windstream, filling the valley the village was in.

The magic wasn’t terribly complicated, it was something I had used a few times already, thick, icy-cold mist that would confuse the senses of anyone unlucky enough to be caught inside. But the main-purpose was to fill the area with our Astral Power, still vaguely connected to us, using a variation of the ritual I had devised against the Devourer, where I had filled the sky with my Astral Power and finally, pulled it all together for the final blow against the Devourer. That way, I was able to use massively more Astral Power than I normally had.

As one, Lenore and I decided that it was time for the second part of our ritual and our connection grew even tighter. An ability we had gained weeks ago, finally got to shine. The Avatar-form, Raven’s Shadow, a merge between Lenore and me, not only our minds working together but even our bodies merging.

The thin hairs on my arms and all over my body turned into black feathers, giving me additional protection from the cold. The rest of the changes was a little different, signifying that the ability was still in its beginning stages and it would take more time and development for it to be perfected. Over my hands, slightly translucent, ethereal black claws formed, while my nose and mouth were covered by a similarly translucent beak, only that this one was bone-white. On my back, a pair of wings formed, not quite the rounded shapes one imagined in angel-wings, the wings were clearly formed in the image of raven-wings. And, unsurprisingly, they were black as the night around us. Something inside me told me that, once Lenore and I developed further, the translucent changes would become real, allowing for a complete merge, even giving me the ability to fly.

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But the mental change might have been even more interesting, before, there had been a slight separation between our minds, now, that was gone. There was no longer communication between Lenore and me, because there were no longer to separate beings. It was a heady experience, inspiring, intimate and a little scary. My resolve to treat the inhabitants of Mundus as real was tested but just moments later, the experience of the joined mind blew me away. I simply didn’t care any longer what Lenore was, it didn’t matter.

There was no longer a me, or a Lenore, there was only an us.

We felt the wind billow around our changed form, and it was almost as good as flying. The cold was a little annoying, but it was part of us, just as the connection with the Astral was part of us. Our dance grew faster, more fierce.

And with the change, the ritual finally made complete sense, the runes we had inscribed earlier coming together in a complete whole, a whole we controlled. The runes we had used before were joined by more runes, runes of death and of devouring, of control and confusion. The amount of Astral Power we poured into the ritual increased and so did the amount of power in the valley. Together, we could feel the dense, dark cloud, feel and even control it, to an extent.

The original plan had been to wait until the dark mist had seeped into the houses, slowly killing the inhabitants before raising them as undead, to fight those who could resist our measures but we caught a lucky break.

A sleepy villager, apparently unwilling to use a chamber-pot, opened the door and we controlled the mist to envelop her, the mist swiftly draining the life from her. We felt her soul leave her body and before the body could hit the floor, our power took hold of it. We couldn’t give intricate commands, but there was no need to do so, the only command we needed to give was to hunt. Through the mist, we could perceive her actions, her shambling walk back into the building, which was now flooding with icy mist. We noticed that she was far less coordinated and understood that the strength of our undead was directly dependant of the strength of the bodies, but massively reduced from that base. It meant that, for now, raising our foes as undead was quite useless, the shambling husks were no real threat for someone of their previous strength, but it could be a massive blow to morale, or, as we were doing now, to augment area-of-effect magic.

The shambler fell against a door inside, uselessly scratching at it for a moment, before managing to open it. Inside, on a wide bed, was another orc just starting to stir. When the cold mist flowed past the female, it quickly woke him up. But it also caused him to become confused, too disoriented to realise what was wrong when the dead form of his partner lunged for him, not to embrace but to attack. She tried to grapple him, her arms scrabbling around uncoordinated while, at the same time, trying to bite him. If not for the tragedy of the scene we observed through the mist, it would have been humourous, the coordination of both combatants destroyed due to magic. But the revenant didn’t need to kill its prey, it only needed to allow the mist to reach it and that had been accomplished. A few minutes later, a second revenant had been raised, this one with a couple oozing wounds.

With the same order as the first, the pair, now united in undeath, shambled from their house, towards the next house. A small part of my mind was revulsed, but the rest of me was proud how well the magic worked. We would have to refine it quite a bit, but for a first try, it was very effective.

We watched as our two revenants shambled to another house, again, taking a few tries to open the door and the mists flowed with them. We changed our focus a little, diffusing it into the mist and adding guidance to the magic as a whole. Some of the mist had seeped into other buildings and started to weaken victims there and we wanted them to rise, just as the first two, thus, we used quite a bit of power to make sure that, everything dying in the mist, would be raised with the order to hunt. The spell would last until the power we had supplied to it was gone.

With that done, we focused on regenerating Astral Power, supplying the spell with it. It also meant that we didn’t have to listen too closely when the screaming started.