Once we all were well and truly within the cave, I let myself relax and took in my surroundings. Or rather, I tried to, for once, not even the night vision granted to me by my elven heritage and affinity for Darkness allowed my eyes to see. Out of curiosity, I closed my eyes for a moment, only for nothing to change. But just because I couldn’t see didn’t mean I couldn’t perceive my surroundings. Infusing the darkness around me with a trace of my Astral Power gave me an idea of my surroundings, letting me see where no shadow was, meaning that there was something else there. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough.
“Let me make some light.” Olivia softly said, but before she could finish the short chant to ignite the golden flames on her staff, I spoke up, stopping her.
“Don’t, at least not this close to the exit. Even a faint flicker of light might be seen in the darkness of the night above.” She let out a sigh and I thought that one of the faint outlines I could perceive gave a nod, which was good enough for me.
“Let’s go a little deeper, where you can make some light so you guys don’t sit in the dark while I find out just how large these caves are.” I added, stretching the Eisblumen to give each of them something to hold onto.
Instead of trying to fill the Darkness in the whole cave-system with my Astral Power all at once, as I had earlier, I slowly let my power seep out, not pushing or forcing anything, but simply let my own Power mingle with the faint traces of Astral Power that were present in our environment. A small part of me was surprised just how perfectly smooth the ground within the cave was, almost like a stone washed smooth in a riverbed. At the same time, I realised that the crag we had come in from was just that, an opening in the side of a much larger, longer tunnel that gently sloped downwards, roughly following the contour of the mountain above.
After a few moments of consideration, I gently used my connection to my Astral Power in our surroundings to push it upwards, as it was the direction we ultimately wanted to travel. I had no idea if there would be more exits that way, or anything about the cave, but it seemed to be a good first step.
Travelling in the perfect darkness, with nothing but my sense of the surrounding Astral Power was slow going, luckily the cave was high enough for Adra to stand, while Sigmir was still within her Hallow, otherwise it would be even slower. Maybe two-hundred meters of distance, until we reached a bit of a bend in the cave, took us almost an hour. By that point, I decided we had more than enough distance that a small light wouldn’t be enough to be seen through the narrow crag we had come in through and stopped.
“Olivia, you can shine some light.” I told her and she instantly said her prayer, one that sounded even more fervent than her normal chanting did. Apparently the Darkness wasn’t to her liking.
I almost laughed when her magical torch made me realise that I hadn’t opened my eyes after closing them earlier, instead completely focusing on what my other senses had been telling me. Turning, to not get blinded, I opened my eyes and let out a soft sigh of awe, one that was echoed moments later when the others stopped blinking away the spots they had suffered from the sudden change in illumination.
All around us were tiny flecks of crystal, reflecting and refracting the light, almost like a starry sky, twinkling with the flickering of Olivia’s magical flame.
“Beautiful.” I wasn’t quite sure whose mumble it was, it might well have been mine, the scenery was truly that.
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“Olivia, you can keep that light going for a while, right? And it won’t cause any bad air that would be dangerous in a cave?” I asked, suddenly not certain about the combustion-mechanism of a purely magical flame. Without any physical fuel, there shouldn’t be any danger of poisoning us with toxic fumes, at least in my mind. But it didn’t hurt to ask.
“It’s no problem, I can keep it going without trouble.” Olivia assured me, causing me to nod and take a few steps ahead, out of the direct circle of light her staff shed.
There, in the darkness, I drew upon my Astral Power, pushing it out not as Darkness, but as Ice, quickly setting up my throne. Once more, I included some Runes, connecting them together in the dwarvish way and again, what I tried to bolster was Darkness-Magic and the absorption of Astral Power. Not that I thought the second would work, it was essentially an idea to use Darkness-Magic to devour the magic around us, but it might work. And if not, I doubted it would cause any actual damage, not without a mind to guide the effect.
Sitting down, I continued what I had been doing, only this time, instead of having to feel out the way for the others and me, I only needed to find out how large the caverns were. Where before, I let my Astral Power fill the whole space around me, to find anything that might cause a fall or any other danger, I used a mental image of hair, of numerous thin feelers that stretched out into the Darkness. Though, I realised almost instantly that using a large amount of feelers would quickly push me to my mental limits, as well as take a rather large amount of Astral Power, so I kept the image, but instead of hundreds of tendrils, I limited myself to four, keeping things on a level I could easily maintain. It was more similar to the vines of my Eisblumen than to hair, but it was good enough.
Exploring with the tendrils of darkness was faster than walking in the dark, by an order of magnitude, but that still meant it was overall relatively slow. Where normally, I could flit from shadow to shadow by shifting my point-of-view into the magical construct, now I was feeling my way in the dark, having to make sure my tendrils weren’t accidentally stretching into different tunnels or getting lost in crevices too narrow to traverse.
When I took a momentary break, having to retract one of the tendrils when I realised it had gone astray, I stopped, considering my methods. Why couldn’t I shift my view-point? I hadn’t done so, on the assumption that it was dark, and thus seeing would be useless but was that a valid assumption? Or had I just made an ass out of me, as there was no you?
After all, when shifting my mind into a construct of magical shadow, did I need light to see? Wasn’t the perception from the construct based on something other than the ability of my eyes to perceive minute traces of light and turn them into visual information? The construct didn’t have any eyes, at least not in the biological sense. Hell, I had originally created my constructs using the mental image of a floating eye, which might have very caused me to add in false assumptions.
Leaving the tendrils where they were, I focused inwards, letting three of them mostly fade from my mind and concentrated on the last one. What was around it? Not just directly in contact, but in its vicinity. For a moment, I could feel the whole tendril swell, turning from a thin, hair-like tendril of darkness into a massive tentacle of shadow, draining a great deal of Astral Power in the process. It allowed me to feel the entire tunnel I had scouted so far, but that was clearly not the way forward.
Pushing aside the slight headache from the draining power, I tried to change my focus, using another tendril while slowly absorbing the Astral Power I had pumped into the first one. Maybe the mental equivalent of an eye was needed, not so much in a practical sense but because my mind was used to filtering visual data through a structure I conceptually identified as an eye.
Remembering my scrying-construct, I formed an eye-like structure at the tip of the tendril, nothing complex but eye-like enough to allow my mind to form the association. There was only darkness before me, but that didn’t necessarily mean I was on the wrong path. Thinking of the way Lenore was viewing Astral Power, I tried to filter in a similar way, not looking for all Astral Power, but instead simply trying to perceive the types I had an affinity for.
Darkness, Ice, Blood and Death, those I could feel, those I should be able to see. And in this place of cold darkness, that might just be enough to allow me to navigate.
The only question was how to do that.