Eventually, we settled down and made camp, my mind still somewhat reeling from the sheer magnitude of Olivia’s spell. Jealousy and pity were warring within me, both directed at her, as I was jealous of the tremendous power she was wielding, the effect of her divinely granted spells simply something I could only envy.

But at the same time, I pitied her. The power she was wiedling, the beauty and impact of her spells, she didn’t truly understand just what she had. She was pressing the button on a jukebox, letting the music play and listening to it, she wasn’t playing the music. I wanted to be the artist, the one directing the power and creating the music, not just someone who could press 1 for fast running.

“Do you feel that?” Lenore asked over our connection, landing on my shoulder after stretching her wings with a quick scouting-flight. For a moment, I had no idea what she was referring to, before I calmed my mind, pushing away my thoughts and feelings regarding Olivia, allowing me to focus on my senses. I even closed my eyes, letting my tongue flicker out, as I had no doubt that whatever she meant was magical in nature and tasting the air was the best way I had to perceive that.

Even focused inward, with nothing to occupy my mind, I needed a few more moments before my eyes shot back open when I realised what Lenore was referring to. There was something, almost out of the range of my perception, like a deep bass-sound that one couldn’t hear but just barely felt from the vibrations of the air around you, and it was powerful, powerful enough to send a shiver down my spine. Just trying to pin down what I was tasting, to conceptualise it in something I could relate to proved to be difficult, as there were countless tastes all overlapping at the edge of my perception.

“Wow.” I let out a soft gasp, my mind now trying to get a better grasp of the barely-there sensation. After a few more moments of standing there, staring into space and trying to make sense of something I barely even felt, having only noticed it thanks to Lenore, I shook my head and decided that I wasn’t smart about it. With a few quick gestures, I formed a set of runes, relatively sloppy and casual, barely more than a focus for my Ice-Magic to create my throne. I could probably have done the same even without the runes, I had created the throne often enough to be used to it, but the runes reduced the strain.

Sitting down, I started to ponder just how to go about things best. It wasn’t as if I had dedicated magic to increase my perception, so I had to be creative about it, if only to trigger Mortal Hubris. My chosen field of study, at least in my mind, was Magic, as a general concept and force so investigating whatever that weird sensation was should qualify, certainly if I used a newly devised magical technique for it.

Given that I was barely able to feel whatever it was, and I was perceiving magic by taste and smell, I decided to try to increase the size of my tongue, so to speak. Smell and taste were conducted better in moist air, which was why smelling the rain, or smelling cut grass after it had been rained was possible and often quite intense, and in many ways, the Mist I could create was moisture in the air.

With that idea in mind, I started to let mist waft around me, forming into a dense cloud still tightly connected to my mind and on a hunch, I channelled Concealment towards the outside of the cloud, not in an attempt to conceal me from outside observation, but the opposite, an attempt to conceal most of the outside from me, to allow me a greater focus on what I wanted to perceive.

My final idea, before delving deeply into my perception, was to imbue the misty cloud around me with the runic concept of magic, as it was what I wanted to perceive and filter. Again, I had little idea if it would work, but just the concept felt about right.

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With the giant cloud of mist wafting around me, I tried to tap into my connection to it, in an attempt to widen my perception, to channel whatever I was feeling, whatever magic was hitting the cloud towards myself, where I might be able to understand it. I could feel Lenore on my shoulder, her mind subtly joining with mine, experiencing what I was feeling, what I was picking up and helping me process it.

For a few moments, we floundered around, grasping at a feeling that was simply out of range, when I had the idea to change the shape of the diffuse cloud around us, trying to form it into something akin to an ear or funnel, the outside lined with concealment to filter anything that wasn’t coming from one direction. That change allowed Lenore and me to slowly move the open side of our funnel, trying to get a better idea just where the sensation was coming from, other than south. It helped a little, giving us an even wider range of perception, but even so, neither Lenore nor I could make heads or tails of what we were feeling.

Joining our minds even tighter, we started to compare and contrast the sensations, looking for common ground in the things both of us perceived in our own frames of reference. What neither of us could achieve alone, we managed together, even if there was little we could actually do with the information, as even with the widened range of perception I gained with the mist around me, there was no way for us to filter the volume of magic we were being exposed to. It was akin to staring into a bright light and trying to filter the light hitting my eyes into a spectrum. Just that I was tasting the purple, while Lenore was seeing the sound, neither of us able to fully conceptualise the sensations.

“It has to be the wild magic covering the ruins of the ancient empire.” Lenore concluded, and I had to agree. We had heard about the WIld Magic that had consumed the Ancient Empire, leaving nothing but the roads they had made, some saying the remnants had moved across the Ocean, to found the Human Empire. What remained on Aretia, was a massive scar on the land, destruction covering hundreds of square-kilometers, though curiously, the destruction wasn’t centered on their base of power, but further to the south-west.

Given our recent experiences with the Manticores, our plan was to stay well away from the place those murderous sky-lions had fled from, driven out by some other, likely even worse, monster.

“Do you want to try scrying things?” I asked, my curiosity not as easily smothered.

For a few moments, Lenore hesitated before she agreed, though she insisted on keeping our mind anchored here and using a Mirror of Darkness, a construct much akin to a window that reflected the area around our scrying construct. It was an early version of the scrying-spell, reverse-engineered from a spell that used water to scry on a different place, and it added a layer of protection, something I appreciated especially after the troubles I had run into when meeting the Arachnids using a similar technique of remote projection.

To add one more layer of protection, I used the mist we had already formed around us and reversed the concealment I had infused into it earlier, now longer trying to filter out the world around us, to allow greater focus, but now keeping us concealed from anything that might try to follow the magic we were using to scry.

Finally, Lenore and I were confident in our protections and started to actually work on the scrying. First, we needed a construct to move and as always, our chosen shape was that of a raven, formed out of Shadow.

Letting Lenore control the magic we had infused into the darkness, the raven took off, soaring into the darkness of the night, blending into its surroundings almost perfectly. It was a little too dark, darker than the black of the night, but there was nothing to be done about it.

While Lenore was letting our magical sensor soar, I formed a secondary construct, pushing the link I had to the magic infused into the raven flow into it, allowing us to get a shadowy image of what we would see from the raven’s perspective. It was similar to whatI had used when scrying underground, a blurry image in shades of black, but it was the best I could do, at least so far.

Leaning back, I started into the dark shape in front of me, studying the land the raven was flying over.