After the Avatar state ended, I staggered for a moment, my mind needing those few seconds to catch up with my body. Around us, the smell of blood was thick in the air, the elves all lay dead while their mounts were either dead or dying, none of them had managed to escape.

“Adra, renew the protections to conceal us, I’m certain somebody is going to take an interest in dead elves,” I ordered, before closing my eyes, drawing out the rest of my magic, amazed at the sheer amount of power Lenore and I had thrown about while transformed. It reminded me that, after the Avatar ability, Overflow might be my most powerful one, simply for the option to channel vast amounts of power into a brief, incredibly deadly burst. Sure, it was inefficient but sometimes, efficiency wasn’t as important as volume.

My hands flickered through the familiar patterns, drawing runes and applying power to them, binding them into a greater whole, a runic formation of darkness and concealment, using the shadows of dusk to bind it, giving it the power to last through the night.

“We’ll have to move, soon,” I reminded the others, the order surprising nobody, staying around the killing field would be foolish in normal circumstances, the scent of blood luring predators to take an interest but here, where we had slaughtered a group of elven guards, it would be worse than that.

As the shadows settled around each of us, I didn’t let go of my magic, instead, I draw deep, pulling out some of my reserves and continued casting my spells. The next move was to obfuscate as much of the events as possible, to delay elven action as much as possible. I could see Lenore flapping her wings nearby, conjuring up an ill wind of death that turned the corpse of a fallen feline into little more than dust and bones, so the physical evidence would be taken care of by her. On the other hand, I had to take care of the magical residue.

Reaching out to draw on my link to the residual Astral Power, I managed to regain control over some of it, the blend was not really useful for anything, but with control, I could disperse it. It took a bit of mental effort, and some Darkness-Magic, to purge the Astral Power around us, feeding it back into the Astral River and turning things into an as natural state as possible. Anyone looking at it directly would notice, but on a magical level, it looked just like the forest should, maybe with a bit of extra Death magic in the area, but that wasn’t enough to stand out. Things died all the time in a forest, so as long as there wasn’t anything that stood as a red flag, like the slowly decaying residue from a lot of used Astral Power, we should be fine.

Nearby, Adra finished up her magical casting and looked at the ground, her powers letting the roots open up shallow graves, maybe promising the trees some fertiliser, before scattering the elven bones, hiding them where nobody would stumble across them.

“Anything out of place?” I asked, looking around the clearing. It was quite impressive what we could do if truly pressed for time. Rai and Sigmir had taken care of the worldly possessions of those elves. They had separated them into the identifiable, like the ornate dagger with a small crest on it and the unremarkable, the things that were so common nobody would think about identifying them. Things like food or coin, those we could keep after a quick sweep by Lenore, Adra and me, to make sure there wasn’t anything magical lingering. It would be quite embarrassing if the food had some sort of magical tracker enchanted into it but from the looks of it, that wasn’t the case.

The identifiable stuff, on the other hand, was taken care of by Sigmir and Rai. They made a game out of it, tossing those things into random directions, scattering them as widely as possible in an effort to mislead any pursuit. Finding a few shallow graves filled with bones was a lot harder if you couldn’t simply scry for the dagger one of them carried and with the Death-Magic used to destroy the bodies, no animal would willingly dig up those graves, there was simply nothing there to attract them.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Around me, the others made one last check, nodding as we went, and then we were off to the races, once again pushing our speed to the maximum, regardless of exhaustion. If we managed to get away from this mess before it was connected to us, we could count ourselves lucky. If not, things would get seriously messy.

As we ran, I took a brief look at my notifications, quickly scanning the gains of the brief battle. There was nothing on the level-side, the elves were simply too weak, and while I had made some gains in my Blood- and Death-Magic when feeding the Soul Prison, bringing the skills to eighty-two and thirty-four respectively, there was little else. I needed to find some major epiphany to gain those last precious points in Ice- and Darkness-Magic, or some great insight into their respective runes. It felt like those skill gains were very much on a logarithmic scale.

Or maybe I was simply not looking at the right places, there were those complicated concepts I could explore further if I had the time and leisure. Ever since we had entered the Forest of Dusk, I had very little time to spare attention for research and experimentation, leaving a lot of my ideas on the back burner. But in turn, there was the Soul Prison and the Nidhogg inside, another source of knowledge and power. If I managed to tap that well, I would gain a lot. What I would gain, I had no idea. It might be something akin to Divine Magic, where I simply asked a different entity for their help and they threw some magic my way but I didn’t think so. My hope was that it might be something more like the empowerment I had experienced during the feeding, where I allowed another entity to briefly use and control my magic, their own insights and ability bringing out far greater effects. If I managed to get empowered that way, I would get to see and experience such powerful magic first-hand, allowing me to go further and gain insights into magic far beyond what I would normally be able to accomplish.

For the first few hours, nothing much happened. We could feel the usual divination-magic washing over our wardings, unable to find purchase and allow the caster to realise that something was amiss but that had been the case for the last few days. Apparently, nobody had noticed that the patrol was gone.

But as one would expect, our luck couldn’t last forever. Shortly after the break of dawn, Adra and I could feel a disturbance in the Astral River. It wasn’t aimed at us, but who-, or what, -ever was acting, they were putting in some effort. Powerful attention was focused on the area we had vacated, powerful enough to give me pause. The closest comparison I had, was when that insane spellcaster had tried to snuff me out from hundreds of kilometres away, using my hair as a focus. It was somewhat similar, only more intense and luckily not aimed at me.

“They brought in someone powerful,” I warned the others, a shiver running down my spine.

“Rai, help me with the concealment. Maybe if we all work together, we’ll be able to remain hidden,” I ordered him, diverting most of my focus to smooth out the magical concealment around us. If we managed to blend into the magical background, we’d just be another shadow in a forest full of them. If they managed to pick up that there was something here, they’d simply push past our concealment with the difference in power. Only by not giving them the opportunity in the first place could we remain safe.

I could feel Adra and Rai focus on the magical weave around us, both of them working in a slightly different fashion both of them finding different edges and burrs, before smoothing them out. Things that one of us wouldn’t have noticed or focused on, another found and dealt with.

Behind us, I could feel powerful magic flare, just the fact that I could actually feel them was frightening. We had been running for an hour and continued to move at a quick pace ever since, giving us dozens of kilometres of distance, and yet, I could feel the disturbance in the Astral. Just how much power they brought to bear, I didn’t even want to imagine, or how powerful they had to be to channel such power.

“They are trying to influence the forest again,” Adra warned, “I’ll try to blend us deeper into our surroundings.”

Once again, I could feel the subtle changes Adra made, our aura changing a little, not so much in the concealed way but adding a few small things that made us seem like a part of the forest, nothing of interest.

I didn’t know if she was successful, but from the way sweat accumulated on her brow, I could only hope she was managing. Given that nothing bad happened, things looked good, but using the absence of deadly magic as a hallmark for success was a low bar.

But as low a bar as it might be, I was quite glad that we had managed to pass it.