After the long, exhausting shopping trip with my girls, we set up a new lair and settled into a somewhat weird routine. I was mostly playing the stay-at-home-mum, making sure that Sabrina had what she needed and gave her some lessons. Helping my daughter with her words and numbers was another thing I had never expected to do, though by now, I was getting somewhat numb to that sensation. There were far too many instances of things I would never have expected to do, from helping with nightmares to braiding her hair or making sure she was actually washing herself and not just playing under the spray. It was so incredibly weird and yet it didn’t feel wrong. It just felt…

Teaching my students about magic had been one thing. While I didn’t truly care for the people, though some had grown on me, the subject was one I loved. Teaching my munchkin her letters, however, was the opposite. I couldn’t care less to slowly sound out words, helping her to write, to slowly sound out words and connect them to ideas was nothing for me to be excited about. But knowing that it was my munchkin made it feel worthwhile, making me wonder how it would feel to teach her magic. Real magic, not just the simple, surface-level stuff I had been teaching her but the true, deeper levels, the intricacies of Ice or the obscurity of Darkness. Sadly, I’d likely never be able to find out, not without some serious investment and interest on her part, making me a little sad that I wouldn’t be able to share that part of me with her. Maybe the communion with Hecate would open up some interesting avenues, otherwise, I’d have to focus my teaching on Lia, though she lacked the interest, even if she had the affinity.

And it was a good thing that Lia had her affinities, otherwise teaching her how to reach into the shadows would have been a massive pain. She had managed with some instruction, allowing her to use the magical bags I had created but she hadn’t mastered it. She needed quite a bit of Astral Power for it, meaning she had to use them sparsely, simply because she couldn’t regenerate that power on her own.

Still, it was a huge advantage, allowing Lia, Alex and Silva to move around the area quite a bit during the nights, gathering supplies, while I stayed home with the munchkin. They also did some fighting but didn’t actively engage the Withered in their territory, instead focusing on Undead and Shattered. Lesser targets but also lesser risks. There hadn’t been any great moves, no great upheavals, but I had a feeling that Silva was quietly angling for something. The timing was just too good for her not to, I certainly would try to make sure that I had the level fifty to cross the first Divide before meeting with my deity. Who knew what such a meeting might entail in that regard, after all, she got the mystical part of her powers from Hecate, so the direct contact could easily propel her to greater heights than anything else.

If she wanted to go down that route, I wasn’t sure about her plans. She rarely used her divinely granted powers, so I could only guess whether she actually wanted to focus on that part of her abilities. Otherwise, she might just focus on the physical side of things, though I wasn’t sure on what concept she would want to centre herself. Something for her to figure out, I wouldn’t know where to begin with something like that. Likely why I was walking down the Arcane Path, magic just spoke to me in a way that physical skills just didn’t. I could see their use, I knew about the value of training and how often the tricks I had learned from Mrs Wu before the change had helped me, had even saved my life a few times, but it wasn’t me. There was no joy in slipping a knife into a foe’s back, sure, it worked, it killed, but it lacked the sheer enjoyment I gained from wielding my magic.

Sure, there was joy in movement, in running and jumping, especially now with the Draconic Leap special ability allowing me to move in ways no normal human could, but that joy was fleeting. Directly linked to the adrenaline and excitement, once the rush died down, it was over. With my magic, I was far more engaged and while there could be a rush, especially after I channelled vast amounts of Astral Power to shape the world according to my will, the true enjoyment was deeper. It was in figuring out the connections between different ideas, in finding links between the elements and learning more about the fundamental nature of magic and its place in reality. There was something transcendental about it, a sublime experience that was simply beyond words.

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It made me wonder how interacting with the divine would feel like. Just seeing the Bound Titan from afar had been incredible, both incredibly scary but also incredibly inspiring, making me yearn for that greatness, to make it my own. Later, when shattering the Nidhögg’s prison, I had felt the rush of power, knowing that I had literally changed the world. And not in some small, minor way that only those looking for it would know about but truly altered the world’s fate, making my influence felt by all but the most primitive forms of life on the face of Mundus.

How would interacting with a being able to do the same feel? And what truly were the limits of the divine, what could they do? Reading about the interaction between mortal follower and patron deity as described by the Grandmother in the Zevarra Agha was one thing, but I couldn’t confirm her writings as fact. There might be research backing her conclusions and I was aware that the Grandmother had immense power, but that didn’t make her infallible, especially when it came to matters beyond the power of mortals, to say nothing of the fact that the writings were at least partially designed to make me help the Grandmother on her quest to Divinity.

Sure, the book was an immensely useful resource but I should never delude myself that the Grandmother had given it to me purely out of goodwill, or as a reward. Making sure I had access to it, binding it to my soul, allowed the Grandmother to influence another world in ways no other mortal on Mundus could. If the Grandmother’s conclusions about divinity held true, and there wasn’t the influence of the Deities behind Pantheon Entertainment, the Grandmother might become the sole deity of Terra. As it was, she might become the only new deity.

Though, that made me wonder. Before the change, there had been billions of believers around the world and only a tiny minority believed in the Asgardian or Olympian Gods. What happened to all those who prayed to the Abrahamic God? There was power in prayer, I had used that very fact when saving Lia and creating the Vampires, but that was only one instance of countless prayers. I had no doubt that some people had fervently prayed to their God, pleading for salvation or something along those lines and all those people, all those prayers, had power.

Only, I had no idea where that power went. Did it simply fade back into the Astral River, as if it was simply a magical effect that ran its course, or had it some other effect? It was a fascinating question, though one I wouldn’t be able to answer, so I simply made a brief note in the book I was using to write down ideas I wanted to investigate in the future, adding it to the ever-growing list. Some of the items on that list were old enough that I had the ideas while travelling Mundus, only that I never had the time to check them out back then, making the whole thing a little frustrating. It felt as if each step I took on the Arcane Path, each question I found an answer to, only allowed me to see more of the unknown.

Truly, I had to learn that I knew nothing. As of yet, I wasn’t even aware of the extent of my ignorance. And maybe I could never truly learn, it might be similar to science. There was no end, there would always be the unknown, there would always be another question to explore. It was both comforting but also a little frustrating. Luckily, I truly enjoyed my walk on the Arcane Path, so imagining that the Path might be endless wasn’t some great, world-shattering idea. It merely meant I would never be bored, even if I lived out the full lifespan of an elf. However long that might be, especially for an elf like me, without a bond to the forest. Maybe I could bind myself to a Nexus, if I ever managed to gain control. Immortality, if I got things right, it wouldn’t just be a dream but a reality.