Once again, I sat quietly on my throne, the familiar setting helping a great deal with my mentality. There had to be a way to communicate with the Grandmother directly, allowing us to exchange words and concepts, not just the brief moment during which I managed to pull the Zevarra Agha into this world.

How that had worked was something I kept questioning anyway. I was certain that it had to do with the fact that the grimoire was soulbound to me, but what that meant, I wasn’t quite sure. Trying to ascertain the effect, or figure out what it could actually do, was a slow-going project that had yielded minimal results thus far. I could always find the book, somewhat similar to the way my Sigmir-sense had functioned on Mundus, allowing me to feel the direction in which Sigmir was, pulling me towards her like Iron was pulled towards a magnet, but other than that? There didn’t seem to be anything else, though I was convinced there was. Soulbound, just the word felt like there should be more to it.

The Soul, and anything to do with it, had always been one of the most arcane topics in my research on Mundus, especially that soul bond I shared with Sigmir. Something completely outside of any reasonable explanation, with us sharing sensations, dreams, powers and thoughts, simply due to our connection. But having an item soulbound to me was nothing but a way to locate that item. It didn’t track, at all, so there had to be more to it.

Regardless of that, there was something to explore here. There had to be a way for the deities to comune with Terra, even before the Astral River had arrived. Some alternative way, independent of it, simply because they had been able to create, or inspire, Pantheon Entertainment and have them create the capsules. So, a connection was needed, unless deities could perform some sort of temporal shenanigans, influencing people in the present to make it so they had done something in the past. A reversal of cause and effect, though I hoped that was impossible. Simply due to the amount of headaches it would bring, I didn’t even want to think about the implications of that.

And so, I didn’t and instead focused on the known routes divine influence could take. I knew that there were links in their blood, I knew that I should have some sort of link to Loki in my blood, simply because I was a Firnelf and Firnelves were born from his experiments, using his own blood. It said so in the description, even if I had no idea how that’d work logistically.

Given the last time I had used a blood-link to intrude on a divine Domain I had been slain on Mundus, I wasn’t about to try that again. Not when I only had one life to work with, not unless I was a lot more confident, or desperate.

Instead, I wanted to focus on other options, especially the Blessing bestowed upon me. When I had experienced with Her powers in the past, She had always demonstrated remarkable tolerance, coupled with amusement, so I was hoping that She wouldn’t simply smite me.

Finding where the blessing connected to the rest of me, the boundary between the two sounded like it should be simple. I knew what divine magic felt like, I knew what my own arcane body felt like and I should be able to determine where one was flowing into the other. Once I had that, I could parse out benevolent and malevolent connections, until I could determine which was of Hecate. In theory, it was simple.

In practice, not so much. The biggest problem was that I couldn’t readily identify my Soul, not unless I wanted to start channelling Death Magic into myself in an attempt to light that up. Yeah, no.

Shaking my head, I dismissed this line of inquiry and focused on something else. Namely, projecting my mind into the Astral River. and gleaning some more information The streams of power within had calmed down quite a bit since they had arrived but they had yet to reach the same primarily calm and orderly state the Astral River of Mundus had been. If the Astral River directly after the change had been akin to a water-cutter, able to slice through metal easily, or the bedrock of reality, the Astral River as it was now was more akin to a waterfall, or maybe a whitewater river, unruly and chaotic but not inherently violent.

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Now, I could dare to let myself drift in the current, trying to get a better idea about the eddies and flows in the reality around me. There was a lot of knowledge to be gained by learning how the Astral River was behaving, the state of reality imprinted itself onto the river, though reading those imprints was not an easy feat.

There was an incredible amount of Death, Darkness and Decay filling the city, that much was easy to see. The remaining buildings, and the many crumbled ruins, also added rock-solid streams of Earth into the mix, while the Sun was baking down each day, adding streams of Fire and Light. Occasionally, rain fell from the sky, adding Water and there were a few small patches of Life, coming from the few parks and plants, but the stream was so minor, that it almost didn’t register. Similarly minor was the stream of Air, there was no wind in this town, not at ground level where I focused.

It might be interesting to see how the mixture changed as the altitude increased, how Earth and everything would fade to be replaced with Air. Maybe I should experiment with that at some point, trying to get a feeling of how the powers in the Astral River changed as one rose into the sky but for now, that would be a fairly difficult proposition. Maybe if I ever learned to fly under my own power, or at least to glide similar to the way I had been able to on Mundus, I might be able to stay up there long enough to get a feel for it.

Letting my mind merge into the stream and get carried by the flow, I started to drift off a little, the mesmerising visuals of the myriad powers around me dazing me just a little. There was so much to learn, each drop of water within the Astral River was subtly different and each moment changed it, as if the totality of reality was reflected in the waters.

Realising that I was getting drawn in too deep, mostly thanks to a stinging headache, I pulled back and started looking at things at a macro-level again. There was too much information within the Astral River for me to look into it in detail, it would be akin to trying to look at some item while trying to understand the molecules directly. Sure, that way one would learn everything there is about the item but it would be far too much information for anyone to truly process. Well, anyone not divine or primordial, someone without the necessary power. Someone like me, as I had to admit to myself. I wasn’t ready to delve too deeply into these mysteries just yet, I had to pace myself.

But I could feel a particularly dense concentration of Death and Decay in a part of the river near me and with a bit of focus, I could even map the direction I sensed in the Astral River to a corresponding direction in reality. It wasn’t easy, merging my mind with the flow didn’t really give me directions that mapped directly, only upstream, downstream and sensations of flowing through a multitude of currents and branches but that didn’t really track to north, south and so on. I had to deliberately pull myself from the river and in that time of change, I could get a better idea, but it also gave me a bit of a headache, not really pleasant after I had already taxed myself earlier when I looked too deeply into things.

Thanks to that sacrifice, I now knew that there was something potentially interesting in another part of the city, maybe not as interesting as the Withered had been, but interesting enough to catch my attention.

Either way, it was something to hunt down, maybe something to challenge us. It might even be an actual Dungeon and we could get a level or two that way. Even if it wasn’t a challenge in combat, the sheer concentration of magic was enough to make it interesting in and of itself, even if I wasn’t overly interested in delving deeply into Death and Decay. Sure, I worked Death Magic, but Decay was just disgusting. Necessary in the grand scheme of things but disgusting nonetheless.

Pulling myself completely out of my trance, I checked the time and determined that we couldn’t head out yet. But I could take a nap, which sounded incredibly good at this time. Tonight, we could find out what was rotten in the state of Denmark, or something like that.