Getting back down to the ground was a bit of a challenge. The Raven’s Shadow didn’t come with an instruction manual, so I had to make things up as I went, adapting the input of Astral Power in an effort to get the right output of lift. Floating up had been incredibly easy, nothing but applying a constant stream of Astral Power and getting back down was logically the same. Only hitting that sweet spot between cutting off enough lift to simply plummet and pushing in too much Astral Power and rising back up was difficult. Mostly, because there was a fairly abrupt drop-off point, barely below the power needed to make me hover when I started to fall, making me wonder what that was about. I had heard about planes stalling but my wings didn’t use a constant airflow to provide the required lift, they were magical. And yet, they didn’t care and caused me to plummet multiple times, each time with its own squeal of fear. Not that anybody had heard anything, or so I hoped.

By the end of my attempts, I decided to simply cut off my lift, let myself drop a metre, provide new lift to stop my fall and repeat. It was about as graceless as can be, but it worked well enough and I wanted to find out what had caused the smoke. Learning to fly was, quite obviously, a long-term project, especially that part about learning how to land. Which was just about my biggest concern, my current work-around of mostly controlled falling worked well enough but I wanted the real deal. I wanted to soar up, up the long, delirious burning blue, to top the wind-swept heights with easy grace, where never lark or even eagle flew, as the poem went.

Alas, while learning how to fly was definitely on my list of things to do, there were other matters to attend to. I wasn’t about to have my companions wait for me any longer, certainly not here in this incredibly boring and destroyed area where they had pretty much nothing to do. Unless one of them came across something interesting while I had been busy these last two days, I wanted to continue onwards. That I had seen smoke, and thus most likely fire and a possible group of survivors only increased that desire.

Survivors, or rather teaching them, had some significant advantages, especially when it came to gaining EXP. Otherwise, I had to track down ever-stronger enemies and while I relished the challenge of combat, finding those enemies was getting difficult. Sure, searching for new and interesting resources to gather was something that went hand-in-hand with searching for enemies and it had its own advantages, to the point that I had gained a level on our way here, bringing me to seventy, but I noticed just how much my levelling had slowed down.

Mostly because I was now level seventy, while the usual Undead had pretty much stalled their level around level fifty. Shattered got a little higher but as they levelled, they gained an animal cunning that allowed them to hide fairly well, to the point that I needed direct observation to detect them. A casual glance was simply not enough, while Lia and Luna couldn’t detect them at all unless the Shattered was engaged in combat.

Nonetheless, level seventy had been a nice milestone for me. Getting the spread attribute bonus from Dragon Touched meant my Endurance went to thirty, bringing with it a fairly minor, but quite useful, trait named Infused Body, reducing the strain my magic put on my body when subject to it by a small amount. I had a feeling it would primarily help with the strain from using Blood Magic to enhance myself but it might also work for the physical strain from casting too much magic at once, something that was hard work. I hadn’t been able to really test that part, simply because it was difficult to observe something that only made a small difference, but I wasn’t about to complain.

On the other hand, the Trait I got for having forty-five Intuition was something else. It was called Perceptive Infusion and likely a fruit of the many, many hours I had used Earth- and Crystal Magic to shape Hecate’s shrine. It allowed me to use the Astral Power I infused into objects to perceive them in great detail, making it far, far easier to detect different layers in a substance, to find impurities, weaknesses and so on. Or even figure out what affinities something had, I had used the trait quite a bit when preparing the ritual that ended up with the creation of Raven’s Shadow. Without it, figuring out which materials carried what elemental affinity would have been a lot harder. Sure, I had Affine Insight but that worked off my magical senses, so my sight, my smell and taste, making it a lot harder to detect whether some internal part of an object had the required attributes.

Stolen novel; please report.

Now, as always after gaining new attributes, I had to decide whether I wanted to put my two free points into Intelligence or not. There were arguments for it, there were arguments against specialising and, knowing myself, I would roll those arguments through my mind for a few days before coming to a decision. Judging by past performance, I’d put the points into Intelligence, just as I had before, but I didn’t want to simply default there, using them somewhere else might be prudent. Maybe getting traits for Agility, at thirty-five, and Strength, at thirty, or making sure I could get a trait in Intuition when reaching level seventy-five. Arguments would be made, even if only in the depths of my mind, but that was for future-me to consider.

For present-me, I had to collect my daughters, in addition to Silva and Alex, so we could find out what was cooking in the West. Or if there was somebody cooking, the smoke might come from something other than fire, or from fire that wasn’t attended. Prudence would be our best friend during the approach, prudence, caution and a whole lot of stealth.

A part of me was tempted to wait until it was fully dark and experiment with the cloak some more. Using it to sneak up on whoever made that fire, simply to see how well it worked sounded like such a fun idea but I wasn’t certain if it would work out well. I wasn’t worried about giving myself away, the cloak was that good and it was made only better by my magical abilities but I wasn’t confident I could make use of the information gathered. Maybe I could sneak in to make sure that the people weren’t some cannibal cult or something along those lines, but personal information? No, I wasn’t confident I wouldn’t accidentally give away that I had spied on them, not with people like Mrs Wu who might be out here.

But, before I considered what to do about people, I should find out if there were any. The fire might be from something else, there were Scorched out there, to say nothing of possible other creatures aligned to fire.

We wouldn’t find out until we actually got there. Getting the others moving was fairly simple, they had all been fairly bored, to the point that Lia and Luna had worked together on some schoolwork. Or rather, Lia had helped Luna with her spelling and writing, while making sure that her own skills, inherited from Chantalle as they were, remained in working condition. So far, neither Lia nor I had noticed that we started to lose our old language abilities, despite the fact that I had a feeling neither Vampires nor Firn Elves would naturally speak English.

Luckily, that part of the traits hadn’t carried over, at least for me. Otherwise, given that my traits literally took away my country of origin and all connections to social groups, I would either be limited to some ancient elven dialect only understandable to those with Loki’s blood or some other trouble. It certainly wouldn’t allow me to communicate with other people, maybe not even with Lia, despite her sharing my blood.

Once we were moving, we made good time. Moving through the night was something we all were well accustomed to, to the point that I wasn’t certain we would move faster during the daytime, even if we ignored the debilitating effect the Sun had on Lia, Alex and myself. The night gave us a great deal of visual cover, sheltering us from potentially hostile eyes while we had adapted.

However, our adaptation to the night didn’t prepare us for what we found when we reached the area I had seen the smoke coming from. Instead of some community filled with survivors, we came across a massive, sprawling ruin, still burning and filled with smoke and noxious fumes. Astral Power thrummed in the area, strong and persistent, the source natural and quite obvious, this place had once been a place of Fire and now, after the change had come, it was no longer chained.

I wasn’t sure what the industrial park used to be, maybe some large-scale powerplant, maybe some sort of factory working with hot metal, whatever the case may be, it was now all gone. Gone and replaced with the closest representation of a fiery hell I could imagine.