3rd Light beneath the eleventh Moon

3761 Cycles beyond the Dark

722 Years after the Repentance

Entry: 1/020

Dear self,

The influence of the dreamcatcher continues to elude me; I woke up sprawled on the floor next to the front door, the handle just barely out of my reach. If all goes well I will only have to deal with this nonsense for one more day. The Aarthrium is fully active now and bubbles green in our cauldron. Letting the cold blow inside to rid myself of that horrid odour was worth the weak complaints from the Darcinderaht. I threw him some embers from the fireplace to make it up to him.

The ranger sent to get the critter finally arrived, which is perfect timing because a blizzard swept through and blocked the highway with snow and ice. The nearby giants must have been playing a sport because there are glaciers strewn on the roads and a few trees were uprooted. The only way past is wondering through the wilds so the ranger is staying while the blockages are being cleared. I was happy to have him cage the Darcinderaht and carry it away after he gave me his badge and I confirmed it with an Augur. He did seem a little stressed which is understandable for a traveling man in this weather.

The Guilds all make use of Augurs imbedded into their badges and seals so that anyone with even a single Augur can confirm their official authorization. They are why Guild approved enchantments are guaranteed to be safe as the seal cannot be forged and an enchanter can have their license revokes remotely and retroactively which affects the seals they have placed on their work if the Guild wants to do a recall. The same mechanism can be used to notify their owners of said recall like. Unfortunately for the Guild the Quislings didn’t integrate their items with the network so the Guild had to notify affected individuals through an unreliable oracle.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Mother arrived finally. She and Tori didn’t seem to have any issues traveling through all the heavy snow. Her luggage also exceeded what a traveler might carry in any weather whatsoever. Considering that the realm she had been visiting was supposedly frosted over for the last year I can understand if she is a little prepared already. Tori was playing with some glowing mass of prisms and rods and payed his brother barely any attention. He seemed engrossed in the puzzle so I left him to play with it.

Mother was surprisingly less upset than I expected she would be and asked me various question about what happened. She went around the house and checked all the wards, reinforced a Matrix somewhere in the basement and started planning out a new spell lattice to surround the workshop specifically and an isolation lattice for the shop where customers enter. She used a drop of blood for me to help with the various protections. As a trained blood mage her enchantments are particularly capable of interacting with blood sympathy and protect her blood relatives in a targeted fashion. I remember her weaving some magic into our veins when we were children so that shapeshifters could never steal or replicate our full blood signature.

After that she did a thorough cognizance of my subtle body to find any intrusions. The compulsions the Quislings wove ended up spreading through more than just my mind, which is worryingly capable coming from imps. We were able to extract an image of the remaining compulsions so Mom could start shaping the Aarthrium to help target the purging spell we will be casting tomorrow. I did hear some muttering about rough work implicating Anora, so she is likely getting a little lecture when she visits from the academy.

Other than that, we isolated the divine essence from the Fortuity shard to find its signature. Axl could not do this since it would have morphed some of the enchantments if Umari herself hadn’t personally removed the shard. It’s the best resource we have to track down the nearby displacement rift assuming they are related somehow.

Asuras battling nearby is a good way to open rifts depending on their aspects, and the shard might have splintered off from a clash nearby that caused the rift, or it might have traveled through the rift to reach here. Natural rifts are always somewhat connected to Chaos magic so there is the potential for literally anything to come out of them, malevolent or not.

Hope we fare well.

Regards,

Me.

~*M*~