I came awake at a nudge to my shoulder. The knife was in my hand and at Melisande's throat before I was fully awake. My sister glared at me and then shifted her gaze down to the blade.

“Would you mind?” I pulled the knife back and slid it back into the wrist sheath.

“Sorry, old habits are coming back. We there?” She shook her head and crawled the eight feet to get out of the storage area from the back where I’d been sleeping. I stretched and adjusted the armor and weapons so they weren’t digging into my back and sides. I pulled the travelers cloak back on and climbed out the open door following Melisande into the Glen Cove Inn. Glen Cove Inn had been built by some historic figure or other as a personal retreat. Since then it had become the type of tourist trap you'd expect to find on one of America’s most popular fourteeners. The place was stocked with long sleeve shirts, pants, and winter jackets for tourist that didn't consider that a warm sixty in Colorado Springs didn't mean it wasn't frigid at nearly eleven and a half thousand feet above sea level, by the time most people got there they had figured out it would be a lot colder at the fourteen thousand and some change feet the summit boasted. We both got the largest cup of coffee they had to offer and I let Melisande pay.

“Still drinking it straight? How can you stand that?” She took a few sips warming her hands around the cup as she juggled the key chain.

“I would have preferred tea, but frankly the selection they had was a travesty and I'm not going to poison even this piss poor excuse for coffee like you did. Can we go already?” I climbed in careful not to flash the sword at my side and reached over to push her door open. I frowned as I looked at the guard houses ahead of us. Melisande spoke before I did.

“They're closing access to the peak due to a storm. Any ideas or do I get my choice?”

“Sis, your choice probably involves bodies, ER visits, morgues and questions. If you can just put them to sleep long enough to get us through… or do you want me to try something subtler by messing with their heads? Besides the storm will make opening the Starpath easier on me.”

“I'm not so good with subtle, maybe knock out the entire mountain for the next twenty hours but that's it. If you can fiddle with the rangers’ heads enough for them to think we’re paramedics doing a run for someone at the summit with elevation sickness…” I unbuckled and climbed back into the storage area fumbling through the old ammo boxes until I found one that had a pale blue and purple star on top. I flipped it open and pulled out a transparent green pyramid shaped chunk of apophyllite.

“Not sure how much this is gonna take out of me, there's a reason the Ute's named this ‘The God's Mountain’, the space back here is built to be used as a ritual area on top of other things, still messing with a person’s perception is tricky. Vanishing us would be easier since they haven’t dropped the bars.”

I closed my eyes and focused on the crystal reaching my senses through it to feel the surrounding area, invisibility is hard to pull off and there are a lot of ways to get the same effect. I usually opt for a tricky type of shield that makes people reluctant to look at whatever I’m hiding and puts an image of whatever is on the other side of me in front of me. It’s a lot easier for me than trying to change how everyone around me sees something. Khan was a reassuring phantom weight at my back as he watched, helping to lessen the mental strain of the task, even my cat was purring audibly where he slept in his carrier. After what felt like eons I was reasonably confident I had a solid image of the surrounding area and projected the image around the car letting the crystal in my hands do most of the heavy lifting

“Go, I don't know how long it will last before I run out of energy.”

The park ranger didn’t even glance up from his book as Melisande drove past despite the audible sound of the suburban’s engine. I had Melisande pull over on the side of the road at the pull off just before Devil’s Playground. It was rare that the snow in this stretch fully melted which was handy for me. When you have hundreds of people a day passing the same spot and a few thousand years of the indigenous people worshiping a site it begins to hold a sort of power all to itself. I clambered out, my heavy metal tipped boots clicking on the stone despite the driving snow and heavy thunder while lightning played through the sky.

I put a hand to the ice and snow feeling its tie to the mountain and the area around it. There was a sense of presence to the mountain as though it was alive and thinking. A trait I’d come to associate with any of the old sacred sites on Earth. Focus enough energy into a place long enough and it can develop a mind of its own. It was more common with sacred sites but even normal places have them. On Pikes Peak it was a general sleepy awareness but other places had full personalities that could get a bit picky. It’s one of the reasons I never want to go to New Orleans.

Ice is like a quality clear quartz crystal; it's good at holding and soaking up the energy it's exposed to but it takes time to get a decent charge. Fortunately top of a major ley line intersection on a mountain that had been worshiped as the home of gods for thousands of years with tourist passing by it every day a few feet of snow could soak up as much emotional energy as a normal person carried around with them. I pushed my bare hand into the cold snow. We’d had a couple harsh and long winters and this patch of snow was several years old. As I touched the snow I reached into the energy trapped in it and drew it into me refining it and replenishing all the energy I’d spent today and then some. I finally drew myself away from the rush of emotions trapped in ice and stumbled away from the snow drift. I could feel the storm play across the sky a scant thousand feet above me like an echo of the storm of power inside me that made my skin feel like it was vibrating. I walked back to the Kodiak a little unstably, okay so I wasn't just full of energy I was drunk on it, it happens sometimes when I feed on a major amount of energy and I loved the feeling. Granted nearly a hundred bucks in road tolls and gas was a bit steep for a good energy high and it was rare that the snow would last more than a month or two. I climbed in and turned the rear view mirror to look at my eyes which had turned to storm cloud gray with flakes of snow falling through them. Yeah my energy was definitely running at an all-time high for my time on earth.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“Gods above and below remind me never to piss you off when we’re near old ice Cathal.”

“Just get me up there, Sis. I want this done and over with as soon as possible once you get me to the Playground you can go home.” A few minutes later we pulled over at the overlook on Devil's Playground named not just for the way lightning strikes would jump from spot to spot but also because it was one of the most electrically active zones on the planet, experiencing thousands of lightning strikes every year. I climbed out of the Kodiak grabbing a focusing rod that looked suspiciously like a tuning fork with copper wire wrapped around the tines and crisscrossing the straps of my courier bags over my shoulders and headed out across the empty field beside Pikes Peak highway.

The landscape of Devil's Playground is barren as can be expected for being over twelve thousand feet above sea level and blasted by the constant lightning strikes despite the efforts of a few hearty tundra plants to carve out a living in the harsh climate. I threw pure unaltered power into the storm now only a few hundred feet above my head and felt the primal forces clashing above me take the fuel and fight harder with it as I strode across the blighted landscape. I closed my eyes and let my metaphysical senses expand out in a sphere around me. I could sense Melisande and Khan a dozen yards behind me. I finally found what I was looking for, a light almost melodic humming feel accompanied by what could best be described as a thinness in reality maybe a hundred yards from what I assumed was the anchor of one of the major wards on earth. I walked a circle around the space a few times and determined the center of the space before driving the focusing wand into the earth.

“Okay I'm stashing this here and I'll call you when I get back. Hopefully Khan can remind me of whatever memory I forget when I get back.” I pulled out my cellphone and a fake rock shutting the phone off before putting it in the oversized hide-a-key. After covering it with a bit of dirt and dust to look a bit more natural I blew on the marks made by my fingers scraping the ground so they wouldn't be spotted. “Okay you may want to stand back.”

Doorways are used for traveling from one spot to another on a single planet, portals between dimensions, but Starpaths were a lot rarer, there were only three or four on any planet and they could be used to reach any planet or dimension as long as you knew where you were in relation to where you were going. Unfortunately, things had a habit of shifting around over time and I only remembered a few coordinates for other planets and planes and of those maybe three were still viable. I thought about Asgard and the celestial bodies and dimensions that bordered it trying to dredge the coordinates for it out of my brain.

Energy work is a lot like magic except it's all in the head. In Europe and some parts of America witches and wizards used spells and rituals to shape and form the energy of life. In Asia and most of the orient they used herbs, calligraphy, talismans, and martial arts for the same purpose. I don't have that sort of mindset I just go straight to the source and manipulate it directly however I still needed symbols to accomplish some stuff. Usually I can just form an image in my mind of what I want and my subconscious manipulates energy to accomplish what I need, it’s all in the visualization. If I want a ball of energy I just imagine it forming and invest energy into the mental image till it forms, if I want to create something, I think about how the energy is going to conform to the shape. As long as I have the knowledge and mental focus to shape and hold what I want the energy to do in my mind and the raw energy to see it happen I can do it.

I’d learned to use different things as focusing objects by associating meaning and purpose with them so that I didn’t have to constantly imagine the same thing over and over and I’d figured out early on that the less I had to imagine the less energy I had to invest of myself. I suppose it was the same principle that the spells a witch or wizard worked on and sometimes it could save time but it was a pain if you had to always drag around the right crystals, memorize thousands of arcane words or hand gestures, or make sure you always had a big stick with random carvings on it nearby.

For something like this though I needed the symbolic items because I not only lacked enough power to open the path but I had to contend with the fact that the wards and seals layered around earth tended to crush and redistribute any significantly large concentration of metaphysical energy. I could try using the ring that Thoth had given me but that was a last resort if this ritual didn’t pan out. Despite how things had been in ancient times, Asgard wasn't close to earth and it was going to take more raw power than the energy suppressing wards (which I was about to try repairing despite how much of a hindrance I found them) would allow me to draw into myself.

I drew out a bronze blade from the sheath strapped to my wrist and sliced a shallow cut across the back of my hand and began tracing runes and symbols in the air around the rod. As I finished each one a bolt of lightning would streak down from the sky and become trapped in the shape I’d drawn. I took a deep breath to focus, and then began digging through my mind for a memory of what Asgard looked like. I finally hit on it and breathed a sigh of relief. The whole effort would be a waste of time and power if I didn’t have a clear mental image of the place. Once I had the memory on hand I focused on it, making the mental image feel as real as the barren and rocky mountain side around me. I looked around me at the spectacle of more than a dozen lightning bolts that were trapped in the shapes of the various runes and sigils I used for manipulating energy. I pushed back the dull constant ache I’d felt since I started the ritual while I fought the effects of the Seals off and reached out to the Starpath with one last spike of energy. The Starpath opened releasing a hot summer breeze filled with the warm scent of apples and wild flowers. I reached through and felt around for a moment before grabbing a fist sized chunk of gold and tossing it to Melisande.

“That should cover expenses for the next few months for both of us. I don't think Odin will mind me borrowing a bit from his treasury. Get going and I'll call you when I get back. Let's hope the storm doesn’t kill my phone.” With that I stepped through the vague heat shimmer of the open Starpath and into a world of gods.