Another typical gray late winter day was currently in progress as I attended to some business in Vinedenne. There had been some final arrangements to take care of in regards to the schools and they were important enough for me to be there in person. Thankfully they had been resolved without issue which allowed me to focus on my own personal pursuits for the rest of the day. Or at least that's what I was hoping. My duties as a goddess however meant there was rarely any actual personal time unless I hid away in my domain.

Up above the clouds swirled in a mixture of gray and black which meant foul weather was soon to be visited upon us. In fact the drops of cold rain had already begun to fall in the distance, something I could hear and see with my goddess senses. This was still the winter months so such weather was expected. At least this was just rain instead of a billowing snowstorm. Though from the looks of the horizon the rain was coming down something fierce. A right deluge.

This incoming rainstorm was certainly going to be inconvenient for everyone living here in the city, though they were used to such weather from their lives in this region. For me personally the sight of an overcast was somehow quite familiar. Clearly in my previous life I had lived in a pretty depressing place. Now as a goddess it would be a simple thing for me to just fly away to someplace else in the kingdom to escape the rain. Though the limitations on my travel meant I couldn't just fly off to a tropical paradise I wouldn't even if I could. My responsibilities to my worshipers came first. I could put up with some bad weather.

My thoughts about the dismal dispensing of water from the sky had kept me from thinking about another critically important feature of large rainfalls in northern regions such as this. Namely that lots of precipitation meant an absolute dumping of snow in the mountains. Back in Doovlin for example they would be getting several feet of snow potentially. This fact was suddenly brought to my attention when I received a large group of rather desperate prayers.

There was a large amount of people praying to me, at least forty, in voices that sounded more exhausted than panicked. The contents of the prayers were quite grim however as they entailed being saved from death. Starvation and freezing to death to be precise. What was more curious was the location of the prayers and the fact that none of these voices sounded familiar.

Immediately I jumped down into the Goddess Zone to the situation table slash map of the kingdom. Sub-Chan was already standing there and looking down with what seemed like an expression of true curiosity. She never, or my subconscious more accurately, rarely showed emotions. This had to be something extraordinary.

With a quick hop I landed directly next to Sub-Chan. Here in the interior of my mind the thought acceleration meant that everything we did here took barely seconds in the real world.

“So what's the sitch?” I asked my other self.

Sub-Chan looked up at me with that curious look in her eyes now mixed with confusion. She pointed to the map with her left hand and refrained from speech.

There on the large table was the somewhat holographic representation of the world as I knew it. It was basically one of those models you saw at museums with a large degree of intractability. Being a goddess meant I literally had an eye in the sky so to speak, a mechanic I still didn't fully understand. It was linked to my worshipers somehow I knew.

After several seconds the map stopped scrolling in the peaks of the Henjuk Mountains. It was the area far to the north on the border of the kingdom met the neighboring kingdom of Phoea. There the people were trudging through a mountain pass with a raging blizzard swirling all around them. From here I couldn't really make all that much more out about them, like they themselves were fuzzy through radio static. It was clear they were dying however. They were clearly not prepared for the journey through the mountains, in winter no less. Why were they so desperate?

I turned to Sub-Chan. “What's up with them? Can we even go there?”

Asking my subconscious questions was usually faster than trying to puzzle it out myself just because Sub-Chan slash I had already thought about it subconsciously.

Sub-Chan turned to look at me with the emotion fading from her eyes as she went back to her normal inert state.

“These people are clearly citizens of the Kingdom of Pheoa. If they believe in me than their faith is quite weak. This area of land should be classified as wilderness and thus traversable, even without their weak faith permissing it.”

I nodded my head and looked back at the map.

“Good enough for me!” I shouted. “Here we go!”

Without waiting for a response from my subconscious I leapt back up into my body and with the momentum of the leap passed the motion into my actual physical body causing it to leap as well. Above my head a portal to the location opened as I started growing to my full goddess size of two-hundred feet.

My senses were assaulted instantly by blinding flurries of large snowflakes that swept through the air on winds that whipped about like lashes. It was almost dark despite being the middle of the day as the violent storm blacked out the very skies with dark clouds. The snow combined with the wind bit into your very soul it seemed like as all around the low light trapped you in a freezing and endless expanse of icy death. Even the mountains themselves seemed to cry out as the wind whistled through the rocky crags like the wail of tortured animal. A frozen nightmare.

My goddess physiology of course spared me from these debilitating conditions as I felt the cold as merely a novelty and suffered no actual damage from it. This all engulfing darkness also didn't hamper my vision as I could see in total darkness if I so desired. No I could see just fine as my feet found purchase on the snowy stone below.

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This area was indeed a mountain pass and a very narrow one at that. There was barely enough room for me to stand with my feet close together on what passed for a roadway as on the left was a steep slope and on the right was a cliff that went down into seemingly bottomless crags. Yeah I was currently absolutely massive in size but still, this place was freaking dangerous.

There below me struggling through the snow were the people that had cried out to me. The number of people hadn't changed from when they first prayed to me so it was still around fourty people. Forty three to be exact. Their group was made up of men, women, children, middle aged, the elderly, and all the ages in between. They were freezing, hungry, and sick. Not to mention how exhausted they were.

As my full goddess form loomed into the sky over them in the swirling blizzard most of them looked up and saw what must have been a nightmare. Even though I was little girl I stood hundreds of feet tall. My hair and clothing was whipping around in the wind with faintly glowing hair and eyes illuminating me in the gloom. Many of them probably thought I was just a terrible vision brought to them in their final moments of life.

I always tried to be a force for good in people's lives, unless they were bad people in need of correcting anyway. Because of this my heart sank as I saw my effect on these people. What little hope they had quickly vanished to be replaced with despair as they realized what they were seeing was indeed real. I knew this was happening not only because I could see the color of their soul but also because the prayers had stopped.

They still needed saving and I didn't care how much they feared me. My accelerated thoughts raced in my head as I puzzled what to do. I couldn't just melt the snow and alter the weather here. That would take a lot of unneeded mana and would also cause a deluge of water that might wash them away. Teleporting them away would be dangerous because even moving them through a portal with the level of frostbite they surely had could be deadly, not to mention the temperature shock could kill them.

Instead what I went with was the only other option that came to mind, that is sticking them inside a cave to wait out the storm. There were no caves around however and so I resorted to making one myself. So still thinking speaking was a bad idea I slowly kneeled down on my knees in front of them. The mountains shook with the impact of my knees but thankfully the snow softened the impact greatly.

Once I was down I moved my body forward and over them like the roof of a tent. They surely thought I was going to crush them under my weight though that was furthest from the truth. Instead I curled myself up over them with my knees spread out and my arms tucked in at my sides. The result was my body curling up and creating a large pocket underneath me making a living cave.

With my body thus covering them like a canopy the effects they felt were immediate. Firstly the wind was completely blocked off from ravaging their bodies, now reduced to the ominous whistling one would hear when inside a house as it assaulted the dwelling. The temperature also immediately increased slightly as simply being in an enclosed space kept any warm air created contained. My body naturally created plenty of heat and I was actually controlling it to not heat the place up too quickly.

The final effect was that the darkness was now all encompassing. It was total blackness without even the hint of stars or moon to provide a scant bit of light. Instead these people stood in utter dark with their bodies still half buried in deadly snow, the sound of the wind screaming around their new prison. Their tomb they thought.

Though their final resting place this was not to be. No instead they found themselves once again being utterly mind blown as the large cave began to slowly light up. Gradually I caused a large glowing orb to form in the area underneath my curled up body. With it came the warmth that normally emitted from my body, extremely gradually of course. It would take more than ten minutes for the place to completely warm up, though the snow was already starting to melt slowly.

Before anything else could happen or be said however there came a loud and distant rumbling. Both me the people underneath me were puzzled as to what it was at first, though it was one of them that came to the conclusion first.

One of the middle aged men shouted in a panic. “Avalanche!”

My eyes opened wide as I realized it. Yeah no shit. How could I have been so stupid? With all the thundering and rumbling I made crouching down of course there was an avalanche. What was the first thing you learned about traveling in the mountains? Don't make a bunch of noise because it will cause one.

The rumbling became thundering as the unknown tons of snow came barreling down the mountainside towards me. It might even fully bury the pass we were in. I however was a goddess and didn't fear the snow and the people beneath me would be protected by my body. So with a frown I trucked my head down to my face was inside the air pocket and braced for the impact.

It didn't take more than thirty seconds for the avalanche to hit me, the impact like being hit by a car even at my size. I was a force of nature myself and thus braced myself using magic, keeping my body from moving even once inch. The unbelievable amount of snow completely buried my goddess sized body in deep snow. The mountain pass was indeed filled for several hundred meters in both directions as endless more poured past me and into the crags below.

After several moments everything settled down and I let out a sigh of relief. Then the need for air popped into my mind and I quickly used wind magic to punch several air vents into the dome of snow I was buried under so that there would be oxygen inside the goddess igloo. This entire situation was actually kinda embarrassing now that the danger had passed and I had time to think about. Like this was really the best thing I could think of? I was in a panic I suppose and it did work.

All of the people I had just saved now had time to think about their situation as well. They found themselves trapped underneath the body of what they could only assume to be a goddess in a snow buried cave, protected completely from the still raging blizzard outside. The glowing light hovering at the top of the cave, which was my stomach, was glowing brightly now like a miniature sun. Their lives had seemingly been saved as ever increasing warmth melted the snow at their feet into slush. At least for now they were safe. But were they really?

There at the front end of their large igloo was my face, a huge face easily large as the average house. The expression on this face was bizarrely one of embarrassment as their savior clearly went through some sort of internal conflict. She was a goddess they thought, surely she was. What else could this immense girl be? Their prayers had actually been answered by the goddess of a foreign kingdom. Coming to understand this fact of reality was enough to keep them silent for over a minute as they stood there staring at me, their broken and starved bodies unable to muster the energy for anything else.

Their looks of utter disbelief could have been seen as ungrateful if it hadn't been for their pitiful condition. So instead of taking offense at their reaction I instead realized there wasn't really anything else I could have expected. My blushing face slowly formed an awkward smile as I looked down at them upside down, head tucked between my arms as it was. All I could muster up was a timid greeting quite uncharacteristic of an immense goddess.

“Um... Hi.”