A strange noise caused me to interrupt the work I was doing on an improved version of my magic bag and investigate. It didn’t come from outside of our camp, in which case I would have focused on making sure nothing was trying to attack us during the night, but, instead, the sound came from within; to be precise, it came from Luna. Walking over, I realised that my dear daughter was in the grip of a nightmare, not the first she had suffered from since we had left Belgrade, and I had the sad premonition that it wouldn’t be the last.
Reaching out, I gently took one of her hands and started to sing softly, trying to gently pull her mind from the nightmare. On previous nights, I tried to use Mind Magic to soothe her tortured spirit, but I had limited success with it. So far, the best way to help her seemed to be this: a gentle touch and soft sounds, though I did try to add a bit of soothing Mind Magic to the mix just because I wanted to make it work.
It didn’t take long for Luna to wake, her nightmare fading along with the sleep, and soon, she returned the gentle squeeze of her hand, her eyes looking at me with a slightly glazed look.
“You had another nightmare, my dear,” I told her, squeezing her hand just a little harder, trying to project calm and make sure she knew she wasn’t alone with these nightly terrors. “Do you want to talk about it?” I asked, already knowing that it almost certainly was about that dungeon and knowing what horrible things people were willing to do to each other without any real reason.
I would call it funny if it weren’t so distressing for her. Neither Luna nor I were squeamish when it came to our experiments; both of us were fairly willing to do things a great deal of people would decry as horrible or horrifying, and neither of us would be particularly bothered by those things. But here, that dungeon, the various tools and the two bodies had somehow managed to hit both of us quite hard, Luna a little harder than me, but even I had woken up in cold sweat more than once since we left that place behind. There was no real, objective reason; the closest I could come to an explanation was that we both felt a bit of empathy with the victims, who we assumed to be female, despite having no actual evidence for it. We never investigated the identity or the physique of the two skeletons and yet that didn’t matter for the nightmares at all.
At least the few scattered images I remembered from my nightmares were of being locked in a cell, often with Sigmir in a cell across from me. Neither of us could reach the other or communicate meaningfully. The only thing I knew in my nightmare was that we wouldn’t be able to touch ever again and that steps were coming towards us. But before I could get a glimpse of the being creating those sounds, I always woke up.
“It was the same dream as last night,” Luna whispered, and I reached out and gently stroked her head, hoping to soothe her a little more as my fingers ran through her hair.
“We were in that dungeon and trapped,” she began to retell the nightmare as she had the previous night, “Both of us tried to use magic to break the doors but nothing happened, it was as if all Astral Power was gone. Then, some strange creature made completely from brass or some other metal came into the cell, walking straight through the iron bars used to keep us in, as if those bars weren’t there. It grabbed you, it always grabs you, and I couldn’t do anything but watch as it took you away, leaving me all alone,” her voice started to crack as she told the story and she started to sob a little. In response I put my arms around her and pulled her into me, letting her head rest against my chest so she would be able to hear the beats of my heart and could feel my breath play across her head.
“I’m here, Luna, and I won’t leave you if I can help it,” I promised, my hand rubbing her back until her sobs quieted into sniffles and, soon, those sniffles were replaced by gentle breathing as sleep claimed her once again.
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When I tried to move Luna away from me, she immediately started to make distressed noises, effectively immobilising me. A part of me wanted to chuckle at this predicament but a much bigger part was just happy that my daughter seemed to be quite alright as long as she was held. Once again, the slightly odd dichotomy between her actual age and life experience and the physical reality of her body and to a lesser degree mind, struck. I doubted many teenagers or young adults would want to be cuddled by their mothers after a nightmare but I was fairly confident that essentially every child would be glad about a mother to hold them in that situation.
Given that I couldn’t move, I made up for it by creating a scrying construct and letting it soar out of the tent we were using to sleep. It was one of the neat things we had picked up over the course of our journey. It wasn’t large nor luxurious, but it was good enough to keep both of us dry when it rained, and it was faster to set up than a magically conjured shelter. Not by a lot; I was steadily getting better with those shelters, but a little. In this case, we had decided to use if for simplicity’s sake, even if it provided less comfort and flexibility.
After a quick glance to see if Silva was deeply asleep or in that state of semi-consciousness a lot of dogs could adopt to doze while remaining alert in case something tried to threaten their people, I knew I could relax to a fair degree and Silva would make sure nothing could get to us easily.
So, I let my mind drop almost entirely into the scrying construct I had sent out. That way, I didn’t just know what the construct was seeing, I almost literally became the construct, connecting to it on a deeper level than usual. It allowed me to use a few fairly neat tricks, like the one where I channelled magic directly through the construct, but it also had a few additional risks, namely, if the construct was damaged, I would suffer as well. Not terribly so, at least as long as the damage was minor, but it was a price I was willing to pay in this case.
As a raven, I lazily drifted through the wind, my mind floating in the breeze as I thought about and considered my future plans. At the same time, my body was idly humming a small melody, just some noise which barely penetrated my drifting consciousness. This was almost meditative in an entirely different way compared to my usual meditation, in which I allowed myself to sink into the Astral River. Here, I was becoming one with the wind and sky, just another speck of dust in the wind, and somehow, that felt incredibly liberating.
Looking down, I could see countless trees swaying in the nightly breeze and a little to the east, a fairly large river, the Missouri if my memory of geography served me right, was lazily snaking through the land, carrying water from the mountains to the sea. I couldn’t help but wonder how much the landscape around the area had changed since the Change, how much nature had reclaimed in that short year, after humanity had taken hundreds of years to reshape the world to fix their, our, needs. And how long it would take for yet another people to rise and reach the capability to reshape the world according to their will. But would those people, the ones in the future, be better stewards of this world?
Could people even be stewards of the land, or would the base nature always take over? The drive to, as the silly book said, be fruitful and multiply, regardless of the carrying capacity of their environment, was a strong one, especially when people learned to shift the burden that had to be carried from their immediate environment to a different one, allowing them to be willfully blind to the effects they and their lifestyle had. Maybe I would see how this particular question was answered by a different people, a different humanity perhaps; it would be interesting to see.
The only thing I needed to make sure of was that I could be around to witness the process and maybe offer some guidance, though I doubted I would ever be willing to truly lead people. Because to accomplish that in a satisfactory manner, one had to willingly work with the people you wanted to lead, and that was something I couldn’t see myself doing. Time would tell, and I would glide upon the winds and wait until Terra had changed beneath me.
