A Jaded Life

Chapter 1325

While part of me wanted to check in on how Jess was doing, given her recently established connection to the Mother, I wasn’t in the right headspace to be social. Talking to Lia had been quite stressful, even though the conversation had gone much better than I could have hoped. To me, the stress wasn’t so much in the conversation itself, but in the preparation for one. If I wanted to talk coherently about complex, and especially emotional, topics without devolving into a rambling mess, I had to mentally prepare, chart the conversation in my head, and plan what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. Right now, I was too socially exhausted to consider such a conversation, certainly not one about a topic as charged as the Mother and Jess’ apparent interest in becoming one of her faithful. Hel, even talking about Jess’ pregnancy would be stressful, doubly so if the topic of aborting a child came up.

That was something I needed to carefully consider, anyway: how I wanted to make my complete rejection of such a procedure palatable to other people. While I could simply explain my connection to the Mother, that felt like a copout, something people wouldn’t readily understand. To the average person, Gods and Deities weren’t something they had to be concerned about. I was fairly confident that people blamed Lorgar for the mess the Blessed City had been in, including the Mind Control, even if I wasn’t sure Lorgar had been aware of it. I could readily imagine him being so confident that nobody would doubt his words and orders because of his connection to Sunna that he assumed people would obey out of respect. Not because they were literally compelled to do so.

No, if I wanted to make my rejection of any abortion understandable, I needed to frame it as something I was unable to do because of some outside force. Which wasn’t completely untrue, as the Mother was becoming an outside force, but that wouldn’t go over well.

However, I could try framing it as uncertainty. It was readily obvious that some magical or divine shenanigans had occurred; there was no other realistic explanation for the universal pregnancies. For so many people to all fall pregnant in the same night, it bordered on the impossible. Taking into account that some of those affected had been infertile prior to that night, it readily went across the line from ‘incredibly unlikely’ to ‘impossible without some force majeure’.

Which could become my avenue to explain my rejection. There was already evidence of an outside force acting to create those pregnancies, and I could simply blame said outside force for my refusal to terminate them. It could be framed as caution: I didn’t want to directly attack the outside force, maybe implying that I considered Sunna a potentially responsible party. I might have to reveal that I had already been cursed by Sunna and wasn’t willing to open myself up to further divine punishment, but that would have to depend on the actual conversation. But this idea had potential and could be refined further.

However, before any such refinement occurred, I had to recharge a bit. A part of me considered trying to take a nap or something like that, but I wasn’t tired, so I was liable to just toss and turn for hours before giving up. Another option was to continue working on the hospital; there was still a great deal of work to be done, but I wasn’t in the mood for mindless repetition either.

Instead, I quickly conjured a small block of Ice, engraving it with a message to my children and stepping backwards, disappearing into the shadows. Once I was within them, I reoriented myself and started to move, abusing the impossibly shifting distances within the umbral realm for all I was worth. It was such a wonderful feeling to know I could simply move across the continent at a whim, and that was exactly what I was doing.

What had taken months to traverse in the real world only took me a minute or two to cover within the Shadows; the exact speed was dependent on a variety of factors I had yet to fully nail down, but it didn’t matter too much. Whether I needed one minute to cross the continent or five, I was a lot faster than anyone else. Using the throne on the highest level of the Nexus Tower as a guiding beacon, I easily stepped out of the shadows and onto the platform atop my tower, taking a few seconds to look around.

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With a bit of focus, my wings rapidly formed from Ice and my legs were encased to add stability. They were not yet fused together. I wanted to take that last step off my tower, but otherwise, my preparations were quickly coming together, my body ready to take flight. Then, I took that one, single step, flaring out my wings to immediately catch the air as gravity started to pull me down when I left the frozen surface of my tower. My legs flailed for a moment before I pulled them together and fused the Ice they were covered by into a single, almost tail-like appendage, complete with a few fins to help me guide my flight.

This was still a work in progress, but I quickly got a feel for the air around me thanks to my Wind Magic and tried to follow the chaotic thermals. The air around the Nexus Tower was a bit of a mess; the runes infused into the tower were continuously pulling freezing cold Astral Power from the Nexus, using it to reinforce the tower at all times. However, a bit of that cold was seeping into the environment, causing the temperature around the tower to plummet by a few degrees. The cold air began to flow down the mountain, causing the pressure to drop and, in turn, draw in more air, creating a turbulent cycle, even without the additional disturbance introduced by moisture. The moisture had been worse in the fall, before the air became generally too cold to hold much moisture, but even now the tower was shrouded in clouds. Part of that was deliberately engineered by me to shield my tower from the sun, but the majority was a simple, natural phenomenon. It was quite a neat security feature, but, sadly, it made flying around the tower rather difficult.

Without my Wind Magic to alleviate sudden gusts of wind or to outright control the air in a bubble around me, I would probably have crashed into the tower, simply because the conditions were so chaotic. With my magic, I could avoid such an ignominious accident and keep flying, fighting my way through the mess and pushing into calmer air further away from my tower.

Not that calmer air meant calm air, the various valleys, passes and mountain peaks caused their own turbulence, but compared to the complete and utter mess around my tower, this was almost relaxing. Exactly what the doctor had ordered, mindlessly flying back and forth, enjoying the wind beneath my wings, even if I had to cheat occasionally and make sure that the wind was actually there and not have it suddenly cut off and leave me floundering.

For an hour or two, I was simply enjoying myself, dancing with the wind, feeling the cold air brush against me, and the darkness of the night trying to swallow me up. To most, it would have been utterly terrifying, but to me, the embrace of the night was welcoming. I knew that the darkness wasn’t to be feared; I knew that the unknown was something to be studied and unveiled. So, the night held no terror for me.

My flight continued until I reached the foothills and started to descend, my altitude rapidly dropping as my mind reached out, quickly recognising familiar landmarks and, more importantly, magical formations I had created in the past.

The cave Lia and I had used before was easily recognisable, and once I knew where it was, I could use the connection to the Nexus Tower to pin down my own location accurately. For a moment, I considered using that knowledge to fly over and check the giants directly, but I quickly decided against it. While I had made some strides to civilise the giants, they were far from peaceful. They were liable to attack me the moment they saw me, especially if they considered me a threat.

Instead, I banked, flying towards the cave I had marked and enchanted for my own usage, knowing that I could be quite comfortable within and use my scrying constructs to check on the giants.

Landing was still a little challenging; the frozen carapace around my legs needed to be broken so I could walk, but I was getting better with that. I only stumbled for a moment before catching myself, my wings shattering into countless motes of Astral Power and fading away behind me as I walked into the cave.

Now, I could check on the giants. Hopefully, they were in decent condition, but regardless, I wouldn’t need to talk to anyone. That was the best about this excursion.