For all my incredible magical power, there were some things I was unable to influence, at least when it came to a meaningful scale. Chief amongst those things was, quite obviously, the weather with its incredibly capricious nature. While I was powerful enough to have a local effect on the weather, to briefly shift the direction of the wind around me or to lower the temperature in the clouds above, at least if the clouds were hanging low, such effects were always temporary. As soon as I stopped redirecting the wind, it would continue to blow as it had before I tried to intervene and while I might be able to drop the temperature in the clouds, causing some of the moisture within to fall as snow or rain, there always were other clouds, ready to make my life miserable.
The weather was, quite frankly, beyond my ability to meaningfully manipulate, especially if I wanted to have good weather. If I merely wanted to have localised bad weather, I could do a lot more, especially when the weather was already capricious and cloudy as it currently was, with a seemingly endless supply of clouds and enough rain to start building boats. As things were right now, using my cloak or my wings to fly up towards the clouds and have them dump a load of rain was trivially easy, but given that the clouds were ready to go again just a few minutes later, I couldn’t really use this.
“Say, Mom, is that smoke or are those some strange clouds?” Luna asked me, gesturing along the hillside on which we had made camp, hoping to avoid some of the annoyingly heavy rain.
“Pretty sure that’s smoke, so there’s likely a village down there somewhere,” I replied after a quick glance to make sure it wasn’t just a strange formation of clouds and mist.
“Want to take a look? It’s been a few days since we met people,” Luna suggested and I agreed with a shrug, not really caring one way or the other. Meeting people was something that occasionally happened, at least as long we were making our way through the mountains. There had been few communities up here before the change, most of them somewhat small and isolated, and now, after the world had fallen apart, those communities had been largely abandoned, with people moving downhill to seek better farmland, to avoid some of the treacherous weather up in the mountains and to generally find other people. As things were now, the mountains were largely left to the animals, some Undead, a few Shattered and the rapidly rising population of magically changed beasts, alongside a few people who made their way up here to hunt or gather some of the interesting plants that had started to grow. It was quite a fascinating process, one I was partially documenting, though I wasn’t the right person to study people and their motivations, that would only serve to annoy me.
“I can take a look, I guess,” I agreed, with a shrug. I wasn’t completely willing to go down there, if only because going down meant we would have to climb back up or take a major detour on our path north. Plus, I simply preferred the higher altitude in the mountains. There was something incredibly liberating about the feeling of being on top of the world and looking down on everything in a vast radius. Maybe that was why I loved to fly so much, that feeling of superiority and liberty. Either way, taking a quick glance to gather information before making a decision would be a good idea.
With that in mind, I conjured up one of my trusty scrying constructs and had the shadowy raven take wing. Letting it glide down the valley, I was happy that the conjured, solidified shadow wasn’t afflicted by something as mundane as bad weather. For any real bird, flying in the mess out there would have been somewhere between annoying, dangerous and suicidal, depending on the individual specimen. Most intelligent birds would greatly prefer to remain under some sort of shelter, just like any other being.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
But in this case, the construct had no will, no mind of its own; it was just a vehicle to anchor my senses to, an extension of my will and magic, so the danger was entirely irrelevant. Even if the construct was struck by lightning, a fairly unlikely event, the only thing I would suffer was a serious headache, as the exploding air would strike my senses with fairly unmitigated force. Maybe I should add a way to prevent my senses from being overloaded like that or include a few protections, just as a matter of prudence, but that was something to consider later. For now, the construct was a simple, avian shape, which I generally preferred to use.
Thanks to a bit of Wind Magic, the avian construct made good time despite the brutal wind, which was continuously getting stronger, and the rain, which made me start to worry just a little.
Soon, the raven was in the area from which we had seen the smoke rise and, as expected, there were a few houses down there, some of them old, from before the change, others newer, clearly constructed after the change, with fairly simple methods and materials. It looked like this had been either a huge farm with a few additional buildings, maybe for guests, before the change and had turned into a nice village since the change had happened, likely due to people seeking shelter. Additionally, I could see the crops sprout on multiple fields and was fairly certain I could see a couple of farm animals, goat and sheep to be precise, take shelter under an open roof. Going by what I could see from above, I would think this was a thriving little community, well on its way to turning the small village they currently had into a small town.
The smoke we had seen from the hills mainly came from a fairly large, almost barn-like building. It was quite similar in shape and style to some of the large, communal houses the people at Apple Gate Farm had built to provide everyone with the shelter they needed.
A fairly uncomfortable realisation disrupted my observation of the village, hitting me almost like a punch to the gut. While I generally liked what I saw, there was one thing I hadn’t considered but had to consider now. Namely, the small river that had carved the valley and which was visibly used by the villagers as their primary source of water was suddenly becoming a liability.
It had risen about as high as its bed would allow, meaning any additional volume of water could spell disaster. And one such large, additional volume of water was currently falling into the mountains above the valley, dumped there by the incessant, and still worsening, rain. Some of that water would find its way into the valley and the river, making the river swell even further, likely to a dangerous degree. This might be seriously bad, at least if I wanted to meet the people in that small village. Having their village destroyed would put anyone in a bad mood, especially if a few people died due to it. Even just losing their entire crop could spell disaster for these people, depending on their number and the state of their supplies, but given that winter had only recently ended, after they had been forced to start this entire way of life, I wasn’t too optimistic in regards to their supplies.
Dismissing the construct I had used to scry, I pulled my mind back into my body, looking at Luna who was observing me with a somewhat bored expression on her face.
“Well, there are people down there, no surprise, but they might be in some serious trouble. Or rather, they will be in a few hours unless they have access to some fairly powerful magic,” I told her, getting a look of interest and a raised eyebrow in response. Sometimes, we could have conversations without the need for a single spoken word, just from reading the other’s expressions, but such conversations could be somewhat imprecise. Now, precision and speed were required, especially if we wanted to help the village.
Quickly, I explained what I had observed, and it didn’t take long for Luna to agree that this could be quite bad for the village and that we should help if only to meet a few new people. So, despite the annoyed and long-suffering glances Silva gave us, we packed our stuff and started the somewhat treacherous trail down the valley, keeping our distance from the river, especially as it was already starting to leave its bed and flood the area around it. Unless the rain higher up in the mountains was a lot less severe than what we could observe here, the villagers would be in some serious trouble soon, so we needed to hurry up as much as the uneven, ever-worsening ground would allow us.
