When I logged back into Road to Purgatory, my mind was whirling with questions, trying to sort through what I had read and learned. The book Mrs. Wu had given me was interesting, very much so but the question why she had it was lingering in the back of my mind, like an itch I couldn’t scratch. The obvious answer to it was that she had learned all those skills at some point in her life, but who was training people as assassins or spies? I had always thought that the professional assassins depicted in movies and the like were just that, fictional and that meant she might have learned it in governmental service. Which government? That was a question I couldn’t even guess and didn’t want to speculate, she was a good friend and teaching me something interesting and that had to be enough for me.

The transition from my real-world body into my avatar-body didn’t help with my wide-awake mind, so, instead of snuggling into Sigmir as I normally would, trying to drift back to sleep, I got up, walking to one of the nearby trees and jumping up, making myself comfortable on one of the lower branches. From there, I could easily glance up at the night-sky, the quarter-moon that was visible and the many stars. It was a beautiful sight, a night-sky without light-pollution and, for some time, I simply watched the stars.

With my mind relaxed and a little playful, I reached out, grabbing my Weaver’s Shuttles, letting them float into the air around me before letting them orbit me. I was their star and they were my planets, only that they didn’t move according to gravity, they moved according to my whim. At first, I simply let them circle around me, before slowly getting more fancy with their movement, trying to see who far I could push myself in moving each shuttle on its own course. Drawing figure-eights, having two shuttles orbit on opposite paths, letting one go over the other on one round before switching it up the next, letting their orbits intersect without touching, it was an interesting mental and magical puzzle that allowed me to lose myself in the simple complexity of it. I wondered if what I was doing was akin to drawing, letting my mind roam while my hands, or in my case my magic, was acting on its own.

I was mostly lost in thought, looking up at the stars, when one of the shuttles passed before my eyes and I realised that it looked a little strange, changed from what its smooth perfection. It looked almost as if something had eroded the shuttle, creating small gouges and valleys in the ice it was made out of. It only took me a moment to realise that I had barely looked at them after fighting the wolverine, just a few days earlier, instead I had taken care of Sigmir. After that, Rai and Adra had removed them from the creature’s body and I, later yet again, had simply put them back into their sheats, without checking their condition.

“Shit..” I muttered, mostly to myself, but apparently, Lenore was aware and awake enough to perceive my annoyance and agitation, flying over to me.

“What happened?” she asked, landing on the branch next to me.

“I forgot to take care of my gear.” I explained, still quite annoyed, and let the damage shuttle fly over to her, while shuffling the others around me, checking them for damage using both, my magical and mundane senses, quickly finding slight imperfections, small nicks and cracks on four of them but the last one was in a state similar to the first one I had noticed. It looked as if I had placed it in some sort of acid-bath, eroding the surface and destroying the cutting edge. Using my magic to look deeper made me notice some curious structures that looked a little different from the rest of the Hard Ice but they seemed to make the whole thing stronger, not weaker. Otherwise, it was in good condition internally, just the outer part was damaged.

“Seems as if we need to repair them.” Lenore said, after I stuck the four mostly intact weapons in the tree next to us, placing one of the damaged shuttles atop them, so I could focus on the last one. I was reasonably sure that I could have stuck all five into the tree but I didn’t want to risk damaging the eroded one even more.

“Yes…” I continued to observe the weapon floating in front of my face, trying to come up with a good way to repair it.

“That might work…” I muttered, creating a simple runic formation in front of me, one purely made from the runes of hard ice, while reaching with my Ice-Magic to manipulate the result. What I wanted to create was a complex shape, something I had yet to try. I wanted to shape the Ice into the rune of Liquid Moonlight, using it to gain additional control over the later spell-casting.

It worked quite well, taking quite a bit of Astral Power in the process but I had time, allowing me to slowly and carefully channel my power, reducing the waste to almost nothing. Once I had a single rune, I did a small experiment, using my Ice-Magic to have the rune take the place of a magically drawn rune in a spell-formation. It worked, creating Liquid Moonlight without additional problems, which was promising for my later work. The rune degraded a little, not by much, but it wouldn’t last forever, but I had already been aware of that problem.

With Lenore watching me, I repeated the process eight times, resting between the castings to restore my Astral Power and, as the sun slowly started to creep over the horizon, not yet showing itself but turning some clouds bright orange.

“Could you join me? I think I need the boost.” I asked Lenore, who hopped onto my shoulder before vanishing into her Hallow. She quickly understood what I was planning and seemed to be happy with the idea. I felt it gave us the best chance to create the effect I wanted.

“Do you want to use the Raven’s Shadow?” Lenore suggested, making me consider it for a moment. It would help, so I nodded, reaching out to her with my mind. A tiny part of me was amused by the fact that I was turning into a humanoid raven-hybrid while sitting on a tree-branch but before I could even laugh about it, I felt Lenore join me and we became one.

Together, we took control of the nine runes we had created from Hard Ice, positioning them around the single Weaver’s Shuttle that I wanted to repair. I felt the runes link together, their power increasing with each connection, while putting a little more pressure upon me. But I was able to control the magic and the magical formation started to conjure Liquid Moonlight in its middle, where I linked into it with my Ice Magic. I felt my magic control shudder a little, when Lenore’s mind intermingled a little more with me, helping me to shore up the processes I was controlling, giving me the breathing room I needed.

The next step I took was to slowly feed the Liquid Moonlight I was creating into the Weaver’s Shuttle in the middle, letting the liquid find its way inside while keeping the original shape in mind and, essentially, using my Ice Magic to create a mold into which I was pressing more and more Liquid Moonlight. I knew that I could use Liquid Moonlight to slightly strengthen Hard Ice, I had done so before, but now, I wanted to take it a step further. Maybe, Eternal Ice was just like diamonds, needing high pressure to coalesce.

The more I pushed, the harder it was but I persisted, feeling Lenore’s curiosity next to mine, spurring me onwards, pushing ever harder, pouring more and more Astral Power into the process.

Sadly, it was not to be.

I felt my control start to slip and knew that, if I let the spell get away from me, it would be bad. So, I started to back off, carefully keeping up the pressure to avoid damaging my Weaver’s Shuttle but no longer creating more Liquid Moonlight, simply keeping what I had under control.

Without the need to keep the nine-sided spell-formation going, we let the runes go. We both knew that there was no need to try to salvage them, the power that had been flowing through them would have degraded them to the point that we’d have to use a new set for the next attempt anyway. Dropping the runes gave us the mental resources to finish the process of repairing the Weaver’s Shuttle, turning the Liquid Moonlight into the slightly improved version of Hard Ice.

Both of us were exhausted, even if the sun was only coming up, but taking a close look at the result of our work was quite promising. Not only was the shuttle back in pristine condition, when I looked deeper, the strange, crystalline formations I had noticed earlier had increased in size, making me wonder if they were some sort of hybrid between Hard Ice and Eternal Ice.

Knowing that we had done everything we could for the day, I jumped off the tree, feeling a strange sensation as I was gliding down to the ground. It seemed that the illusionary wings of my avatar-form were not so illusionary after all. Curious.