It was already late in the night, just after midnight, when Sigmir and I returned to the area where we had made camp earlier in the night. Ylva, who had stayed behind with the others, raised her head as we approached and I noticed that she was sharing guard-duty with Olivia. Over the last week, that had become something of a habit, to have Olivia take a guard-shift but, as there was that lingering bit of distrust in my mind, I had quietly asked Lenore and Ylva to share the shift with her, just in case. In this case, Olivia had clearly noticed our approach, giving us a wave of acknowledgement, before looking at our surroundings again.

“Why don’t you sleep first, I’ll stay awake until my watch starts.” I quietly told Sigmir, in order to not disturb the others.

“And where did you sneak off to?” Olivia asked, once we were near the center of our camp, where she was sitting on a rock. There was some amusement in her tone, coupled with a bit of teasing but given the relationship between Sigmir and I, there was nothing for her to tease us about.

“Why, are you that interested in what a pair of lovers get up to when nobody is looking?” I asked, just as quietly and with as much suggestive undertone I could put into my voice. If she wanted to tease me, she needed something other than my relationship with Sigmir.

“Mhm, if I was twenty years younger, I might ask to join you alas, time is a cruel mistress.” she replied with an amused snort.

“You know, there is an island full of people like the two of you, in the ocean between Aretia and Daiea.” she added, still amused, before launching into yet another of the stories she had told me about her travels.

This one was, obviously, about a visit on that Island, called Sobel by the locals, and their curious customs. The Amazons, for that was what the people of Sobel called themselves, seemed to be an old tribe, not quite humans, not quite like the Giantbloods of the north but something in between. Their myths spoke of a legendary heroine who had managed to bed a Titan and ever since then, they had passed on their strength from mother to daughter. In addition, they didn’t quite worship the Olympian Gods, at least not like everyone else.

Normally, Zeus was obviously considered their most important deity and everyone but those who dedicated themselves to a single deity, like Olivia, worshipped him as King of Gods, leader of the Pantheon and all that. For the Amazons, that was different, as they all dedicated themselves to a few Goddesses, mostly Artemis, Aphrodite and Eleutheria, with Zeus and the Pantheon a minor part of their worship. There were a few, interesting anecdotes regarding their rituals, especially about the time when the locals had realised that Olivia, who was apparently far from their ideal figure of Authority, was a dedicated Cleric of Eleutheria and blessed with power from the Lady.

But her stories didn’t go into too much detail regarding the society of the Amazons, which sounded headache-inducing complicated, instead she focused on what she deemed more interesting. Namely, tales of city-wide orgies, where every woman had fun with all the other ladies. Males, curiously the weaker sex, were essentially forbidden from participating and were mostly used to breed, if they had the preferred characteristics. One of the things she mentioned about their politics was that the Temple of Aphrodite had an exhaustive list of bloodlines, to make sure that they kept enough male breeding stock to prevent trouble due to breeding between too close relatives.

While I personally doubted the scale of the orgies she described, she was grinning far too hard at my embarrassment to be taken seriously, the rest was horrifying enough to give me pause. In that pause, I began to wonder just how a society that worshipped a Goddess of Freedom was so repressive, with one sex keeping the other in what almost amounted to slavery. Luckily, the island was far enough off our path that we would have to utterly lose our way to end up there, meaning I didn’t have to worry about some busty amazon trying to move in on me or Sigmir. Such a thing would be annoying, just the idea of sharing Sigmir was enough to make me consider murder.

Shaking my head once more, I decided to send Olivia off to bed and continue to keep watch on my own. She had no problem with that and soon, I was sitting alone in the darkness, making sure that nothing was trying to use the cover of night to attack.

With nothing better to do, I decided to start experimenting with my latest idea, at least on a small scale. There was more than enough darkness around me, the mountains around me and clouds above me keeping out what little light there was.

Creating a cloak of darkness to blend into the darkness around me was almost laughably easy but that was to be expected. It would be a lot more difficult, if not outright impossible, to achieve the same result during the day, let alone while in bright sunlight. Maybe, if I managed to push my darkness-magic a lot further and focused a lot of time and energy into the direction of shadows and the twilight-aspect of it, as that seemed to be the direction to interfere with Light the most. In a way, that part of Darkness-Magic was interesting, as it likely shared quite a few properties with Light-Magic, just coming from the other side. If Light and Dark were sides of the same coin, the twilight-aspect was the edge of the coin.

As I realised where those thoughts would lead, away from my path of pure darkness, trying to find the ultimate expression of the element of Darkness, I shook off those ideas. Certainly, they were interesting and might be something worth pursuing, but not for now. For now, I would have to focus on that simple idea I had earlier, to simply use a shell-game to keep people guessing. To accomplish that, real concealment wasn’t needed, only enough concealment to make it impossible to spot which of a number of equal looking shadows was concealing me.

Closing my eyes for a moment, I created two additional blobs of shadow, trying to make them look just like the cloak of darkness around me. Sadly, Lenore was already asleep, or I might have asked her to give me a second opinion on their looks. Instead, I decided to go into the other direction first, to try moving them around. My idea was that, as long as I kept moving and shuffling the shadows, even when I was attacking, it would be difficult to keep track of the right shadow in the heat of combat. That difficulty could be increased even more if Lenore and I somehow managed to have her stay within one of the shadows, acting as a secondary point of origin for my spells but it would mean giving up on the additional Astral Power.

Moving the shadows around was relatively easy, as long as I kept the mental processes that I used to move around my frozen shuttles in mind. That way, I wasn’t accidentally moving them as fast as they actually could move, draining a lot of Astral Power in the process. The biggest mental hurdle was to keep myself from drifting and falling into a pattern. There was always a temptation to let my mind wander, while the clouds of shadow orbited around me. In combat, that would make the whole exercise pointless, it only worked if I managed to conceal which was the cloak and which the clouds.

Finally, after I had started to get my two clouds of darkness to move around me in an independent manner, without quickly falling into the trap of forming a pattern, I realised that I had been keeping watch for almost half the night and it was already time to wake one of the others, either Rai or Adra. Normally, Rai would have had the watch after me but thanks to my intense focus on keeping watch, nothing to do with the magic experimentation, the time to wake him had long passed.

Luckily, nothing bad had happened while I had been lost in my own mind. With that thought, I carefully moved to wake Adra, making sure that she was fully awake and aware that she had the last watch of the night, before moving over to Sigmir and making myself comfortable in her embrace. According to Olivia, we would make it to Neamov soon, just another day and a half of travelling. I couldn’t wait to see the town she had described in glowing tones, making it sound like a major metropolis. But first, I had to sleep or my mind would be completely mush during the coming day.