On my travels through Mundus, I had seen quite a diverse range of terrain, the frozen forests and tundras of the north, the windswept plains further south, the cragged, dusty mountains of the Turan Mountain Range and finally, the forested areas between the Turan and White-Mountains. All of them beautiful but at the same time realistic, only the creatures and some of the architecture giving away that it was a fantastical world. The closest to truly fantastical lands I had seen so far were the tunnels beneath the White Mountains, but that might just be because I had very little to compare it to.

The area of Wild Magic Lenore and I were scouting out with our scrying construct changed that.

It took us a while to cross the mundane terrain that kept us safe, the immaterial nature of the scrying construct allowing us to move it far quicker than even Lenore could move, if she pushed her flight with Wind Magic, but even so, we needed almost two hours to get there. The terrain we were flying over during that time was interesting in its own right, the forests slowly thinning, trees getting smaller and warped, almost as if we were moving up in altitude, until there was a stretch of grassland before we got into the weird area.

The change was obvious, for more than one reason. The most obvious was that gradually, the image Lenore and I were creating through the window of Darkness, became colorful, instead of grayscale. Vibrant shades of green, deep earthy tones of brown, with pulsing shards of red interspersed, the colors appeared to be stronger and deeper than they normally were, almost as if I was seeing the world in high-definition compared to my normal sight.

And it wasn’t just the colors that changed, the terrain, too, was fundamentally altered. Rocks were sticking from the ground in sharp, jagged spikes, untouched by wind and weather, still looking like they would cut Lenore’s feet if she tried to land on them. Nearby, the ground had swelled up, like a large wave breaking near the shore, only to freeze in that overhanging, unstable form, the grass growing on the underside of the overhang making it obvious that the wave had been there a while.

In addition to the terrain, the vegetation was clearly affected as well, the plants moving in ways that were too deliberate and far too irregular to be naturally caused by wind, the swaying of the grass reminding me more of tentacles that were searching, reaching for prey that might stumble nearby. For a moment, I questioned if my mind was playing tricks, when Lenore directed our scrying towards a certain tree, that casually strolled along, its roots moving in and out of the ground in a manner that reminded my of the vines manifested by my Eisblumen-accessory.

Its leaves shone with an emerald light in my vision, a stark contrast to the reddish brown of the bark, almost matching the color of dried blood. That color suddenly turned a lot more ominous when one of the branches suddenly shot forward, moving just like a spear would, stabbing into the ground before dragging some small critter up from underground, skewered on the branch. For a brief moment, the critter wiggled on the branch, before it was tossed towards the trunk and into a gaping maw that suddenly opened in the wood.

“What in the world?!” I asked, not quite sure what I was looking at. If I ignored the fact that the tree had suddenly grown a mouth, was obviously carnivorous and mobile, even if I ignored all that, the way the wood had been large enough to be larger than the tree was wide, akin to a snake unhinging its jaw. A part of me wanted to call it comically huge, but the casual ease with which it had swallowed that critter made me just a little queasy. It was easily large enough to fit a raven, or, for that matter, a person.

Shaking my head, Lenore and I decided to look elsewhere and moved our scrying construct away from the walking tree, curious what other insanity was lurking in the area. For a few minutes, there was nothing that topped the moving tree, though a few shrubs looked like they weren’t as placid and rooted to their location as one would expect them to be.

“What’s that?” Lenore asked, subtly changing the focus and for a moment, I wondered what we were looking at, before I realised that yes, that patch of dirt was casually floating in the sky. It didn’t look like anything special, just a nice patch of damp-looking, somewhat spherical, brown topsoil, with brightly glowing, emerald grass on top that floated along like nobody's business. Which it likely wasn’t but I had certain expectations, one of which was that gravity was around to do its job. After all, it was somewhat important, holding everything together and all that.

“We should keep a bit of distance.” I suggested, staring at the small, floating island.

“You might be right.” Lenore agreed and we continued to move our sensor, when I noticed a bit of movement, almost on the edge of my field of vision. Shifting the focus, my eyes widened in horror, as a set of crystalline-looking projectiles sped towards me, too fast to react in any coherent way. My body started to evade by conditioned reflex, but by the time I had tumbled out of my throne, the crystals had long since pierced the sensor and continued on their merry way. Lenore changed the focus, kept the spell going, and traced the crystals back to their point of origin while I got back up, looking into our scrying construct with equal parts trepidation and curiosity.

What I saw made me shudder, just a little. The monster had the general shape of a scorpion, but instead of normal, somewhat camouflage plates on its body, it appeared to be made wholly from grey, metallic-looking crystal, similar to the few it had shot through our construct. In addition to being made out of metal, the thing was the size of a bus, and not necessarily a small one. The pincers alone had the size of cars and getting caught in them, would undoubtedly allow the monster to bring its stinger to bear, and if I had been respectfully cautious of the Manticore-Stingers, the stinger on the scorpion was easily enough to make me afraid, even if it might be a case of size not really mattering and the poison being what sealed the deal. Not that it would need poison, not with a stinger that could simply smash me to pulp.

For a moment, I noticed the stingers glow with an eerie, purplish-dark glow, so very familiar to the Darkness-Magic I used. There was a moment of realisation, the fact that my Astral Power always remained connected to me flashing in my mind. Having a connection between me, the construct and whatever magic a massive scorpion might wield was not something I was comfortable with. As the Mirror of Darkness Lenore and I had set up started to flicker, I dropped myself into the Astral River, letting its flow wash around me, the rapids in this place ripping my mind with them, just as I hoped they would. For a few, brief moments, I simply let myself get carried, the chaotic streams washing around me, some scorching, others battering me, pain washing through me, as I forcibly pushed out all Astral Power within me, all Astral Power that I was connected to, letting it mix and merge into the chaos around me. Hopefully, the mix would shatter any connection left, making it impossible to trace anything back to the core, me.

Not trying to remain, I pushed myself back out of the Astral, my head feeling like it had been beaten with a hammer and I felt incredibly tired. For a moment, I simply lay there, not quite up to the task of even moving my body, or investigating why I was on the ground, before realising that the Throne was part of my Astral Power and thus purged away.

Lenore landed on my shoulder, looked quite ruffled, as if she had been flying in a storm.

“Tomorrow, we should keep going like we did today. As fast as possible.” Lenore suggested, sounding just as shaken as I felt.

“Agreed. If that was just a random inhabitant, I don’t want to meet the actually powerful inhabitants.” I admitted. Just knowing that some possibly random scorpion not only had the ability to strike at me, through a remote, magical construct but do so in the magic used to create said construct made me shiver. It either was a massive coincidence, or I had vastly underestimated just how dangerous the area was. Or maybe both.

“But we are not running away, just travelling towards our destination with great haste.” I laughed, remembering how Olivia insisted her magic wasn’t for running away. No, we wouldn’t run away. No matter how quickly we moved.