The first few minutes the godling spent walking on the trail the young creature was quite easily distracted. Even doing something as simple as walking along the sandy trail would be pleasantly distracting to the creature. It enjoyed the feeling of its feet sinking into the trail beneath it, and was delighted to feel the warmth of the sand-like soil on its feet.

Unbeknownst to the creature, it was autumn and it didn’t have any shoes on so when its feet were out of the sand they were exposed to a chilly breeze that occasionally blew through the forest.

It had other clothes on, a plain-looking but warm cloth shirt made of magic, and a pair of equally magical pants that looked like and felt like thick fur meant to both protect the wearer from the attacks of wild animals and provide some measure of protection from the cold.

Other distractions came in the form of the creature listening to the sounds of the forest itself. The creature had astounding hearing and could clearly hear noises that came from as far as hundreds of meters away.

The sections of the forest the godling wandered through were themselves fairly quiet as if the forest were waiting for the creature to do or say something, but its presence didn’t matter to most of the forest and it heard the noises of forest life off in the distance.

The real reason why the section of the forest it was in was quiet was due to the trail it walked on.

Humans frequented the forest and animals learned to avoid the areas they were most likely to come across humans. The primary reason why did that was that humans were skilled hunters who’d delight at the chance to trap a rabbit or snag the pelt of a wolf and many animals learned that firsthand before their neighbors began to avoid the humans.

Humans also had a bad habit of marking the paths back home they took by creating things like the trail that the godling walked on and so whenever an animal saw that path it turned around and fled from it.

Off in the distance, the sounds the godling heard were a bit more interesting than the sounds the creature could hear further down the path. It heard the sounds of heavy padded feet stepping onto and crushing leaves and the sounds of fish hopping out of water as if to swim upstream.

It heard the sounds of wildlife engaging with each other, bears and wolves starring each other down and roaring or barking at each other, and a rather ominous noise: the sound of wild laughter echoing through the trees.

Those noises, especially the laughter, seemed to come from far away and felt distorted as if they had been changed from however they originally sounded, which caused the young god to feel a faint sensation of concern. The creature wondered to itself if the presence of the trees were partially responsible for the distortion of the laughter or if there was something more magical at play.

Shortly after hearing the bouts of wild laughter the creature felt something stir in the air before hearing a subdued explosion tear through part of the forest several kilometers away. These noises and sensations were intriguing to the entity, but ultimately it decided to stay on the path it was on.

It had been walking down it while listening to the forest and was beginning to stumble across footprints and hoofprints and considered investigating them, before ultimately deciding to stay the course.

The footprints in the sand ahead of it were clearly human in origin though the entity didn’t know that since it had never seen a human before. Upon reaching them the creature knelt down and examined the prints left in the sand with a thorough eye for detail.

It spent several minutes memorizing the dimensions of the prints and carefully studied how deep each footprint was as well as looking for details within the footprint itself that might enable it to identify the source of the footprints if it encountered said source. Out of curiosity, the creature decided to look back and examine its own prints.

Bizarrely, when it turned around the creature noticed that it hadn’t been leaving prints. It lifted its knee just a bit to see if it left one while it was kneeling down and studying the prints left behind by some other forest explorer but was disappointed to see that it hadn't.

The creature thought for a moment and then chalked it up to a mystery it’d have to solve later. It had no way of knowing how soon it'd be consumed with a desire to investigate mysteries like this.

When satisfied with its oddly scholarly study of the prints the creature got up and resumed its walk. The prints lead off the path so instead of following them vigorously the creature quickly decided to resume its walk while heading in its intended direction.

The creature’s first experience using its own mystical powers came when it approached the edge of the forest.

The creature sprung into existence in a part of the forest that was fairly well explored and documented, which was precisely why there was a path there. It had followed the path and walked atop it for all of its short life, and as it neared the edge of the forest the path not only widened it also got deeper.

Each step on the path as it neared the edge of the forest caused the creature to have to take more time to lift its feet out of the sand and such an inconvenience was annoying to the entity. It had no patience for this and so it quickly decided to step off of the path.

Once it made this decision it slowly walked towards the edge of the path. Each step was made with an awareness that it’d be off the path soon and so it decided it was worth luxuriating in the warmth of the sand-like soil just a bit longer. It even backtracked a bit so it could enjoy the sands as it preferred.

When it reached where it intended to step off the sands it did so quickly like it was trying to drink an unpleasant tasting drink that would help it feel better in the long-run but still dreaded the actual task it needed to do.

It was pleasantly surprised to find that the forest floor beneath it was warm. Unlike the sand-like soil it had walked on before the forest floor, the floor’s warmth didn’t extend throughout its feet, but just the bottom of them. It was still more than it was anticipating, and so the creature was grateful for that at least.

The creature’s power didn’t activate at that moment. Its power required it to already have taken its first steps somewhere before it could be used and so the first steps the creature took onto the forest floor were like each of the steps it had taken before. It was on the creature’s second steps atop the forest floor that the power activated.

The second time its feet were brought together and they touched the floor beneath it, it fell to its knees as its mind reeled from an explosion of knowledge.

The creature’s power activated without the creature's understanding of it, or its consent and the surprising sensation of its mind-expanding brought the entity to its knees.

It basked in the sensation of its mind-expanding and filling with new knowledge, but the sensation was also powerful enough for the creature to need to take a second and sit down since the power actively increased its mind.

What had happened was actually quite simple: the god possessed remarkable senses and as a complement to that it also possessed an ever-active mental map. The mental map came in the form of a sort of radar that sensed and revealed the locations of all nearby creatures that were on the same surface as it.

For that power to activate it had to be on a solid surface, it could release mental waves that explored the surface and imperceptively bounced off of things also on the same surface. Each time a wave bounced back off of nearby creatures the godling’s mental map was updated with their new locations and their distance relative to wherever it was.

This new knowledge revealed fairly little to the godling. It had a limit of roughly 50 meters and was imperfect because it was limited to the surface and didn’t seem to be capable of detecting flying creatures. Aside from the locations of creatures burrowed just under the surface of the forest, it mostly confirmed what the entity already knew.

Namely that most of the forest’s inhabitants were far away, over 50 meters away and behind it, deeper in the forest, at least since that appeared to be the limit of the power’s reach. But the creature now had experience with some of its own abilities, and that new experience would undoubtedly serve it well in the near future as it left the forest behind.

After recovering from the shock of the power’s activation and analyzing the knowledge the mental map contained creature got up and experimented. It noticed that it’s map was updated with any movement it made no matter how slight, so long as such movement involved one of its feet touching the ground beneath it. That was handy because it immeasurably increased the difficulty of catching the entity off-guard, and the creature delighted in such knowledge.

The creature considered turning around and exploring the forest for a bit. Its newly discovered ability gave it greater confidence, but it ultimately decided that it was worth leaving the forest for now. It nodded to itself and continued down the path that it suspected and hoped would lead it out of the forest.

The god's young mind was filled with simple thoughts. It was a brand new creature, no more than a few minutes old, and it was alone so there was no real reason to consider that it should be any more mature than it was at that moment.

I wonder what these things are called...

That was one of the god's idle observations and questions about the various sorts of natural debris and foilage that littered the forest floor. It looked at the assorted twings, branches and more that it walked by.

The deity's idle thoughts were about the nature of the strange objects it came across. Many of these objects were mundane things to humans and other lifeforms with language, but not to the deity.

I sure would like to meet another living thing sometime soon...

The other idle thoughts were about desires and "wants" the deity had. They were the musings of a simple child, not of a powerful deity who as of yet not only didn't know about its own powers, but also didn't understanding the nature of other living things, even if it possessed some strange knowledge that alerted it to the reality that it wasn't alone in the world.

The log cabin was silent. Awkwardly so. The married couple studied the corpse in front of them. After nearly a minute of silence the husband, a middle-aged human who looked older than he was due to stress prematurely aging his skin, spoke up.

“So… how do we get rid of it?”

His wife, a youthful-looking beauty with fair skin and a fondness for clothes that matched her complexion, was actually older than he was. She was stunned by the callousness of her husband’s remarks, and upon realizing this her husband coughed to clear his throat and rephrased his statement.

“How do we get rid of him?”

This was almost as callous, but that time the coldness didn’t come from contempt. It came from social ineptitude. He didn’t mean to sound cold this time, it was just the way he talked. This remark was far more to Cynthia’s liking and so she responded to it.

“Well… can you go outside and start a fire? I’m sure the smell is starting to get to you anyway, and I can’t do it myself because, as you well know, fire isn’t exactly something I’m comfortable around.”

Cynthia’s husband looked at her and studied her carefully. He was too proud to admit it, but the stench of blood seeping into their floorboards as a result of the many puncture wounds penetrating the body and the smell of the body’s emptied bowls were definitely getting to him.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to leave her alone in the house with the body while he started a fire, but there was definitely logic behind her suggestion. Without an idea of his own, it’d be difficult to say no to the suggestion and none came to mind.

His wife’s eyes were calm, but there was something else there as well. Some other emotion that was harder for her husband to analyze. Her calmness was surprising since the couple had left their old community behind so she’d be away from other humans and therefore there’d be less blood for her to be tempted by.

He had long figured such distance from the power and pull of blood would have made her weaker to the seductive its power.

It was at that moment that he realized that she was probably still delirious from the impact of the fresh human blood she had already drunk from the deceased would-be-rapist currently rotting in front of them. So long as that blood was fueling her she’d likely be able to resist the need to feed on other humanoids.

So he had fairly little time, perhaps a matter of hours, before she became susceptible to the ravenous urges that plagued vampires who hunted humanoids. Which meant he needed to move fast.

Upon realizing that, he sprung into motion and spoke softly to his wife even as he dashed past her to grab what instruments he needed so that he could start a fire outside of their cabin.

“Alright. I’ll do that.”

His words were heard by his wife, but she remained on her knees and silent for a few more moments. As he glanced at her while moving past her he could tell she was trying to focus but was having difficulty. He walked deeper into their cabin and grabbed a pile of tinder that would serve as fuel for the fire, as well a flint to start the fire with.

He returned from deeper inside the cabin within a minute and as he walked towards his wife he was distraught to notice that she had yet to leave where she was when he had left. He approached her and then spoke softly.

“Honey? Do you need help getting up?”

His voice was unusually soft when he asked this. He was a grumpy man but he had always been capable of tenderness with her. He waited for her to respond and had placed the items he retrieved on the floor so he could reach out and lightly touch her shoulder. She responded before he could lightly touch her and pull her into his embrace.

“No honey. I’ll be fine..”

Her voice drifted off, but it sounded unusually alluring. He could tell there was something unusual about her current state, unusual beyond what she was normally like when she drank humanoid blood. She spoke again moments after her voice drifted off.

“Sorry! I’ll be fine. There was something odd about the baron’s son. When I bit him to stop him from approaching me it didn't’ work. That’s never been the case before. When we’re done here it might be worth investigating. If my bites aren’t capable of stopping an attacker I might just have to invest in something else like a sword, but so far that’s just never happened.”

Despite the shock, she was clearly feeling and her stunned awe and terror, her voice had regained some of its usual strength. This was slightly reassuring to her husband, and he nodded at her, though she had her back turned to him.

He was still concerned but at least some of that concern had been assuaged when she returned to something resembling her old self. It was at this moment that he thought to ask her what she planned to do.

“So babe, while I handle the fire what are you going to be doing?”

Curiosity laced his voice and he was genuinely curious as to what she would say. In response to his question, she turned to face him and smiled. Even in her current, mildly vampiric state, her smile was dazzling and disarming. It was a charming feature she had possessed before she became a vampire, but her vampiric transformation definitely accentuated it.

Her smile exposed her thin canines, teeth he knew were like hypodermic needles meant to suck blood efficiently and with relative safety as opposed to brutal fangs meant to crush and tear humanoid flesh.

“I’m gonna make our unfortunate and unwelcomed guest here easier for you to transport my love!”

Her voice was giddy, and he could tell she would enjoy this. This would have frightened him in the past, but he was used to it now. This too was a part of what she was normally like after drinking blood.

He looked at the corpse in their tiny living room and realized that there were multiple ways she could lighten the body. The first that came to mind was the normal ways someone would lighten a corpse, such as dismembering it or using basic spells to lighten the load. But then he abruptly realized that despite the corpse’s pallor due to the cause of the nobleman’s death being bloodloss, given the freshness of the corpse there should still be some blood in it.

He looked at his wife, who had spent these last few moments studying his face with the vivid curiosity and interest of a cat given a new toy, and was aware that his question was most likely written all over his face. He preferred having to leave his question unspoken and his wife looked at him, before reading his expression and realizing what concern might be on his mind.

It took her a second to be aware of the question he was hoping he wouldn’t have to ask aloud. When she realized what was on her husband’s mind she giggled, the sound pleasant and filling the room with a sort of cheeriness that the room had lacked ever since the now-deceased nobleman had first invaded the log cabin.

“Oh, honey. No. No! I’m not going to drink his blood. I’m gonna dismember him. It’ll be easier to transport and ultimately burn his body if we do it in pieces rather than start a fire and try to burn him all at once. Given what we have access to in this cave I don’t think it’d be possible to burn him all at once even if we tried.”

Despite the specifics of her comments being deeply disturbing, her husband was relieved to hear what she said. It was also deeply logical. He agreed with her assessment and was about to turn to leave the cabin when he heard her quietly add something.

“I’m not gonna drink any more of his blood.”

Her soft voice was unusually and purposefully quiet. Gregory was unsure of whether or not she had wanted him to hear that. But he also knew that there wasn’t much they could do at this moment. And he had a task to complete. But that doesn't mean he was to stand by and do nothing if his wife didn't believe in herself.

He lifted her up and turned her around so she was facing him. He did this so that he could study her carefully.

He gazed into her eyes, currently swirling pits of darkness as her enemy’s blood surged through her veins and then carefully examined her facial muscles. He was studying her, trying to determine if she believed in herself. She met his scholarly examination of her gaze and her facial muscles with pride and strength. It was reassuring to him and hinted that she had wanted him to do what he could to believe in her.

After a few moments, he determined that she believed her words, and nodded at her. He wasn’t exactly the talkative type, and he gently put her back down where she had been before. The two of them looked at each other for a moment, aware of the grim nature of the actions they’d have to take over the next few days and painfully aware of the possibility that their lives would never be the same.

Then Cynthia nodded at her husband and turned around so she was facing the corpse. She immediately began to activate one of her vampiric powers, a sort of shapeshifting that was focused on individual body parts.

Before his very eyes, her hand began to darken as blood collected there and then her hand regained its normal pale color seconds later. The blood was used as fuel to be spent as part of the cost of using a vampiric power. And then her fingers began to fuse together into a single flat surface. He had only seen her do this once before and the rest of the process wasn’t pretty so he quickly grabbed the items he needed and moved to leave the cabin.

As he left their cabin he heard her quietly grunt in pain. She was doing her best to stay quiet, but her efforts weren’t entirely successful. In fairness this wasn’t because she had low pain tolerance, it was because of the sharp pain the power caused its users.

She had once described the power’s sensations upon activation as comparable to having small blades tear through someone’s skin from the inside, so the skill was evidently immensely painful to activate and that Cynthia's groans of pain were as quiet as they were was a testament to her self-control.

As he walked away from their cabin and to a distance far enough from it to safely start the fire, Gregory mentally promised his wife that when they were safe and the next few days had come to pass he would do something truly romantic so that they could recover from these days blissfully.

But sadly for Gregory, what Gregory didn’t know could hurt him. And it was hurting them, both him and his wife, right at that very moment. Gregory lacked the magical intuition to detect or resist the scrying spell that had been cast on the body of the nobleman and was now watching him.

The scrying spell, cast by a mischevious imp many kilometers away from the cave, had effortlessly determined their location. The imp had been looking for the nobleman and was a bit shocked to find that the nobleman was now a noble-corpse.

Far away from the cave and the cabin, the imp who cast the scrying spell contemplated telling its master about its grisly discovery. After thinking about it for a minute or so, which was truly an impressive accomplishment given how little the creature cared about the nobleman the spell had uncovered, the creature decided it’d tell its master if its master thought to ask it, but would otherwise keep this juicy information to itself.

Imps obey their arcane masters, but they prefer to follow the letter of their master’s commands and not the spirit behind their orders.

The wizard’s tower that housed both the imp and its master was located farther away from the cave than the cave was from the forest. It was in a fairly isolated location that was kilometers away from the nearest settlement, which was the town lorded over by the wizard’s boss: a baron named Miles Hightower.

The wizard worked for the baron as a magician and court spell-singer. The two communicated via magical amulet that allowed for the wizard to spend most of his time in his arcane lair.

The tower was an odd blemish on the landscape. It was a tall home, coming in at about 65 meters tall and only a few meters wide. It was more like an impossibly long needle than any sort of respectable-looking tower. This was because of magic.

The tower was wider on the inside than it was on the outside and each layer of the tall thing contained multiple floors and more than enough room for even a small settlement.

The wizard who lorded over the tower was a proud and secretive fellow. He preferred to labor alone, aside from his familiar. Weeks ago he had succeeded in selling his soul to a devil for power and to gain a new and wise ally: an infernal imp who served him as an adviser and as a familiar.

So the area surrounding the tower had been deemed his property and his property alone. He purposefully kept it uninhabited, not that many would willingly settle so close to a spell-slinger anyway.

The middle layer of the tower was where the wizard was hard at work. It was also where the wizard’s familiar, the lazy imp who was the only member of the royal court with any eldritch expertise, lazed away. The imp already knew the location of the deceased nobleman thanks to its successful scrying spell.

It had kept watching the scenes in the cave for a few moments after casting the spell and coming across the corpse in an unknown cabin, which strangely had been built inside of a cave. It had watched as the human man started a fire.

Before undoing the spell the creature willed it’s arcane eye back to the log cabin and was genuinely shocked to see that the man’s companion, a strange vampire, was hacking away at the nobleman’s body with a blade it couldn’t quite see. It hadn’t dared to approach the vampire since she likely would have detected the spell. Vampires were more sensitive to magic than humans were.

It didn’t know who the woman was who was hacking away at the body with a blade that she must have had hidden on her person somewhere. It didn't know who the large man who was starting a fire was, but the imp’s master made the mistake of not ask it where the body was.

Heck the man didn't even ask where the nobleman might have gone, which in the imp's mind meant it wast free to keep such valuable intel to itself.

The imp was doing its best to train the wizard into a powerful evil spellcaster, but the wizard wasn’t receptive to the training yet. He wasn’t even aware that he was being trained. Especially since the wizard still had the arrogance of a spell-singer who just received a big power boost and most likely believed that he would be the one in charge.

The imp didn’t mind that all too much, it was first and foremost a patient servant of evil and could wait for when the pride of the spell-singer was broken. It took the imp a few moments of contemplation on its current circumstances to come to a delightful realization.

In a moment of unusual mental clarity, the creature realized that the breaking of the wizard’s pride might come a lot sooner than it had first anticipated upon meeting him. The baron wasn’t patient and he was demanding that the wizard locate his son soon.

The grinning imp was a scary sight. Had its master been watching it, the creature likely would have been questioned as to why it had such a creepy expression on its face. But the wizard was hard at work preparing to cast his own, deeply simplified scrying spell in an effort to locate the baron’s missing son.