“Well, damn,” I muttered, looking out of the forest, the wet boundary before us stopping our progress.

“Yes, a dam would help here,” Adra snickered in reply, making me let out a soft growl of annoyance at her joke.

“Harharhar,” I grumbled, shaking my head at the idea of damming up a river of that size, wide enough to make the forest on the other side hazy in the distance.

“So, where do we go from here? We’ve been heading straight southwest for the last two weeks, but I’m not sure we can cross this river without getting noticed,” Adra asked, watching the muddy water with concern. Sniffing the air, I focused my own senses and noticed that there was something curious about the scent, somewhat similar to the prevalent scent of the forest but with a different flavour.

Remembering the trailer Pantheon Entertainment had launched and the Naiads lounging in a muddy river and using what I could only assume was scrying magic similar to what I usually used to inspect disturbances, I had a good idea of what I was sensing, the influence of the Naiads that manifested similar to the influence of the Driads over the forest. Only that we had no allied Naiad, making it difficult to conceal our crossing from them.

Closing my eyes, I focused past the physical world, into the Astral, trying to see if we were close enough to the Nexus so I could sense it. Back in Aretia, I had been able to find the Nexus in Neyto from quite the distance, a few hundred kilometres if I didn’t miss my guess and my perception had grown a lot since then.

The first thing I felt was the forest around me, its very presence pulling on the Astral, infusing it with its energy and getting infused in turn. It was almost as if the Forest was a single, massive organism, not sentient, let alone sapient, but with a certain awareness nonetheless. Now that I was aware of it, its influence was strong enough to be felt without focusing on the Astral, at least until I managed to block it from my mind, just like one wouldn’t be constantly conscious of the clothes one was wearing. They were simply there, but unless something changed or you focused on them, their presence wasn’t intruding on your mind.

Similar to the forest’s presence, I could feel the river ahead and here, I was quite surprised. I could understand, on a conceptual level, why the forest could manifest into a single, large entity and I had read about certain trees that essentially cloned themselves, sprouting countless trunks, all connected by one massive root system. I doubted this forest was the same, but I could see that living trees could serve as the basis for a ‘living forest’.

But a living river? What were the individual units, water was, at the end of the day, not alive, it might contain living things, from bacteria to the massive crocodiles I could see in the distance, but the vast majority of volume was no more alive than the air around us?

And yet, I could sense a certain… existence from the river ahead of us.

Pushing past the influence, I focused deeper, remembering the influence of the Nexus in Neyto and how it had tugged at me. I wasn’t willing to fully delve into the river and start sifting through the currents, travelling along the small tributaries, into the larger channels until I reached the Nexus, and even if I did, I wasn’t certain I would be able to connect the sensation to the world around me, but I wanted to find the Nexus.

For a minute or five, I simply felt the river until I became attuned enough to the minute ebb and flow of it, those tiny fluctuations that were almost drowned out by those two titanic presences all around us. To make matters worse, the larger influence on those minute fluctuations was something I wasn’t willing to focus on, it felt akin to the influence of the Forest, only far less immediate as if the influence was projected from far away and yet, it was powerful enough to be felt.

The other influence was subtle, flowing only through a small part of the Astral River but amusingly, the river ahead was carrying the majority of that influence. There was Ice there, but it wasn’t pure or strong enough to truly be felt, making me think of glacial runoff, the Ice had thawed but it would carry traces of its origin for a long time.

Feeling that connection, I tried to glimpse a direction, something more concrete than ‘south-west’, staring into the Astral and trying to relate it to the dimensions of the physical world.

Sadly, even after trying for a few long minutes and starting to get a headache, there was no progress, other than the quite obvious realisation that if the river was essentially a physical representation of a part of the Astral River, following it upstream would, at some point, bring us closer to the Nexus, hopefully, close enough to feel it. I doubted that the source of the river and the nexus were in the same place, the elements didn’t feel right for that, but a physical connection was likely. Possibly the same mountain range, or a glacial run-off that eventually connected into the river, either way, if we followed the flow of water, we’d also follow the flow of Astral Power and thus, at some point, reach our destination.

“We should stick to the river,” I told the others, getting a sigh of relief from Adra.

“Good, 'cause I don’t think there’s a way to cross it without being noticed. You feel their influence, don’t you?” she asked, warily eying the river.

“The Naiads?” I asked, getting a nod in response, “Yes, I can feel that there’s a whole lot of influence going on. The river and the forest are curiously interlinked, I think,” I mused, before shaking my head, pushing away those rather metaphysical and somewhat mystical connections. The river, a source of life providing the forest? Possibly, but there definitely was something more going on.

But nothing we could investigate in passing.

Following the river was incredibly simple, there was even a path doing just that. Or maybe I should call it a road, depending on what the locals felt about such designations, either way, it was obvious that we weren’t the only ones travelling this path.

Which was why we immediately retreated back into the forest, our plan to occasionally check the river’s course so we wouldn’t get lost.

“You know, you might want to consider some deception,” Lenore suggested, a sly amusement in her mental voice. We had been following the river for maybe an hour at this point and noticed a few elves guarding it, and, of course, the constant presence of the Naiads.

“Mh?” I perked up, the idea of deception, especially when connected to such amusement quite intriguing to me.

“Think about it, they’ve got to have a good idea of our speed and direction, just using the last few rituals. But they also have to know just how difficult crossing the river unnoticed would be for a landbound being, right? I mean, unless they are completely retarded and somehow missed the massive, magically infused river that winds its way through their equally infused forest, quite possibly partially from said river,” she chortled, the idea quickly making sense in my mind.

“So the moment they realise that there is an incident on the other side, they know we can either teleport or fly, neither of which are easy abilities to come-by,” I now shared her amusement, already imagining just how annoyed the elves would be. Sure, high-level spellcasters would always look for ways to improve their battlefield mobility, it was one of the best ways to avoid having some fool stick a pointy bit of metal into your squishy bits, but from what I had seen so far, and read on the forum, those abilities weren’t all that common. They greatly depended on your personal affinities and abilities.

“We shouldn’t just try to fly, though, that might be a too common way,” I mused, looking towards the river with a bit of apprehension. There had been a great deal of power in those waters and I wasn’t about to see what happened if a magical bird casually tried to fly across. It might do nothing, as countless birds had to fly across constantly, but I wasn’t willing to bet Lenore’s life on it.

“Shadowstepping would work, too,” she sighed, before suggesting “Tonight?”

“Tonight,” I agreed, already looking forward to that particular endeavour. Maybe I would get some extra insights into the Nidhogg’s flames, their composition and aura fascinating me to no end.

Hopefully Sigmir wouldn’t be too annoyed at the idea that I would use yet another night to deceive our foes, hopefully getting us enough time to escape their net.