“Mother, I would like to ask you for help,” Lia’s request, right after the shrine's completion, was a bit of a surprise. While Luna and I had been busy building it, Lia had roamed around town with Alex and I had no idea what they had done. Some combat, that much I knew and Lia had asked me a few questions about magic during our downtime, but other than that, I simply did not know. So, the request for help was a curious one.

“Certainly my dear. What do you need?” I asked, wondering what sort of situation had stumped her. Or if she simply wanted to work on some project together with me, I had spent the last two weeks mostly working with Luna, so maybe my first daughter wanted some attention, too.

“I…” she paused, taking a deep breath, “I tried to do a thing, but it didn’t quite work. Maybe you can help me make it right,” she admitted and I could see the blush she was no longer able to generate, even without any visual indicator.

“A ‘Thing’, you say?” I prodded, a small grin appearing on my face. Now, I really wanted to know what she had done, especially as she started to squirm around a little.

“You know how we made Alex?” she began, getting a nod from me in return and I realised where this might go, “I know that you somehow made me from a Shattered, we talked about it, I remember fragments of that time. I tried to make another vampire, just like we made Alex, only this time I tried using one of those Shadow Cats that run around the area,” she explained.

It was an interesting idea, Shadow Cats were an evolution, adaption or whatever you wanted to call it, from normal, domestic cats, formed either by exposure to Astral Power or because they reached a certain level and consciously chose. I had no idea how that exactly worked and Silva, the one who might know, hadn’t deigned to explain the process to me. They were somewhat larger than normal, the size of a medium-sized dog, had excellent stealth and acted like ambush predators. No danger to me, at least not those I had seen thus far, but they had some moxie but not enough to engage in suicidal battles. Not quite the creature I would have chosen to experiment on, but maybe it was a good idea nonetheless. They were primarily nocturnal, their stealth greatly enhanced by some innate shadow magic similar to my cloak of shadows and I had a feeling they’d also have some sort of enhancement to their physical attacks but I didn’t have confirmation for that.

Either way, they were solitary, so if Lia had captured one, there shouldn’t be a pride of them trying to get their lost member back.

“As I said, I will help you, so why don’t you show me where your experiment is and explain what you tried so far, maybe I can figure out something. Otherwise, it’ll be experimenting until we get it right or we decide to give up on this experiment and move on. Or something else happens, you never know when Murphy shows his troublesome mug,” I grinned, gesturing for her to take the lead into the twilight of the evening. It was dark enough to be harmless to her, likely why she had asked me at this time.

She easily sped out of our shelter and I followed, having to use a bit of Blood Magic to push myself to her level. She wasn’t going all out, I’d have to either push my Blood Magic to the limit or use Wind Magic if she had, but she put on a good pace. Maybe we should try to find some way that she could magically speed herself up, too, it would be a valuable tool in her arsenal. Though, how well that’d work with her inability to regain Astral Power passively, I wasn’t sure, experiments would be needed. But those were ideas to consider at a later point, for now, I simply followed after her as she moved along the still mostly empty streets, ignoring the Shattered and Undead that were just getting out of their daytime-stupor and moving out of the houses they were occupying.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Noticing them made me wonder, were the houses they used their original houses or how did that work? Did they simply move into the nearest, convenient patch of darkness or did they have some sort of rudimentary memory? I doubted anyone had really looked into the question, simply because there was an almost universal and incredibly strong desire to forget that Undead and Shattered used to be human, let alone trying to find out who they used to be. Treating them as monsters made fighting them a lot easier, nobody wanted to fight their loved ones, at least as far as I understood things.

Though, it made me wonder. If it was one of my loved ones, their body desecrated after their passing, would I want to simply forget about the body or would I want to lay the body to rest, seal it in eternal ice so their body would have an eternity of peace, or maybe turn it to dust with my power and scatter it in the wind, letting them become one with the earth once more? Granted, if the loved one was Sigmir, the answer would be that I’d try to pull her back into this world, no matter the cost or sacrifice, but that wasn’t really an option for other people. But even so, I wouldn’t want my beloved’s body to wander around, not where anyone could gawp at it, not that I had seen anyone do so. The Shattered and Undead weren’t seen as human, so I doubted anyone considered them ‘naked’ even if their clothes had ripped to shreds. Just like people didn’t think a dog or cat, even one without fur, was naked and in need of clothes, clothes were for people, not monsters.

It was curious how easy it was to disassociate the body from the person, making me wonder how people would react if more non-humans started to walk around. Would they see us as something other than human and hunt us with the same tenacity as they hunted Undead and Shattered or would we find acceptance? The answer, as so often, was likely neither black nor white. In some places, we’d be welcomed, in others shunned or only welcomed as second-class citizens, to be used and discarded at leisure. Not a terribly pleasant prospect but unless I managed to overcome all my detrimental social traits and settled down somewhere to guide the place’s development, there was little I could do.

It made me wonder how things had turned out at Apple Gate Farm, with Cassie, the dwarven cleric, in their ruling council. Would that single, non-human voice be enough to guide the rest or would some sort of prejudice force her out? Knowing Mrs Wu, I doubted it would easily come to that, but I couldn’t be certain. No matter how skilled Mrs Wu was, she couldn’t sway everyone, she was an excellent teacher but if people didn’t want to be taught, they would just ignore her. Time would tell, but I doubted I’d find out as I didn’t really plan to return there any time soon. Maybe if I learned to fly swiftly, so I could cross hundreds of kilometres in a day, but that was purely a dream.

For now, my focus was back on our surroundings, mostly because Lia had started to slow down. We were in just another residential area, one that had been hit pretty hard by the earthquakes after the change, turning it into a devastated mess of concrete, rubble, wood and metal, all now starting to grow over. The plentiful growth made me wonder for a moment until I sniffed the air and realised that the miasma of death was a lot thinner here than in the rest of town. No Shattered hanging around due to the lack of easy shelter, the remaining bodies likely too broken by collapsing buildings to rise as Undead, leaving large amounts of nutrition for enterprising plants. No wonder that plants were thriving here, though I doubted anyone would want to actually use that fact, simply because it was born from human corpses.

“This way,” Lia gestured, guiding me towards yet another broken building. Moving around and over the rubble, she showed me a recently cleared stairwell granting direct access to the cellar and unlocked the door. It was a solid set-up, whoever had lived here had invested some time and effort to make their home secure from burglary but given that Lia had used a key it didn’t really matter.

Even before I could look around, an angry hiss caught my attention. There, sitting in a makeshift cell made from repurposed metal, wood and some wire, sat one of the Shadow Cats, only this one was larger and angrier than any I had seen, its eyes alight with a faint, crimson glow.

What a curious experiment my daughter had produced. Now, I just had to figure out what had happened and what I could do to make things work.