“So, what did you find?” I asked Luna, once she was done with her meditation, or maybe calling it a prayer would be more fitting, given that I was fairly certain she had communed with her Goddess while meditating. Now that she was done with it and we were moving out of the area sound the inner crater, I wanted to know what she had divined and what Hecate had made of the investigation.

“It’s hard to say,” she admitted and I realised that she was struggling to find the right words, just like I had been struggling occasionally. With Lenore, I had been able to transmit impressions and concepts without trying to find fitting words in a language that lacked such words. Hel, I wasn’t sure any mundane language had the words to express certain magical concepts, simply because those concepts were so far removed from the usual usage that created the expressions needed that there were none.

Eventually, either the words would be coined and accepted as part of the usual language or the specialists who’d need these expressions would find a way around the need for words, like using formulas or specific and agreed notations that those in the know could understand. But for now, only Luna and I wanted to converse on these topics, meaning Luna would have to find a way to express herself, or maybe have Hecate help her.

“Why don’t you try and begin with what you felt near the crater? And what your spellwork told you. I believe your Eyes of the Lunar Maiden allow you to see magic like the way I experience it through my magical sight, though I’m not certain. Maybe we can start with that?” I prodded, curious about what my munchkin would make of the idea.

As it turned out, she began to make quite a bit of it, slowly at first, stumbling over words and occasionally having to resort to gestures, comparisons and a slightly strange game of magical pantomime but it worked astonishingly well. The more she talked and explained, the more I began to understand, allowing me to circle back and have her clarify previous points according to my new understanding and her newly advanced linguistic skills.

A part of me wondered if the process of acclimatising to completely new words was a little too swift or if the system helped us, maybe according to our advanced intelligence or maybe by simply beaming information into our brain, I wasn’t sure and had no idea how to put the idea to the test. Not that it truly mattered but it was a fascinating thought, fascinating and horrifying.

However, I wasn’t able to dwell on the question of our advancing vocabulary for too long, instead, I was too fascinated with the topic itself as I began to understand what the Charland was. It wasn’t just a manifestation of the outside energy from the Astral River, it was composed of more than that. In a way, it could be called a manifestation of humanity’s sins, or at least part of those sins. The central crystal was composed of radioactive elements, ripped from the Earth and refined by humans to be used before the magical enhancement of the system struck, altering what humans had made.

While the world hadn’t held as many nuclear weapons as it had some thirty or forty years earlier, there had still been more than enough firepower to devastate it multiple times, depending on the spread and efficiency employed in the usage. And it wasn’t just the weapons that were problematic, the numerous nuclear power plants would bring similar problems once the humans maintaining them were gone, alongside the various machines needed to keep things controlled.

Even without the Change acting on the material, the powerplants would have caused massive devastation as the cooling needed broke down but with the Change altering the properties of the nuclear material inside? Some power plants might become harmless, the material in their cores stabilised by the change to the point that nothing bad would happen but for the majority of the power plants, the change would make things… interesting. In an explosive manner.

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Thinking about all those potentially devastating weapons and power plants was enough to make me shiver in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature. There was simply too much power contained in all those devices, especially with magic added into the mix, so something would have happened. Something bad, potentially world-ending bad, not that it would need much more to end the world of Humanity. The change had seen to that.

But somehow, the system had some sort of mechanism in place to prevent such devastation, concentrating the problematic parts into crystals like the one in the centre, surrounding it by devastated land. The land itself was made manifest in a strange, cosmic exchange, or so Lady Hecate had told Luna. It hadn’t existed before the change and now, it had been formed and would slowly become part of the world while in exchange other parts of the world would flourish. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, it felt like the exchange described here would require energy to be expended on both sides, even if one side was restored and the other devastated, both would require tremendous amounts of energy. Just like an air conditioning unit wasn’t pulling out heat, it was using energy to fuel a heat exchange, making one side a lot warmer while the other was made a little colder.

However, as I considered the comparison, I realised that I wasn’t necessarily bound by those laws of thermodynamics, the whole of Ice Magic was laughing in the face of it. I wasn’t making anything warmer if I conjured Ice, unless I somehow managed to make the realm of Ice, if there was such a thing, warmer. I used Astral Power to manifest Ice, as an independent elemental concept. There was no real thermodynamics involved, at least not in a way that could have been understood before the change. It was, fundamentally, magical in a way that physics hadn’t been prepared to explain.

So, maybe the idea that there was a realm of Life of some kind that could exchange ‘whole’ land for devastated land could be plausible, at least in a magical sense. Just like earlier with Luna, I was missing the words and concepts, preventing me from considering the idea immediately. It also made me wonder about the world in general, or rather, about reality in general.

I was somewhat familiar with the realm of Shadows, familiar enough to move within it for a short amount of time, though I wasn’t exactly comfortable doing so. I remembered the strange feeling of being watched I had when I ventured into that space while on Mundus and while I hadn’t felt it here on Terra, I wasn’t sure the Shadows were as quiescent as they appeared. But if there was such a realm of Shadows, was it the only elemental realm?

While on Mundus, I had originally used a Water Mirror spell as a foundation for my own shadow-scrying spell that later evolved into the shadowy constructs I had used there and was now using here. Given that my scrying constructs remained connected to me thanks to the realm of Shadows it implied that Water had a similar realm, one that likely could be accessed via bodies of Water. Additionally, I remembered that the Naga on Mundus used some sort of aquatic spellwork to communicate across vast distances, maybe even to travel on a personal level. That added another point towards there being a realm of Water, which, in turn, suggested there were more.

How many was a curious question. One for each element seemed to be the obvious answer but given that the same element could come in vastly different shapes and biases, I wasn’t so sure any longer. I could see the Light element, for example, be separated into one for the usually benevolent, vital element of Sunlight with a much more destructive, scorching element of Radiance being left over. Both might be expansive enough to be considered elements in their own right, though I wasn’t sure. Both were light but both were vastly different.

Similarly, I could see a case being made for differentiation between smaller manifestations of Water, like Rain, and the pure, elemental dominance that was an ocean with its currents and tides. Both Water but utterly unlike one another.

And yet, both seemed to be part of the same element under the system. Where did the system draw its artificial lines and just how permeable were they? Trying to understand the strange, central crystal and its fairly unique elements might give me a few answers. However, studying the crystal wasn’t something I could do at this time.

Simply because I lacked the strength to survive its presence, in addition to lacking the foundational knowledge. Luckily, it would take years for it to dissipate, so I had some time to expand my knowledge, maybe find other crystals like it and draw some inferences from them, compare what I could find. It sounded like an excellent secondary goal, alongside my plan to reach the Nexus of Ice and take possession of it.

All for the sake of power. All for the sake of Sigmir.