By the time we managed to get out of Racoon City, I was thoroughly annoyed. The whole night was practically wasted, we came, saw and had to run away because our enemies would have crushed us, far from the Cesarean ideal. There was no conquering to be done, as much as I would have loved to conjure up a massive snowstorm and bury the Withered under mountains of ice.

But the night’s failure left me a little lost, we needed information on what was going on in the centre of Racoon City but trying to go there as a group was impossible. Going there alone might work, but I wasn’t quite willing to risk it, not after the danger I had landed myself in last time. This left me with one option I had to explore, something I had done multiple times on Mundus. Namely, scrying.

The problem was, I couldn’t just use the same method as I had used on Mundus, even if I had the entirety of my magical abilities back to their original levels, it wouldn’t work. My old method had greatly relied on Lenore, on her innate experience as an Avian, to provide the magical construct I created with their shape and abilities. Those constructs used to be, at their core, copies of her body, her physique and abilities, which we used to gather information. If I tried to use that method, I would likely just get somewhat mishappen humanoid shapes, little more than stick figures, able to walk and look around but certainly not able to fly. And flying was what made the scrying constructs so useful, their ability to avoid trouble on the ground by venturing through the sky.

There were few enemies that constantly checked the sky, only those who were regularly attacked by flying enemies had those instincts. Given the lack of avians since the change, I wouldn’t bet on the Withered ever checking more than the rooftops.

But even if they did, there were ways to insulate the person scrying on them from any magical backlash they might experience from their scrying construct’s destruction. At that point, it essentially became an arms race between the person doing the destroying and the person creating the safeguards, both trying to overcome whatever the other might throw at them. Caution was always needed because the original ways I had used would leave me vulnerable to attacks I didn’t want to consider. If my mind was out there, directly linked to a scrying construct, it lacked the usual defences it had thanks to my physical body. Getting attacked in that state could easily latch onto that connection and if that happened, I’d be in serious trouble.

Which I really didn’t want.

For the rest of the night, and until I went to sleep some time in the morning, I was once more reading through the Zevarra Agha, looking at the Water Mirror spell I had originally used as inspiration for my own scrying spell, remembering my thought processes and considering how I could adapt them for my current situation. The easiest would be to use my memories of flying with Lenore and the times she had shared her memories with me to build my constructs. I wasn’t sure if I could get them to work and behave as I wanted, but if I added some extra magic, I should get something serviceable, even if it wasn’t perfect or the most efficient.

Another option was quite a bit more interesting. Namely, I was relatively certain I could use the Nevermore’s Feather she had sent me as a focus to reach her as if I was praying. Maybe not with anything resembling clarity, but I might be able to use it in order to conjure up a small part of here, a mere figment of her existence and abilities if I used the Feather. Nothing permanent but that would, hopefully, mean my magic wouldn’t consume the feather.

Which was the biggest hindrance to the idea, I wanted to keep the feather for a far greater project than some scrying, I wouldn’t even use it to create a permanent scrying construct. At this point, using it in a manner that consumed it would be an utter waste, simply because I lacked the power to make anything truly great with it. So, for now, I was incredibly hesitant to use it, even if the idea was quite fascinating,

Partially because I wanted to commune with Lenore, even if I doubted I could truly contact her with my current power and partially because it was the closest to Divine Magic I could imagine myself coming. Trying to commune with a true, established Divinity, even after the faint contact with the power behind Lenore’s miracles that had felt both quite amusing and incredibly disturbing, wasn’t something I could imagine myself doing. The idea to send your Astral Power, your literal thoughts and prayers, as hilarious as that made the old wishes for thoughts and prayers, out there was disturbing. To let an entity you didn’t trust into your mind, just opening up to the Grandmother to talk to her within the Astral had been a bit of a challenge and there, it had merely been an exchange between our minds clad in shells of Astral Power. I had a feeling that, to truly commune with the Divine, I would have to let them into my soul. That idea itself was enough to stop me from entertaining a communion with any extraplanar entity save Lenore, though if Sigmir was still alive I would certainly consider her. Mainly because the idea of worshipping my beloved brought a grin to my face.

The third method I could envision to gather information was one I was confident in, at least theoretically, but I wasn’t sure about its practical viability. Back on Mundus, I had managed to project my mind into the Astral River and traverse the streams of power, using the nearly omnipresent web of magic to traverse the realm. While the strands weren’t always obvious, they were always there and while I wasn’t sure I could venture into the thinnest of strands, I was curious to try. I felt it was somewhat like the circulatory system of one’s body, only that the body was the entire world. There were locations in the body where major arteries were close to the surface, but even without those obvious spots, regardless of where you poked a hole into the flesh of one’s body, there would be a bit of blood welling up. Similarly, regardless of where one was on the ‘flesh’ of the World, the Astral River and the power it carried was never far.

But the problem with that idea was that the Astral River had yet to settle down. It had gotten a lot better from the raging flood that carved through the foundation of Reality right after the change but only in the sense that it had gone from the equivalent of a tidal wave to the equivalent of a waterfall, constantly cascading down. Trying to swim in either was a foolish venture that could easily see you swept away, a fate I wasn’t quite willing to tempt.

Each of the methods I could come up with had its own flaws, its own demerits and its own price that needed to be paid. I wasn’t sure which I wanted to use, but I knew that I wanted, or maybe needed, to do something, that knowing what was going on with the Withered was crucial. Not only that, it also irked me that I couldn’t just find out, that I was thwarted.

Maybe I had become a little too used to being the baddest bitch in town, knowing that, other than the Sun, nothing could stand up to me. Slaughtering hundreds of mindless Undead had certainly helped to confirm that idea, as did the fearful awe with which the Survivors at Apple Gate Farm treated me. But now, I was faced with an enemy I couldn’t defeat easily, maybe not at all. An enemy that had the numbers to oppose me, but also the ability to wield those numbers.

From deep within my soul, annoyance started to well up. Suspecting that the enemies we had killed those last two weeks were basically fodder, a distraction from whatever controlled the Withered to keep us from getting too nosy, grated on me. I felt cheated, played in the worst kind of ways. I wanted to punish the entity behind the Withered, to show them that I wasn’t to be trifled with, that I wouldn’t allow myself to be dismissed like some toddler who was thrown a few toys to play with.

Only, I had no idea how I could actually accomplish that. I needed information, I needed to find a weak point in the Withered, so I could slaughter them all. They had defied me, and I would not brook that defiance.

I was the Queen of Ice and I would not be denied. Winter was coming!