I was no dwarf, but damn, could I dig a hole.

After sleeping for a few hours, curled up next to Lia and Luna, I had concentrated on doing just that, taking the relatively small hole I had initially created and enlarging it. It was partially to continue training my Earth-Magic, partially because I was bored and finally because the increase in living space was useful.

It was a curious exercise in control and power, forcing me to constantly adapt and adjust, so I wouldn’t accidentally collapse what I had already dug, to say nothing about bringing the small hill above us down or digging too deep. While I doubted there was a Balrog down below, just getting into the water I knew was there would be an annoyance, swelling the compacted earth I was using and turning it to mud. Sure, that would stop any Balrog I might accidentally dig up, but it would also make an utter mess.

The whole process reminded me a little of an old game, digging up blocks of dirt in an effort to make a safe base, only that I couldn’t simply punch the ground or a nearby tree, at least not if I wanted to achieve anything. But thanks to my magic and the efforts I had taken to make it incredibly versatile, I could dig with nothing but my mind.

And now, a few hours before nightfall, the cave was suitable, with one wing having a tarp, a few soft pads and our sleeping bags, one wing holding a curved chimney and even a simple table and lastly, the tunnel out to the surface.

The construction part done, I began to do nothing but channel vast amounts of Astral Power into the walls around me. While I wasn’t able to simply turn the dirt to stone, I could get quite close, simply by exposing it to insane amounts of Earth- and Crystal Astral Power. It wasn’t the same process that would happen naturally, far from it, but it was good enough to get a fairly close approximation. And make sure we would be comfortable underground, something that felt amusingly natural to me. But then, the original lore about Firn Elves had been that the race was based on a combination of swartalfar, a subterranean elven subrace, and Frost Giants, so maybe digging holes and tunnels truly was for me. Only that maybe, I should have been digging in some glacier somewhere. Alas, maybe I could do so someday, but sadly, not today.

When night finally fell, I was ready to go. The nights were currently short enough that we really had to make the most of what little time we had, so all of us happily moved out, towards the curious marsh Lia had discovered.

I was so interested in this area because I considered it a magically altered, or maybe even created, biome, an area that had no business being as it was. And yet, I couldn’t really argue that it existed, not unless I wanted to expend excessive amounts of magic in an attempt to deny reality. So, I wanted to figure out why the area that shouldn’t be as it was, was that way. Outside influence was the obvious answer, but who had influenced it, and how? Or, more likely, what had influenced it, as I highly doubted there were any powers strong enough to cause such change, not unless one of the Gods had taken a favoured similar to Luna and pumped them full with power to the point that the servant became something wonky.

No, it was far more likely that there was some environmental factor, some curiosity that had turned this area into what it was. There was far more Astral Power in the air, or rather the water, than anywhere else, the closest effects to this I had experienced were areas of Wild Magic, so maybe this was what happened here. It wasn’t a Nexus, but it might become one, a Nexus attuned to water. I wasn’t sure that this was the case, but it was a realistic scenario and studying the formation of a Nexus, or generally studying what was happening here sounded like an excellent idea, as this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, or close enough to that.

With Lia and Silva keeping an eye out, we moved towards the marsh, moving slowly and carefully as we had no idea what might lurk in the area. Alex had abandoned their usual perch on Lia and moved over to Luna, the two acting as secondary eyes, not that either had senses acute enough to detect incoming danger. No, Silva was second best at this, thanks to her canine traits increasing her hearing and olfactory senses by quite a bit, though not enough to keep up with my intuition. And given that my attention was focused on possible magical threats, it left them.

Given the possibility that this was an area of Wild Magic, I wasn’t about to discard a magical threat, simply because there were no sapient spellcasters that I knew of. Wild Magic was utterly unpredictable, it could easily turn an area into an aquatic minefield filled with deadly trap-like effects. An area like this could easily hold spots where the ground was so inundated with Water Astral Power that the ground was more liquid than solid, at least in one direction. It would make quicksand, the movie idea, seem unspectacular, before literally dragging a person down into the muck so that they would never emerge again. With the possibility of such threats taking us by surprise, I had to keep my focus on the magical side, leaving the others to take care of the physical side.

As we got closer to the water, I realised that my worries were reasonable. There was something in the water, not necessarily something physical but a diffuse magic that was far beyond normal. While it wasn’t as magical as conjured water, it came close, making me wonder why the water didn’t just diffuse back into the Astral River. Sure, it would take a few weeks, maybe even a month, but by the looks of it, the water here wasn’t diffusing. If anything, the amount of water was increasing, which I considered impossible, unless something or someone was feeding more power into a conjuration.

“Don’t get closer,” I warned the others, before quickly creating an Icicle and floating towards the water, trying to draw out potential attacks. Nothing happened, but that could just as well be because whatever was in there wasn’t interested in Ice.

Changing my plan, I tossed the Icicle towards the area where we had seen the massive cat the day before, hoping that I could spook something into revealing more about the area but the only thing I managed to get was a splash when the Icicle hit the water near the tree. Nothing else, other than a rapid dissolution of the Icicle, the conjured Ice melting far quicker than it should and the Astral Power I had used to conjure it fading from my control.

“Curious,” I muttered, before deciding on the next course of action, namely cutting into my finger, infusing a bit of blood with my Astral Power and smearing that blood onto another conjured Icicle. It was still brimming with vitality and Astral Power, so if there was something attracted to those, this might cause a reaction.

And it did, as soon as the Icicle was floating above the water, a sudden surge of power within the water caused me to try jerking it back, only for the floating Icicle to get smacked from the air by strange, stringy algae, wrapped up and dragged into the water and out of my control. I barely managed to send out a surge of Death Magic to sterilise the Blood I had put onto the Icicle, destroying its magical connection to me, but the uncontrolled burst also made me completely lose control over the Ice, while making me hiss in pain.

“Well, there’s something in the water alright,” I mused, not quite sure what to make of this.

“Not sure why we didn’t notice anything off yesterday, maybe it’s only active during the day and will soon fade, night has just fallen after all, or there’s something else in play. No idea, really. Lia, Silva, can you track down something living that we can use as bait? I’d like to understand why that plant reacted as it did and how there could be some cat lounging on a tree if the algae drag things into the water to feed on or whatever happened there,” I told my companions, before looking at the placid lake once more.

My original suspicion was definitely confirmed, there was something weird going on here, something beyond simple background magic. But it didn’t look like Wild Magic, though there were some influences of it, nor did it give me feelings similar to the hive mind of Withered.

This was something new and I was quite curious what Lia had dug up for us.