For once, I wasn’t stalking the forest near Jademoon Tower, looking for worshippers of Sunna to torment. Instead, I was sitting in the cave Lia and I had set up near the giants close to the Nexus Tower, observing the world through a scrying construct. In a way, this was a vacation from my vacation, a distraction from all the amusing curses and misfortune I spread on the people down south. By now, I wasn’t sure that my continued influence was even needed to make them miserable and cause their community to break apart and turn on one another, but I wasn’t about to leave their demise to chance.

  Tomorrow, I’d get back south and plant some more seeds of paranoia, maybe in conjunction with one of Lia’s fun little concoctions. She had mentioned something about a powerful hallucinogen, though I wasn’t sure it would be wise to use something that overt. So far, our attacks had all been incredibly subtle, to the point that I doubted Lorgar and his merry band of fools knew that they were being attacked. So why give them more information than necessary for little actual gain? No, it would be better to keep things quiet and let their paranoia and the conflict within simmer and grow until it all exploded into internal bloodshed and misery.

  For today, I was planning to check on the giants and ensure they were continuing on their path, that none of them had succumbed to the harsh winter and wasted our efforts in doing so. Not that I’d be able to do anything if a giant were already dead, but I was hoping that their hardy nature, alongside the fact that they were amongst the strongest beings in the forest, would keep them alive. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered resettling them in this area.

  The first destination of my scrying construct was the group of five giants centred around Naya, the first giant I had encountered. Their camp looked roughly like I had expected, maybe a little more developed, but still within my expectations. They had set up multiple constructions that hovered right on the edge of being called buildings, all set up around a large, central fireplace. It was quite obvious that these giants were doing well, and a quick look into one of their buildings showed that they had been hard at work, gathering supplies.

  Their stores had large chunks of rudimentarily smoked meat and fish, approximately a metric ton of gathered root vegetables, and a similar amount of nuts, although it was hard to tell with those. They certainly filled multiple surprisingly well-woven baskets, as well as some racks to dry their supplies out. Sure, it wasn’t all that fancy, certainly not compared to what humans had built, but it looked very much like this would be enough to have them last the winter. Unless something bad happened, but that would always be the case.

  Another curiosity I noticed while observing these giants was that their clothes had evolved. Originally, the giants had merely used crudely skinned pelts to cover their most sensitive regions, mainly the crotch and breasts for the females. Those pelts hadn’t been to preserve their modesty, at least I didn’t think so, but instead, those pelts had effectively been armour. Nobody wanted to get wacked directly on their most sensitive parts, no matter if those sensitive parts were a male’s or a female’s.

  However, those crude pelts had undergone significant evolution. Before, they had been held together with knots and the occasional string of rawhide cord, making them barely suitable for their purpose. Now, those same pelts were stitched together, and a few pieces the giants wore even had what looked like simple fasteners made by sticking a carved piece of bone through a latch. They hadn’t quite managed to discover buttons on their own, but it was an obvious precursor, making it only a matter of time until they got that part down.

  That fact alone drove home that giants weren’t as simple as I had thought. The lessons I had given them had covered simple stitching, alongside a few other extremely basic crafts, but those proto-buttons were their own discovery. It proved, without any reasonable doubt, that they had the intelligence to innovate, even if the innovation was relatively simple. But it was a good first step, making a part of me want to continue observing.

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  The next stop on my raven’s tour was the pair of giants, whom I had named Kanya and Zenio. When I had checked on them before, their home hadn’t been as elaborate as that of the fivesome, but their supplies had been fairly impressive, especially for only two people.

  Thanks to my aerial perspective, it was easy to find their home; they hadn’t relocated or anything. When my raven got close, I easily saw that little had changed about the place.I was fairly sure that they had improved their insulation, but otherwise, the place was just as it had been from the outside.

  Once I was close enough, I could see that this didn’t hold true for the insides of their home; those had changed a bit, though they hadn’t innovated or anything. They had increased the number of pelts they used to cushion their home and had added a bit of shelving and a few other bits of general comfort, making the place quite homy.

  However, while their home was neat and cosy, not all was well in their little family unit. Kanya, the female of the pair who was visibly pregnant, had a deep and bloody gash in her leg, barely bandaged with hide and fur. Even for creatures as hardy as giants, this could easily be a fatal wound, especially if it got infected.

  For a moment, I considered my options, thinking about what I might be able to do, especially without completely invalidating my experiments. Before, I had a few ideas regarding the introduction of a deity based on Sigmir, potentially allowing me to use a link of faith to locate and possibly draw in her soul, but that wouldn’t work at the moment.

  So, instead of trying to come up with a complicated solution, I opted for a simple one. Well, simple, by my standards.

  The first step was to modify the Raven construct I was using slightly. The eyes turned a baleful, glowing blue, far too luminous for a normal bird, the feathers gained a light-absorbing effect that made it impossible to perceive their exact shape, and the claws were tipped with crimson, dripping blood as the bird moved. It wasn’t exactly fancy, but I felt it gave a certain impression.

  Then, I had the bird fly through a narrow opening into their building, taking advantage of the fact that the only substantial parts of the construct were its claws and beak. The rest was made of magical shadows, and shadows had little trouble to stretch and contract according to my desires. Making it into an opening too small to accommodate a construct was trivial.

  Landing near Kanya’s feet, I used Wind Magic to create a loud caw, making the sound echo unnaturally within their small home. My magic allowed the sound to fill the room for a full ten seconds, making the giants noticeably uneasy, just as I intended.

  One hop after another, my construct made its way onto and across Kanya’s injured leg, leaving small marks of blood from its claws as it went. The markings sank into her skin, mingling a small bit of my power with her blood, though I wasn’t certain how long that would last. It was an interesting experiment and would probably be quite interesting in the future, especially when it came to observing and studying the continued development of her foetus. But that was for later.

  For now, my construct simply made its way across her leg to the deep gash in her leg. There, I used a bit of Darkness Magic to sever the strands securing the bandages around her leg, causing them to fall away and expose the wound for the world to see. Curiously, Zenio’s expression was worse than the one on Kanya’s face, or maybe I wasn’t quite able to interpret their facial expressions. Sure, they looked similar to humans in that regard but their minds didn’t work the same way.

  With another loud caw, my construct hopped right onto the bloody gash, causing Kanya to let out a gasp of pain and almost making Zenio smack the construct away, but neither acted. That was a good thing, as the gash was healing with every painful step my construct took. Every drop of blood from my construct’s claws was condensed from my Blood Magic and healed the wound, until my construct reached the end of the gash, leaving a fairly faint scar in its wake.

  However, I wasn’t done and used some of the power I had just infused into her body to mark her leg with a raven’s feather, right around that scar. Kanya would remain marked by me, right above the wound that may have otherwise killed her. I wasn’t certain what I would do with this in the future, but I had a feeling it would be interesting.

  Then, my construct cawed again and disappeared, dispelled back into the Astral River. There was another group to visit, and then I had some more fools to stalk in the south.