Sitting down for dinner was an odd experience. It was something so ordinary, so perfectly normal, at least if one managed to ignore the circumstances. Or if one was unable to sense them. Ignorance was truly bliss in this situation. For me, it was incredibly strange, as I was unable to hide in blissful ignorance. Lia was normal, or at least what passed as normal for her. Sure, she had a somewhat unusual diet, but that was just my daughter. A little weird, but not worth commenting on. Luna, on the other hand, wasn’t just my daughter today.

  Ever since the ritual had finished, I could sense something, or rather someone, lurking beyond, not quite concealed but also not fully present. Lady Hecate was present, at least the aspect of her that was represented in the Maiden. Her presence was almost as strong as when I was in her realm, and she used the figure with three faces to talk with me, only now the presence wasn’t embodied in a statue but wrapped around Luna like a cloak. It wasn’t intrusive, at least it didn’t feel like that, or malicious. More as if the curious Maiden had decided to drop in and join us for the feast, borrowing Luna’s senses to experience things.

  The Grandmother had her own presence, not as powerful as that of Lady Hecate, but in some ways, denser. More concentrated, maybe because the Grandmother was effectively projecting her being, her Mind and Soul, into the statue the ritual had created for her, while Lady Hecate was simply using Luna’s status as her favourite child to manifest a sliver of her presence here.

  And yet, despite these oddities, the feast was perfectly normal. If someone else had joined us, someone without my senses or the knowledge of our circumstances, they wouldn’t have noticed a thing. The Grandmother, even though she was merely piloting a figurine primarily made of conjured Ice, happily tasted the various dishes my daughters had prepared, taking small bites, complimenting the food while offering a few words of advice and criticism.

  I made a mental note to study that ritual later and go over my memories to the best of my abilities once I had a bit of free time, just to see if I could copy the figurine’s creation. A normal person, and most people below level one hundred, wouldn’t be able to tell that this wasn’t an actual person but effectively a puppet somebody piloted from afar, making it an incredibly valuable skill to have. Using it, I could visit different places, never having to worry about locals taking offence at my presence and ambushing me, never having to fear betrayal and poison.

  “Say, Grandmother, what can you tell me about the situation on Mundus? You mentioned something about poisonous rain a while back. What happened there?” I asked after the entrees had been consumed.

  “That was a bad winter,” she sighed, looking at me with a profound expression of grief. “I obviously don’t know everything, but I’ve been scrying abroad quite a bit, and have talked to the northern Naga a few times. The fishies always had excellent communication, regardless of the distances involved; no matter how remote one of their villages was, they had a way to talk to the rest of their people,” she explained, a faint grin flickering across her face for a moment.

  “The poisonous rain back then was the result of a magical imbalance, making me wonder just how badly Arbotoma suffered. If I had to guess, I’d think that the whole continent had been turned into a massive area of Wild Magic, all of it aligned to poison, decay and death,” she explained, making me swallow a lump in my throat. By just thinking back to the areas of Wild Magic I had experienced myself, I could guess how bad this might be. And, even with my best guesses and assumptions, I was well aware that I could be off by orders of magnitude, simply because the scale was so unbelievable.

  This was a significant percentage of the entire landmass on Mundus, an area so massive that one needed to be in orbit to see it in its entirety. And yet, it sounded as if my actions had reduced it all to rubble.

  Even if a part of me was crowing in delight that the elves and dryads who had cost me my beloved Sigmir had been punished, another part of me was a lot less confident and certain.

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  “But the imbalance faded?” I asked, curious how such an imbalance would play out. The consequences of such a massive shift in the magical climate were unpredictable, doubly so because it had been caused by the transformation of a veritable font of Life and Nature into a land of death and decay.

  “Not really,” the Grandmother shrugged, “It started to balance out, yes, but I’ve got no doubt that Mundus will feel the consequences of your actions for a long, long time. Certainly longer than the current winter, and that has been going on for almost four years now,” she replied, making my eyes go wide.

  “What does a permanent winter look like? I mean, does it snow everywhere, even in the deserts of Daiea, or is the weather simply weird and colder than usual?” I couldn’t help but ask, now a lot more interested in the mechanics of this than the consequences for the individual.

  “Not as far as I know. The weather was colder, plants needed more care and magic to thrive, animals were smaller, crops died, far more clouds than usual, blocking the sun more often,” the Grandmother explained, making Lia chuckle for a moment.

  “Sounds like paradise,” she grinned, “A world without Sun, permanently covered in clouds and shrouded in gloom, what more could a vampire want?”

  “Food,” the Grandmother replied, her voice as dry as the aforementioned deserts of Daiea. “If the animals starve, if crops fail, people aren’t far behind. And if there’s no people around, there’s nobody you can feed on.”

  “True,” Lia had to agree, looking a little put out by this, even if I could see a twinkle of amusement in her eyes. She had already known this, just as I knew that humans had their uses, but wanted to poke a bit of fun at the Grandmother.

  “How long do you think the winter will last?” I asked, trying to return to the earlier topic, “I mean, it can’t just last forever, things will find a balance again, right?”

  “Shouldn’t you know?” the Grandmother replied, looking at me with a single, raised eyebrow, “After all, you invoked ancient magic, things that shouldn’t be trifled with. That’s the stuff of legend, and those always grow in the telling. Thus, their effect also grows with time.”

  “That makes no sense,” I couldn’t help but laugh, “Shouldn’t it be the opposite? If the legend grew over time, invoking it shouldn’t be more effective than it had originally been, before it grew, right?”

  “You’d think so,” she grinned, now finding her own amusement, “But no, it’s not. Legends, and myths for that matter, tend to take on a life of their own. A little bit like the Gods, only without the ego, literally. They feed their own invocation, strengthen the effect they have on the world and, in turn, the world feeds them back. Or the people aware of them feed them, even if they don’t necessarily want to.”

  Looking at her, I blinked in confusion, struggling to make sense of this and fit it into the rest of what I had learned about the world and the system.

  “Wonderful, yet another layer of incomprehension,” I grumbled, deciding that this would be dealt with later.

  “She’s not wrong, you know?” the Maiden’s voice formed in the air around Luna, projected into existence without the need for vocal cords.

  “While Gods receive the most power from prayers dedicated to them, just having mortals be aware of a God, to believe in their existence, gives that God a smidgen of power. That’s where some of the ‘evil’ Gods in some places come from,” she paused for a moment, before adding, “You know, like the Pale Lady.”

  “Oy, the Pale Lady isn’t evil,” I immediately defended my divine alter ego, despite chuckling at the implication, “Just…” I trailed off, unable to find the right words to complete the assertion. “She just is.”

  “That, she is, yes. She is, and will probably be annoying for quite some time,” the Grandmother glared at me, though there was no heat to it.

  Luckily, Luna spoke up at that moment, apparently trying to defuse the situation by dragging the Grandmother into a discussion about the Life Magic she had gained from the bond the three of us shared. Listening to them, and the occasional input from the Maiden, was fascinating, even if I had no actual idea about Life Magic.

  And, as I realised a little later, despite the oddity of the participants in this strange little family dinner, it turned out to be completely comfortable. Maybe this was what family was all about. Respecting one another, talking, trying to understand, and accepting that everyone was an individual with their own differences, some differences bigger, some smaller.