Chapter 582: Decisions
I pouted as we flew back to Exterreri, moving through a cold and wet cloudbank. Made us a little harder to see, a little harder to find, even as rain pelted my face hard enough to bruise. Well, if I was a normal human, anyway. Auri had her Lava ring of rocks spinning around her at furious speeds, the entire thing blurring into a solid-looking ring of dozens of glowing colors. Steam hissed and sizzled off the rings as she impacted raindrops, muttering to herself how she hated the weather.
Which, to be fair, was pretty miserable when you were a phoenix made out of fire.
We’d gotten hit by something nasty at the last city we were at, and my wonderful spellbook of [Greater Invisibility] runes had bit the dust. [Clad in Twilight] was a solid armor skill, but [The Arbiter of Life and Death] didn’t have anything to do with books the way [Sage of Tomes] did, and the vitality protection didn’t extend to books the same way it did to my clothing, armor, and weapons. I was already tracing out more runes into a spellbook, but not as aggressively. Not as full.
Blank spellbooks were now a difficult to replace resource, and I needed to conserve what I had. I couldn’t just snap my fingers and create everything needed to make paper, let alone good paper. Fuck this whole war thing.
“We were only helping.” I sulked. “They didn’t need to be that aggressive about it.”
Iona patted my arm, her other hand massaging my neck in exactly the way I liked. My eyelids fluttered as her distraction worked exactly as she intended it to.
“Looking for the Sixth’s convoy now, yeah?” Iona asked. I reluctantly tore myself away from her tender ministrations.
“Yes… but no. We’ve done a lot for me, my people, and what I want. What about you? Is there anywhere you want to go? Any miracles the Moon Goddesses want us to perform on their behalf? A favorite place, a person who needs to be rescued? Finding Nina, Alruna, anyone?”
It was like I’d dropped a load of bricks on Iona’s back.