It was fascinating just how focused people could become when they had something new and exciting to work on. Leaning magic had, in an odd twist of fate, lost some of its lustre during the time everyone had spent at the tower, a jaded sense of normality soon replaced the initial excitement as it became just that, the norm. For many people, it was hard to remain excited at something that happened every other day and so, day after day, the incredible slowly turned mundane. Though, in defence of my student, I had to say that they never took my instruction for granted and continued to work hard to prove themself worthy of it, so the situation could have been a lot worse. If my students were as invested and motivated as some students back in high school had been, I'd probably have chucked the entire batch out as a bad batch and either shuttered the entire teaching-idea or looked for a new set of students. Luckily, that never happened, though comparing their joy at the idea of organising a celebration with the motivation for their lessons was somewhat disheartening. None of them shared the enduring love I had for magic, the motivation to try another experiment day after day, only for most of them to fail in a wide variety of ways. Most likely, the people I had here wouldn't go far on the Arcane Path because of that, they simply lacked the tenacity to stick things out.

Maybe it was for the best that Maggy had returned to the tower a little over a week ago, apparently fed up with the organisational details of running their community and looking for a bit of a working vacation. I wasn't quite sure how I was supposed to take the knowledge that the woman saw my tower as a retreat from her duties but I couldn't fault her too much for it, the things she had shared about keeping a community of a little over a thousand people running sounded like utter torture to me. So much paperwork and organisation, so many people who needed to be pushed and prodded to move in roughly the same direction, I doubted I'd be able to do the same without either massive threats or magical compulsions. Maybe both, I wasn't sure.

Amusingly, organising people for the party seemed to be something Maggy actually enjoyed, making me wonder if there was something wrong in her head but given my own mental state, I wasn't one to throw stones. But, insane or not, she managed to get together with Luna, who had the best working knowledge of rituals pleasing to Lady Hecate, and was setting something up that should be educational, relaxing and pious enough to please the Goddess and the people. Even I had been given a part to play beyond figuring out the date and it was quite an interesting project to figure out, too.

So far, I hadn't completely managed to accomplish it but I felt I was on the right way. Amusingly, the project might even filter into the creation of my draconic breath but I hadn't got that far just yet. It also served as a good project to further my studies into Illusions, a topic I had neglected just a little while Maggy had been gone but this idea was a good one to work on them, especially as I was trying to use the Twilight aspect inherent to Darkness Magic, even if I had yet to rediscover its Rune here on Terra. In comparison, purely mental illusions, where I used Mind Magic to trick an opponent into seeing and experiencing what I wanted them to was a lot easier and harder at the same time, depending on the severity of the illusion and the number of targets I wanted to influence. The second part was the major difficulty, though that might be because people had yet to learn what was possible with magic and what was not, making it a lot easier to make them believe things that they would usually have immediately deemed impossible. Their mental resilience was still shaken from the Change and I doubted it would completely recover within this generation.

Visual Illusions, as created with the Twilight aspect of Darkness Magic, the suspected Refraction aspect of Water Magic or, at least for other people, a fairly wide variety of Light Magic, wouldn't have that advantage but on the other hand, they also didn't suffer the same drawbacks. The question of which method was better was, as with almost everything in life, a question of priorities and focus, which element was deemed more important by the evaluator and that it was impossible to answer the question in a general fashion. Unless one decided that the availability of the skill was what made a skill better and in that case, Visual Illusions would be deemed better as it was possible to make them with a wide variety of skills, some of which I probably hadn't even thought about. Mental Illusions, on the other hand, needed Mind Magic, meaning the pool of people who could use them was incredibly limited. Which, in turn, some people might deem an advantage as the limited availability meant that counter would be just as unusual, as were people who put in the effort to ward and defend against such an intrusion.

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And so, during the week as Darkness Magic was reaching its crescendo leading up to the solstice and the Longest Night, the tower was a hotbed of activity, straining my nerves repeatedly, even if the activity was confined to the lowest level and the annexe. How so few people managed to be so noisy, I had no idea but it seemed that excitement and exuberation could make up for numbers easily. Thus, I reworked some of the magic I usually used to keep the noise I made from getting away from me and alerting foes in my surroundings to my presence to something doing the opposite, namely to keep the noise made by others away from me and allow me some peace and quiet. And yet, despite that newly discovered trick, I retreated into the mountains on many occasions, partially because I needed a bit of focus to silence my surroundings and while working on my project I didn't have that focus to spare, partially because my experiments were quite visual and I wanted people to see the project in its entirety once it was done.

So, the mountains and the snow it was, especially as my work was a lot easier surrounded by the twilight of dusk or dawn, when that particular aspect naturally strongest. By now, I was starting to figure out how to decouple what I wanted to project from the environment and was turning it from a pure illusion into a mix of illusion and projection, partially powered by my own, internal magic, partially powered by the very thing I wanted to project into the physical world.

Luckily, what I sought to project was already part of the world, only not of the physical one. It made me wonder if I could do something similar with the Realm of Shadows, drawing parts of it into the physical world and having them interact with it, maybe as a defence, allowing me to deflect troublesome attacks into the Realm of Shadows while remaining with the physical where those attacks wouldn't be able to harm me or maybe even as an offensive tool. I doubted many people could defend against being swallowed up by their own shadow and dragged into an endless, lightless realm where nothing but your will and magic bolstered by your affinity to Darkness and Shadow mattered. Once inside, I would be able to take my time or even make them surrender outright if only to leave the realm once more.

Plus, there was that sensation of being watched I occasionally felt within that realm, though it had been far more prevalent on Mundus, making me wonder just what had been hiding in the shadows over there. Or if there was something hiding deeper within them here on Terra, just unable to come close to the surface due to the remaining turbulence within the Astral. Either way, I knew it could feel discombobulating from personal experience and somebody without my affinity and exposure to that realm. They would be about as helpless as I could ever want them to be, making the idea an interesting one. If I could pull it off, that is.

But before I could start down the path to modify the technique, I would have to complete it first and in this case, it meant I would have to find a way to project the Astral River into a visual form, allowing everyone to see, feel and experience it when Darkness, and thus Magic and Change, were at their strongest, during the Longest Night. I couldn't think of a better way to celebrate Magic and Lady Hecate than to let people see the Astral River in all its glory.

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