It had taken almost two months of work, but it was done. My tower, all hundred and twenty metres of frozen glory, was completed. Each wall was glowing with the ethereal light of runic formations, every pillar was reinforced with webs of crystal and each door was magically protected. The shrine at the base of my tower had been sanctified by Luna, drawing upon Lady Hecate's power, though the layout wasn't quite what I had expected.

Instead of the shrine being wholly devoted to Lady Hecate, it turned out that my daughter had changed things around. Given the connection between Luna and Lady Hecate, I was willing to bet that the change was due to prodding by the deity, not because Luna wanted something different. Plus, some aspects of the Shrine's construction mirrored the work I had done on the Dragon's Temple, especially when it came to the entrance.

The tower here, just like the temple, had two large portals, sized to allow even a giant entry if one made the journey. They were set at a ninety-degree angle, one opening towards the north, the other towards the west, giving the internal space the initial structure. That structure was further reinforced by the doors to the stairwells, one on each side of the tower, in the north-east and south-west. The stairs wound around its entire length in a double helix, giving access to every space, from the observation platform at the top to the Nexus down at the bottom.

The imagery within the shrine was set around that initial structure; however, it wasn't quite set up as I would have expected. The altar in the middle was almost par for the course; it belonged in the shrine and had to be there, it was just part of it. Maybe it didn't have to be precisely in the middle; it could be offset towards the back, away from the entrance, but it had to be there in a central place. In front of it, in a north-western position, right between the portals into the tower, stood the largest statue. It depicted Lady Hecate in all her trifectual glory.

Contrary to the depiction I was used to, the statue here had the faces I had seen in Lady Hecate's realm, before she had habitually borrowed the faces of Luna, the Grandmother and me. Adding to that oddity, the faces on her statue were looking across the room. The Crone's face was looking at the southern point, where a statue of the Grandmother held an acorn aloft. On the other side of the statue, The Maiden's face was gazing at the eastern point, where Luna's statue was tending a vine. Finally, the Mother's statue was looking right across the altar, towards the south-eastern point, where a statue of me, carved from crystal, was standing proudly, an athame in hand. Our statues were only a little smaller than the one of Lady Hecate, but, given the way the shrine was structured, it was pretty clear that Lady Hecate was depicted as a guest in our space. I wasn't quite sure what to make of this, especially since the shrine, as of now, was only sanctified by her, adding a slight sense of discongruence to the entire thing.

We had already added a few shelves, filling space around the room, but had yet to add any tomes to them, simply because none of us thought we would want to use the usual stone tablets here. They had their advantages, sure, especially when it came to preserving the information inscribed for a long time, but they were also incredibly cumbersome to transport and annoying to store. Eventually, there'd be a better solution, either by the reintroduction of books and a printing press or by the invention of something new and better. I considered trying to inscribe information into crystals, somewhat analogous to microfilm, but hadn't done any preliminary experiments to make the idea a reality. Either way, I was confident that the shrine would eventually house a great deal of knowledge.

Most of the living spaces remained sparse and empty for now. We simply didn't have the furniture to fill and decorate them, but I was confident that would change. As time went on, things or people would crop up, and the space would come in handy. It wasn't as if I could easily add space to the tower, not with the massive amount of reinforcement and the various enchantments woven into the walls. I could affect the tower, sure, but if conjuring and integrating a centimetre of height into its walls had taken a few minutes while I was constructing it, now, after everything was finished, it would take me an hour. Once the enchantments and reinforcements had absorbed all the magic they could hold from the Nexus, that would go up even further, to the point that it would take days to make minor structural alterations.

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The spaces we had the furniture to fill were located near the top of the tower, despite it being quite impractical and a long climb. Part of that was because of the view along the valley, but also because I simply preferred to be high up; it felt soothing to look down at the world. Additionally, the room housing my throne was on the second-highest floor, the entire space open with the throne sitting on a dais offset from the centre. Otherwise, the room was entirely empty, with large parts of the outer walls woven to be completely transparent, giving me a fantastic view when sitting on my throne.

The level above held a study on one side and a defensive position on the other, just in case somebody managed to make it to the observation platform atop my tower and tried intruding from there. The study was to make use of the observation platform; I was planning to investigate and manipulate the local weather, as magically charged as it already was. It would be interesting to see how far I could take things, especially when it came to the simple comforts.

I might have to ask Luna to add another Oculus to the observation platform, but I wasn't sure how useful it would actually be. The location of this tower, high in the mountains but within a valley, greatly limited just how far one could see, unless one wanted to study the ice on the various slopes around it.

And those slopes were a concern in and of themselves. Mainly because, at the end of the day, the laws of physics couldn't be broken casually, not even with magic. The steep slopes and the ice frozen atop them held tremendous potential energy, something I knew very well. When the elves had tried to attack me in the mountains of Mundus, they had sent a sizable army, their collective power far outstripping my own.

And yet, they had all died a cold, lonely death, their formation broken by an avalanche, their number scattered and their strength isolated, allowing far weaker foes to tear them to pieces. There was a lesson to be learned from them, one I didn't want to learn from my own mistakes.

The tower's position was fixed; there was nothing I could effectively do about the Nexus, it simply was where it was. I could cheat a little with the Throne, but the tether I had used was almost stretched to its limit. I doubted anything beyond two hundred fifty metres would work. Far too short to leave the danger zone if somebody managed to set off avalanches on the slopes above, especially as the only real area safe from that was at the top of the mountains.

No matter how much I would prefer to build my tower up there, it just wasn't happening.

So, I needed to add defensive structures, something to keep enemies from breaking the glaciers above and abuse simple physics to crush my tower under thousands of tons of stone and ice. Because not even my tower would be able to withstand that, not in its current form. Maybe if I managed to convert all the Hard Ice it was currently made of into Eternal Ice, the concept of Eternity might allow it to withstand those extreme physical forces, but I wasn't completely confident. And even if the tower survived, the cleanup would be a major headache.

But those defences could wait a little longer. The time I had taken to build my tower had also been the time winter needed to make its presence known in these mountains. Tons of snow had fallen in the area, and I wanted to check in on the giants, just in case they needed some help. I had no idea how well they would withstand the winter here, but I wanted to have some of them left come spring. Otherwise, it would have been a massive waste to drag them along.

So, after making sure I could step through the shadows and return to the tower through the Astral River, Lia and I set off once more, heading back down the mountains. Luna and Silva wanted to stay at the tower, while Lia had been incredibly bored just hanging around and wanted to collect some interesting ingredients for her alchemy. We would have to see what we could find.

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