“Mooooom,” Luna’s voice pulled me from my musings as we were walking along an old game trail. These paths had been our best bet for the last few weeks, essentially ever since we had left the area around the burned land. There might have been roads in these parts in the past, or even trails, but the strange decay of civilisation that had happened since the change had already made those disappear, leaving nothing but these rough paths. Luckily, this one was leading in the right direction, though without knowing where I was in relation to various strands within the Astral River, it would be nigh impossible to know.

“What is it, Luna?” I replied, after shelving my current line of thought regarding new and exciting things to incorporate into wards. There were so many ways to have other beings be unable to notice you, I doubted I’d ever figure them all out.

“Can you look around to see if there is something interesting anywhere close by? Anything? I’m so sick of trees, you wouldn’t believe it,” Luna complained, her voice sounding quite petulant, making me wonder if my dear daughter was now getting into some sort of rebellious teenage mindset. The thought made me grin for a moment, though just how ‘teenaged’ my daughter was, thanks to the various shenanigans with her physical and mental growth, was questionable.

“I’ll take a look,” I promised, quickly summoning a few more scyring constructs while focusing on the few I had already out to make sure we didn’t bumble into serious trouble. With the new tricks I had recently learned, I could let the bound spirit wrapped around my arm keep control of the constructs and largely tune them out unless something obvious was visible. Sure, that meant their utility was somewhat limited, but, at the same time, it meant I didn’t need to keep focused on them the entire time. Now, I was focusing on them and had them spiral outwards and forwards, surveying the land we were travelling into on a much closer level.

“There are trees and a small lake over there,” I gestured, “More trees in that direction,” I waved again, this time into the opposite direction, “Oh, and there’s a slightly differently coloured tree over there,” I pointed, noticing the look of absolute annoyance on my daughters face, making Lia and me laugh. Even Silva and Sasha made some chuffing noises I recognised as their version of laughter, while Luna only glared.

“Something interesting, not trees. I’m so sick of them,” Luna complained, picking up a pine cone from the ground, channelling her magic into it before lobbing it into the forest nearby. Strangely, nothing immediately happened, though given that the amount of magic she used had been enough to produce a visible reaction, I wasn’t about to assume that nothing would happen.

“I’m looking, I’m looking, don’t worry. But there might just be nothing interesting in the area, at least not on the surface,” I told her with a shrug, knowing that sometimes there just was nothing there to find, no matter how much you tried. “Out of curiosity, what did you just do?”

“Made this place a little more interesting,” Luna replied, looking quite smug.

“I’m almost afraid to ask, but how?” I just had to prod, despite knowing that my dear daughter was almost as bad as I could be when it came to the creation of horrors and crimes against nature, magic and everything good in this world.

“You know what Life Magic is, right?” she answered my question with one of her own, making me think for a moment.

“Living things, growth, change, all that stuff, what exactly are you thinking about?” I shook my head, not entirely sure what she was referring to.

“Change and Growth are good enough. In this case, add movement to the list, and you get what I’ve got in mind,” she grinned cheekily, not assuaging my worries in the slightest.

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“So, you infused the pine cone with Change, Growth and Movement?” I tried to clarify, getting a nod in return, though I still wasn’t sure what the end result would be. It might be some sort of partially mobile tree, like we had seen before, allowing the tree to launch its pine cones or maybe bludgeon people with its limbs; there were numerous options. Or its seed might become exceptionally mobile, spreading like the floats of a dandelion, though I wasn’t sure how that could work. Finally, there was the most extreme case, where it became some sort of Ent or treant —a walking tree with its own mind.

“What do you think it will become?” I asked once I had thought through the possibilities.

“No idea,” was her only response, the grin on her face growing even wider, “But no matter what it’s going to be, it will be more interesting than these trees all around us.”

Shaking my head, I focused back on the scrying constructs ahead and around us, hoping to find something that might assuage my dear daughter's need for excitement, or she would continue to commit crimes against nature. No matter how interesting they might be in the future, they didn’t teach us anything in the present beyond the fact that Luna was growing dangerously bored.

“There’s a beaver dam in a nearby river, and it’s all flooded. The beavers have already set up their lodge in the lake,” I told the others, finally finding something beyond the ubiquitous trees we had all around us.

“Are those giant beavers, or just your normal, run-of-the-mill fuzzy critters?” Lia asked, already trying to understand if these creatures might be a threat.

“Judging by size, they are pretty normal-sized, so not much of a threat.” I shrugged, unsure of what else to say about this. I couldn’t even confirm that beavers made the structures, nor how big they were. I could judge the structures by their size and estimate the creators' size based on that.

“But there might be something bigger somewhere else, I’ll keep an eye out,” I promised, before focusing back on the scrying constructs, looking for something else that stood out.

Like the weird tracks I could spot from above. At first glance, it looked like a game trail like the one we were on, but when looking a little closer, I realised that wasn’t the case. Or, at the very least, it wasn’t just a game trail; there were a few spots in which the trail looked as if it had been widened with tools, cutting back trees and branches to allow for easier passage. The whole thing was massive, for a game trail, large enough that cars could drive down the track. Not something your average deer needed, not even a ginormous moose would put in the effort to enlarge a path like that.

“This might be something,” I told the others, explaining what I had discovered. This time, their reaction was significantly more enthusiastic than the one regarding the beaver lodge had been. Granted, tool usage, or what looked like it, was indicative of something more interesting than a bunch of beavers and their dam, but so far, I had only some rough marks I thought were made with primitive tools. They could just as well have been made by a moose or some other antler-bearing animal that had some dedication or annoyance to work out. With how much the Change had altered numerous animals, I had no idea what different critters could, or would do.

Using my scrying constructs, I checked to make sure there wasn’t anything too annoying on the path, though even with my constructs, we had to circumvent a few spots where the underbrush was too dense to traverse. Below the trees, numerous shrubs and vines had formed into a thick, almost impassable wall, the structure dense enough to make me wonder if somebody had encouraged that growth to create a natural barrier.

Out of curiosity, I jumped up, into the trees, so I could get a closer look after climbing over the barrier, but it didn’t look like there was anything to it but wild and natural growth. At least for now, eventually some critter would undoubtedly take advantage, but that would come later.

Soon, we reached the other game trail, the one I thought wasn’t just made by animals. There, we started to quietly investigate, curious to see who might have added construction here, as the trail was new enough to have been made after the change. But there hadn’t been any indication of human, or humanoid, activity in the area. Unless the beavers had somehow evolved and adapted, those critters had been incredibly smart before the change, so who knew what they might have turned into?

Regardless, the trail was too big to have been made by beavers; it was almost the size of a road, the dirt all trampled flat and compacted, making me intensely curious. Now, we just have to find out who did this.