One big challenge regarding travelling with a group of territorial giants surrounding you was navigating natural barriers. As we made our way from what once was Yukon into Alaska, the towering mountains posed a massive challenge. I could hardly keep the giants separated from one another while having them climb across glaciers and march through alpine forests, meaning I had to follow the local geography, not make like Hannibal.

Following the occasional river and valley was obviously the way to go, at least if those valleys were wide enough to space out the giants. If the valley had a river, that helped, too, as it gave me a good idea whether the valley would narrow until it ended or if it would continue on, depending on the direction the river within was flowing.

A part of me wanted to shift our trajectory further north, but the local circumstances just didn’t allow for that, even if the Nexus was getting closer each day. Almost close enough to let me smell the power suffusing the air, though I was pretty sure I was imagining that part. Or maybe I was simply detecting the Ice Astral Power infused into the numerous glaciers capping the mountains all around us as we travelled; those had to be deeply steeped in the freezingly cold power of Ice.

On more than one occasion, I was tempted to spread my wings and fly up, change my position until I could get a good heading towards the Nexus, then do so again until I could triangulate its position and estimate our distance from it. But considering the risks involved, especially for the giants we had dragged along, I didn’t consider that particular bit of information to be overly useful. We would get to the Nexus eventually, whether it was in a week or a month, we would get there. But getting impatient on these last few steps of the journey and tossing away the valuable resource I had managed to acquire, namely the giants, would be utterly foolish. No, slow and steady would win us this particular race, especially as I was confident to take control of the Nexus once we got there.

However, that didn’t mean I was completely disinterested in the mountains all around us. Or the forests, valleys and the numerous bodies of water. Even the occasional glimpse of the far-distant ocean my scrying constructs could get when flying as high as they could was calling out to me, the thrill of exploration and discovery already pulling at my soul.

There were countless mysteries out here, endless opportunities to find something new and exciting. I couldn’t help but want to shed myself of the responsibilities I had taken upon myself and just take a detour, make my way down that one craggy valley and find out what was hidden in the caves further down. Or what might be lurking between the countless small trees in the area, all of them bent and twisted by the wind roaring down one of the valleys. It might be natural or it might not be; it was even possible that the original occurrence had been a purely natural one before the change, but then, once the world had shifted on its axis, what once was normal and natural suddenly was not. We had seen it before. Places where the change had taken the local circumstances and altered them to fit a supernatural explanation, or created a convergence between the two, where local circumstances became something new to fit a newly added cause. It was a deeply fascinating subject, and I couldn’t help but want to explore and study it all before the grind of time normalised it all, erasing these curiosities caused by the change.

I doubted I would be able to explore a world as strange as this one, even if I were to learn how to travel from world to world eventually. Explored and subjugated by sapient hands, only to have all their efforts, the countless years of work, progress and exploitation get worked over by the system and its arcane rules. Those circumstances had to be somewhat rare, unless the system usually rolled over realities as it had rolled over ours. Which, given that the Gods had put the capsules into place to let people acclimate to the system, was frighteningly possible. I doubted that they had created that particular system just for a single world. Another thing to ask Lady Hecate about at some point, even if it wasn’t completely relevant at the moment, just a point of curiosity.

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Which was a trait I really couldn’t indulge in right now. Not while I had to try and teach the various giants while figuring out which giant had what talents and in what they could specialise in the most.

For the moment, I was simply using Sigmir’s face, and occasionally a giantised version of her body, to present lessons to them in their dreams. I wanted to teach them everything from simple survival and tracking skills to crafting, cooking, fighting, philosophy, and so many other things, some of which I barely knew myself. Still, luckily, we had looted a few bookshops and libraries on our trek north, giving me some material to work with. Hopefully, I would be able to teach different giants different skills, giving each of them their own skill-set and encouraging teamwork and a societal build-up. Something like that might eventually become the seed and foundation of their society, unless I managed to find an outside enemy to unite them against.

One of them had already shown some talent in crafting after I had shown her some dreams of Sigmir teaching how to make simple tools from wood, stone and animal sinew. It wasn’t an actual memory of mine, just my imagination putting together a lesson based on my memories of Sigmir, a few things I had seen in videos before the change and a couple of books we had found. Together, those ideas could form into a surprisingly coherent lesson, allowing the giants to see SIgmir, or rather, a slightly exaggerated version of her that was purely giant, teach them the lessons I wanted.

That part, where I had been forced to alter the perception of her body to increase her height and make her appear even more powerful than her already incredible physique always had, was one of the things I worried about a little. Was I altering how Sigmir would look, once we resurrected her, if I used the giants to create a faith for her before using that faith to hone in on her soul?

It was an interesting question: how did the body connect to the soul, and what happened if outside forces changed the body? Looking at my own experience, I could readily say that accepting a changed body had been trivially simple for me, both times it had happened.

First, when I turned from a human into a Firn Elf after accepting the Legacy of Morgana, little to no adjustment had been needed. Sure, that might have been because I had adjusted during my time on Mundus or something similar, or maybe because the elven body had been almost identical to the human one. Still, I just couldn’t say, not without asking other people about their experiences. Maybe that Centaur, Lorgar, right after he stopped trying to murder me for being who I was. He might just be one of the more extreme cases of physical alteration, unless there was somebody out there who had changed from a human of one sex into something like a Naga, Lamia or something similar of another sex, that might be an even greater change, I wasn’t sure.

The other time, the change had been slightly more significant, after I crossed the first divide and suddenly grew by almost a foot, shedding my previously diminutive stature and exchanging it with my current, somewhat more impressive one. Sure, I needed a bit of time to find my balance again, to get used to having longer limbs and things like that, and I may or may not have bumped my head a few times, simply because I wasn’t used to the siz,e but that was about it. No real problems, no discomfort, nothing to make me feel like the body I was inhabiting wasn’t mine.

That being said, the most comfortable I had been in the few dreams I had, in which I had the body of a dragon. What that said about me, I wasn’t sure, nor could I imagine what it might mean for the question of how a person would react when shoved into a body different from their own.

Regardless, it looked like this was the best chance I had to get Sigmir back, and I wasn’t about to discard it.

Now, we just had to get to the Nexus, but first, I could already make out the first bays reaching inland on the horizon. Once we managed to get through the long, mountain valley we were currently traversing, we would almost be at the ocean.