With the information given to me by Lady Hecate, I started to look for the people apparently calling out for aid. Given that they were supposedly in fairly close proximity, I used some scrying constructs during the day, when we couldn’t hunt for Bitumen in the burned area, to scout things out from the air. If there was a decently large population of people somewhere nearby, they should be visible from the air, especially once my constructs were clear of the smoke and ash from the burned land.

A part of me was already curious how the people here had managed to get through the winter, though, to be fair, the past winter likely wasn’t the difficult part, not if they had managed to store up on supplies early on and their community was small. The telling part would be the next winter, and their current supply state, whether they had managed to cultivate some crops and things like that. I honestly had no idea just how well crops would grow on this latitude, or which crops, for that matter. There had to be a way for people to survive even here. Native tribes had done so for millennia before the world became connected by trade, and food was traded globally. However, just because the natives had the experience and knowledge to do so didn’t mean the people living there could manage, too.

Sure, the system gave everyone an advantage by allowing people to increase their attributes beyond what humans should be able to, but that didn’t magically impart knowledge, at least not directly. There might be some sort of agricultural intuition traits or something like that, but I hadn’t come across one just yet. Granted, I didn’t do anything to get one, but I hadn’t heard about one, either. Still, my focus had always been on magic and combat, so the knowledge I didn’t have was likely a lot more encompassing than what I actually knew. Hel, even when it came to magic, I was aware of entire areas I was largely ignorant of, to say nothing about areas I didn’t know about in the first place. The old saying about knowing what I didn’t know was incredibly apt here; I didn’t even know what I was ignorant of.

Regardless of their abilities and chance of survival, if Lady Hecate went out of Her way to tell me about this group, it was likely that finding them would be an advantage in the long run. Maybe not strictly an advantage for me, Lady Hecate would get something of Her own out of the contact, but by now, I trusted Her to keep things somewhat fair between us. Enlightened self-interest was the buzzword in this case; She gave us something advantageous while also providing an advantage to herself, thus helping everyone involved. Even the people I was looking for would get something out of the contact, so it truly was a deal without any losers.

Though if I was honest with myself, a small part of me wondered if contacting these people was truly why Lady Hecate had contacted me in the first place; something about the entire interaction had felt somewhat off to me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on the reason why something was off, but my gut told me that something weird had been going on. Maybe I would understand eventually, but for now, I simply shelved it and concentrated on the present and my current project, namely, trying to find these people She had told me about.

While the focus of my scrying was away from the burned area, I soon realised its sheer size and the impossibility of ignoring it. The Bitumen were continuing their hard work to spread their disease, and while they didn’t get all that far in the direction we were blocking, other directions didn’t have that boundary. Thus, the burned area was, quite literally, as far as the eye could see, though part of that was due to the rising smoke and the low clouds hanging overhead and limiting my visual range. Still, just seeing the endless spread of burned soil, spread ash, and flickering flames was enough to drive home that this needed to be stopped. Otherwise, the only hope would be for it to burn out on its own. Eventually.

Though, that made me think of Lady Hecate’s warning and the realisation that it might not burn out but seep into the Astral River and turn into a nexus of Fire, or it might even cause some other complications, I could easily see the sheer amount of elemental Fire in the air here turn this into a volcano, regardless of the local geography. However, given the nearby Canadian Rockies, I could easily see this area being potentially volcanic in the first place, something the burned area might reinforce, creating an even bigger mess.

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Hopefully, we’d be able to prevent such troubles, but continuing to work on our own might not be enough, which could very well be why Lady Hecate gave me the guidance She did.

As it often happened when searching for people, rising smoke gave away their position. Sure, with the nearby burned area, smoke wasn’t all that uncommon but the different direction was enough of a give-away to guide me towards them and it didn’t take all that long for me to realise that these people might be in a worse situation than I had thought.

Their current location was fairly good, located in a somewhat narrow gorge, though that could be just as much a detriment as it could be an advantage, with a couple of gardens and similar areas demarcated between some fairly simple huts.

Finding out where they had lived before the change wasn’t difficult, either, as there was a city just below the rocky hills their gorge was located in, though that city had clearly seen better days. Some places I had seen from above had weathered the change fairly well, with only a portion of the buildings broken or burned, but this one wasn’t one of those places. Here, it looked as if the city had suffered an extensive bombing campaign, possibly involving fire bombs, before an earthquake levelled the rest. There wasn’t a single building that remained unbroken; a lot of them weren’t even recognisable as houses any longer, their frames complete rubble, without a single brick connected to another. It was utter devastation on a level I couldn’t really believe. The Change had truly made a mess of this place.

Or maybe it hadn’t been the change; I could hardly tell what had happened to this place to wreck it this thoroughly. And, on second thought, it couldn’t have been the change, not if a group of people managed to get out while finding enough food to last the winter. It would be interesting to ask those people how they managed and even what had happened at some point. I doubted leading with those questions would endear me to them; the devastation here had to have left some trauma.

But the devastation and the possible trauma left by it weren’t why they had a serious problem. Their current problems came from the Bitumen, both directly and indirectly. From what I had been able to see from above, their supplies came primarily from hunting, there had been multiple drying racks with pelts out in the open, and a few locations that looked like they were used to process or store meat, which, given our location’s negligible climate for agriculture, made some sense.

The burned area, although still some distance away, had caused the various game animals to flee from the conflagration, and without animals to hunt, a group dependent on hunting would be in serious trouble. Nothing I could see indicated that they could grow enough food to subsist on, so just that was enough to destroy a community, ignoring the fact that in about a week, judging from the rate of growth we had observed, the burned area would swallow up their homes, leaving them in even bigger trouble.

I could see why these people would pray to anything willing or able to help them, though I wasn’t sure why direct contact was needed to give them that initial push. Maybe their prayers were just too diffuse otherwise, or there were some divine politics involved; I would have to ask Lady Hecate at some point, or figure it out myself.

For now, I was more interested in helping them and, hopefully, pointing them towards the burned area and the Bitumen, their numbers, though somewhat small on a pre-change scale, would tremendously increase our odds of pushing back the infection and defeating it. Additionally, the fact that they had been hunting here meant their levels were likely high enough to be of use without too much help from us.

But first, I needed to make contact in a way that made them want to listen to me and accept my help. Just because they were desperate didn’t automatically mean they would do the smart thing and listen, even if it was in their best interest. They were, after all, people, and people could, as a rule, be idiots, no matter their situation.