Sitting in my newly established underground lair, I could only laugh at myself and shake my head when considering just how easily I had let myself get distracted. The idea of the underground lair was a sound one, even the Burned Land with its Bitumen and artillery beasts would need some time to burn through some thirty metres of earth and rock, meaning I was in a secure place. From here, I could test and implement a few ideas that would allow me to project my attacks through the Astral River or my Bound Spirit, allowing me to strike at the Burned Land without exposing myself to retaliation.

Granted, my work here had taken some ten days of continued effort during which I had somewhat neglected the locals, leaving my daughters and our two furry companions as their primary support, so I would have to make sure to put in some work in order to lessen the burden I had placed on them.

For that, I sat down on my throne, the various symbols, runes and glyphs shining with a soft, subtle light as the different strands of Astral Power started to flow out of my body and infused the construct. As always, Ice, Blood and Darkness held primacy but by now, I was used to channelling a wide variety of elements. Hel, I might even try to channel Light Magic at some point, just to see if I could. I had a feeling I might be able to, though a small voice in the back of my mind warned me to prepare a shower beforehand, or some other way to get the undoubtedly disgustingly self-righteous flavour of power out of my mind and off my body.

Shaking off the tangent, my earlier amusement returning in full force, I focused on the Astral River flowing around me and let myself delve into its structure. Finding the burned land like this was utterly trivial; it stood out like a sore thumb, or like a candle in the dark, burning brightly and already seeping into the Astral River, disturbing its usually placid nature. Now, the influx of Fire from an external source turned the flows turbulent, and, to make matters worse, it also seemed that the fire influenced and infused the different elements, at least on a local scale, corrupting them into something weird. It faintly reminded me of some things I had seen on Mundus, like the bear with an Eternal Ember implanted into its body, though the occurrence here was somewhat less artificial. Not natural, I was quite confident this was an effect of the Change combining with local conditions, but also not the result of an insane spellcaster sticking arcane crystals into unsuspecting animals.

Even without looking into the situation too deeply, I immediately realised that trying to overwhelm the effect of the Burned Land on the Astral River would need a lot more power than I had access to. While I was possibly the most powerful sapient being on the planet, at least when it came to magic, I had no delusions that I could overpower a literal force of nature, or possibly a dungeon. Whatever the Burned Land was at its core, it had power to spare, though it lacked direction.

Once again, I wondered about the correlation between Intelligence, the attribute within the system, and intelligence or sapience or whatever one wanted to call the attribute that decided how far a mind could develop. Somehow, I had a feeling that trying to reason out why the Burned Land was as powerful as it was, but didn’t seem to have a guiding mind, would only result in a headache and not any usable understanding.

However, while I couldn’t directly compete with the Burned Land within the Astral River, I could use the river to project power into the outside world and, more precisely, I could use my own power as leverage to influence the physical world, pushing it in a direction I wanted it to fall in order to crush the Burned Land.

The methodology was quite similar to my first attempt at a ritual to extinguish the Burned Land, though this time, I was even more circumspect, especially as the area had now grown to approximately five thousand square kilometres. Granted, I was fairly certain its radius wasn’t growing as quickly as it had before; it seemed that even the Burned Land had its limits when it came to expanding its area, but it was already big enough to be a massive problem. One too big to tackle with a single ritual, but not too big to create problems for.

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In this case, the ritual wasn’t trying to completely extinguish it; I merely created some favourable conditions in the atmosphere, subtly redirecting some wind, cooling down a few clouds, things perfectly in line with my own abilities. Even the Bound Spirit wrapped around my arm joined in and helped, allowing me to manipulate the atmosphere much more easily.

Just as before, the Burned Land didn’t take my manipulations gracefully, though I had no idea how it could sense my actions. Maybe the amount of Astral Power I channelled was big enough to draw notice, maybe it had some sort of precognition or something like that, or maybe it could sense my influence within a space it partially controlled, though given that my manipulations focused on the atmosphere some distance away from its core, I wasn’t so sure the last one would work. But, whatever the method it used to detect me wasn’t all that important, its reaction was.

Thanks to one of my scrying constructs circling above the mountain I was using as an additional shield above my lair, I was able to observe said reaction from an almost front-row seat. Even observing through the construct's eyes made me feel a little uneasy, as if I was too close to the action for comfort, and it was only the knowledge that there were tons of dirt and rock between me and the incoming fire that allowed me to stay calm.

If I hadn’t seen that artillery beast a few days back, the massive waves of goop getting slung in my general direction would have been inconceivable and even as it was, knowing about the artillery beast’s existence, it was quite impressive and somewhat scary. Or, as I mentally reassessed when the next wave of attacks came a few minutes later, because the first hadn’t stopped the ritual, it was really scary. If watching enough burning goop to make a small hill get lobbed at you in an attempt to stop you wasn’t enough to make you feel some trepidation, you were a fool.

In my case, I certainly felt the trepidation but given the solid mass between me and the incoming fire, I was also confident enough to stick around while wondering if I could use a bit of Ice Magic, either now or later, to turn the burning goop into something a little more solid, adding to the thickness of the rock above and making my underground lair even more secure. If I could do that, I wouldn’t have to worry about attacks from the Burned Land until it was right on top of me and could reassert its dominion over the burned goop, though, by that time, the goop would certainly have cooled enough to be unusable until it was reheated.

Finally, as the fourth wave of burned goop was flying through the air to strike the mountain I was sitting under, or rather, to pile onto the hill of goop on top of said mountain, the results of my ritual finally reached me. Now, it was no longer raining fire but instead, the air was filled with enough water to make one wonder if it was possible to swim through the rain, though one would have to dodge the occasional hail. It seemed my attempts to chill down the clouds to make it rain had been a little too successful, resulting in a few fairly sizable hailstones dropping in addition to the rain, not that I really cared.

But the effects of the torrential rain on the burning goop were quite impressive and, just like everything involving literal mountains of fire, at least a little scary. As soon as the raindrops started to drop on the burned goop, they were vaporised into steam, causing countless small explosions and a thick blanket of steam to sit above the goop, with thin flickers of flame occasionally arcing through the steam.

Then, as if to show that even small changes could have big effects, the torrential rain turned into a thunderstorm, with banks of lightning coming down, many of which struck the burned goop, splattering material and fire all over the place. By now, I was truly glad to be under a lot of cover and felt a little guilty for calling down this sort of mess, even if my companions were over a hundred kilometres away. In that regard, the size of the Burned Land was quite useful; I didn’t have to worry about my spells and rituals accidentally hitting somebody I cared about.

If only I had some hot chocolate to go with the massive thunderstorm, that would be perfect. But even without the hot chocolate, watching the violent clash between Earth and Sky was inspiring.