Making contact with Luna and the others was a bit of a challenge as I was unwilling to approach the village, regardless of whether I was using a scrying construct or going in person. I had no desire to run into Angelina or get exposed to prayers to the Pale Lady, not with the incredible agony I had suffered due to that connection. After all, pain was generally a signal the body sent to tell the mind that something was wrong, and you should stop doing this. Which meant, avoiding pain was the sensible thing to do, especially if you had no idea if the pain was merely a symptom of some other, far more important damage you were causing your body. With the connection between the pain and the burgeoning divinity of the Pale Lady, I wasn’t about to take a risk.

That risk-avoidance meant I needed to figure out a way to send Luna a message without exposing myself, a challenge I couldn’t help but accept. I considered trying to use my connection to the Maiden to communicate with her, but decided against it, instead trying to find another way. Or wait until the rest of my family left the village behind, allowing me to make contact at that point, but given that I had nothing better to do, other than try to figure out that whole divinity thing or start working on the endless list of things I wanted to figure out, I decided to go with trying to figure out something from the list.

In this case, the entry on the list was the topic of autonomous golems or constructs, especially regarding flying constructs, though I’d love to use autonomous humanoid constructs just as much. Like the constructs I had made as teaching aids, though those had been linked into a larger, magical construct instead of being truly autonomous, so I needed to tweak the approach a little.

Back then, I had used memories to give the constructs direction and skill, to program them, for lack of a better word, but that wouldn’t work with what I had in mind here. Instead, I needed something a little more imaginative, smart enough to follow directions and control the construct, even without direct instruction.

Whistling to myself, I made a few constructs from Ice, bound together with Wind, Water and Darkness magic, using the different elements to form something faintly reminiscent of the avatar I had used to speak with the Grandmother. The important difference was that the construct I had used in the Astral River had been made from raw elemental Astral Power, while this one needed to be physical. Effectively, it needed to be just like my usual scrying constructs, only that it needed to be able to operate without me remaining linked to it and stabilising the entire thing with my magical power.

Hel, my usual scrying constructs wouldn’t be able to move without my magic doing the heavy lifting, let alone fly, so I needed to rethink my approach more than a little. The shape worked; it was simply a copy of a raven’s body, just sculpted from Ice, and that was where the problem started. Sure, Ice was a nice material to use, but it was relatively heavy and, more importantly, it was completely rigid; it didn’t bend, it broke or melted, depending on the strain it was under. But it didn’t bend, which was quite important for mobile parts like wings. Usually, I got around that by using Ice Magic to shift the parts around as needed, but if I wanted the thing to be independent of any outside magical power, I couldn’t do that.

Thus, the inclusion of Water and Wind magic, both useful to make moving parts, and Darkness Magic, as it was the embodiment of change, allowing me to make things work, even if they normally wouldn’t. I just needed to imbue the construct with enough Astral Power to make it work and keep it working, though I soon realised that efficiency was a problem with this idea.

My first few successes were limited. Sure, they could move and even fly, but they ran through the Astral Power I could imbue into them in a matter of minutes, depending on their activities. Flying worked for a minute or less, far too little time to get anywhere. I considered using a combination of my usual approach before severing the connection and letting the construct complete the final approach on its own. I felt it was a promising idea, but I wanted something better.

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Which is when I began to tie in the bound spirit, especially when it came to the control scheme. The spirit was a creature of pure Astral Power, formless without its bindings, so I felt that I should be able to induce a split, so to speak. My idea was to add Ice to the figurine the spirit was bound into, before channelling Astral Power into that additional Ice, tempting the spirit to stretch beyond its usual prison. Then, once the spirit had spread to the added Ice and filled both, the added Ice and the original figurine, I wanted to sever the connection between the two pieces, hopefully ending up with two spirits, or at least a bound spirit and an imprint of one. I wasn’t sure if this would work or if I might be destroying the bound spirit with the experiment, but I was willing to try.

While it didn’t work quite as well as I had hoped, there were a few minor complications and annoyances along the way. I eventually managed to figure out the process to the point where I was able to imprint the spirit on other items, though it took a fair amount of Astral Power. Curiously, the imprints were significantly better at storing Astral Power than almost anything I had worked with before, only surpassed by crystallised Astral Power, in other words, Eternal Ice and similar substances. But, while those substances could contain more Astral Power per volume, they were limited to a single element while the spirit could contain the different elements it was composed of, making the imprints quite useful in their own right.

They undoubtedly had their own drawbacks, one of which was the potential that the imprint might expand into a spirit in its own right if exposed to enough Astral Power over a longer period of time. I would have to figure out those drawbacks in the long run. For now, the spirit’s imprints worked quite well, allowing me to imbue enough Astral Power into the constructs to make them fly. Additionally, the imprint could hold information to some degree, improving efficiency even further, though, again, I was hesitant to imbue the imprint with too much information or power as I wasn’t certain just what it would take to turn an imprint into an actual spirit. My guess was it only needed Astral Power and experience, or information, depending on the exact process, so I was somewhat cautious.

Not cautious to the point of discarding the experiment, but vigilant and maybe a little paranoid about the amount of power I channelled into these constructs. Just in case something weird happened with them.

Once that was done, I tried them out, having one of the newly created, independent constructs, with a message strapped to its claws, fly to the village so it could hand the message over to Luna. To make sure nothing bad happened, I created another construct and had it fly alongside the independent one, only for the independent one to crash and shatter fairly quickly.

Clearly, more experiments were needed and a lot of testing, which was what I did next, using a few more days while occasionally sending a construct to check on the village from afar, making sure that my family hadn’t left just yet. After all, I was spending quite a bit of time fiddling around with these new constructs, while they were doing... something.

Eventually, I managed to make one of the constructs sufficiently independent and able to navigate decently well, and had it fly towards the village, again escorted by a controlled construct. However, the independent one veered off course just before we would have reached the village. Just as I was about to discard another experiment and destroy the independent construct, I saw that it was headed towards a small, familiar group.

It seemed as if I had needed too much time to get this thing going, and my family had left the village and was travelling towards the area I had suggested as a meeting spot in the short message I had sent to Luna while they had been moving through the burned land on the way back.

Shrugging, I decided that this worked out just as well and let the independent construct deliver its message before conjuring a second one through the controlled construct, promising them that I would catch up with them soon.

Once that was done, I left my lair behind and took to the sky, flying to meet my family again.