I opened my eyes to see night had fallen. I dashed off a belated Salute to Aethra, annoyed I hadn’t felt the shifting of Dusk Renewal. A strange sky filled with very bright stars, swirling nebula clouds, dancing paths of northern lights, and even trailing comets here and there extended across the sky. Four bright moons; white, blue-white, pale green, and lavender, hung up there in the sky, symbolizing who knew what.

There were still things up in the sky. I could hear them calling up there, and the animals certainly weren’t yakking as freely as they could have, still wary and on alert. Given the leafy trees, I figured bats and owls were certainly possibilities at night, but it was a magic world and anything could be here.

I stayed under cover, although I didn’t climb the tree. If something came sniffing around, the squirrels and birds and rodents and toads about would sense it before I would, and I’d be able to react.

Defeat it, maybe not, but we’d see.

I could also feel my Renewal getting closer. It didn’t seem to be reflected by the world, the Manafield unperturbed by the advancing of the moon, or the exchange between sun and moons at dusk. There was definitely an element of darkness to the Manafield, clear as a falling shadow, but the Mana didn’t actually seem to be reliant on ambient illumination, only manifestation of power...

Eh.

And then the forest started to get quiet behind me.

I swore despite myself. I didn’t have very good night vision here in the shadows under the trees, but my hearing was still working. It wasn’t very long before I could hear something shuffling along the ground not far away.

I needed to see something to shoot it. I looked at the fairly well-lit clearing out there, sighed, and rose quietly to my feet.

Yeah, +9 wasn’t great for a Stealth check, but it wasn’t horrible. It kept me mostly quiet as I moved slowly and carefully out from under the tree, staying low to the grass as I did, hoping nothing was watching from above right this second, and I moved forty feet outside the shadow of the tree, crouching down and freezing in place.

The creature wasn’t loud, but it was heavy enough that it broke twigs and snapped leaves when it moved, and it seemed to be sniffing about, foraging.

Ho, it would get my scent almost instantly off the tree. If it was a predator, it would immediately follow it, I imagined, even if it didn’t recognize it. After all, I wasn’t exuding a smell it would consider dangerous.

I concentrated forward, feeling for a sense of Evil, and felt nothing. I had neither range nor depth of perception, so I couldn’t sense it, and Detect Life wouldn’t reach far enough. I did have both Darts and Shards ready to come up, depending on how big the creature was, and what my chances were.

Thinking ahead, I dropped a Light on the ground. It would last for ten minutes a Caster Level or concentration, whatever was longer, and I circled around behind it parallel to where I’d been.

Yeah, dark motion under the trees. I heard the definite difference in breathing, and scratches against the bark as it shuffled around where I’d been sitting. The randomness of its movements was gone, and it began to move quickly this way.

It came out into the grass, and I could see it.

A Rat the size of a big pig. Two or three hundred pounds, at least. A Rat... because it had two red eyes, reflecting the light of the moon brightly, stacked one on top of another, instead of side to side, giving it a remarkably broad and predatory-looking head.

Those red eyes were glittering with something more than moonlight, fixed on the Light ahead.

Bane, Magical Beasts. I couldn’t take the chance of a Cantrip, and my Shards winked into existence, four of them... two by my Caster Level of Four, one by Shardcaster, one by touch attack variant. Yeah, it would be quick if it saw me first, but that would be fine. I held my hand behind me as the Rat moved quickly along my trail, predatory eyes gleaming as they faced forwards... but I was off to its side through the grass, having circled slightly over and back two paces off my trail, and as it stepped up in front of me, I flipped up my hand and completed the spell.

Four hand-long tri-wedge Shards burning with dancing red bloody Banefire converged on a point in front of my hand, and were Spellwarped into a Ray of fourfold force, holding the same crimson Banefire... and then that Ray hit a prism of Will in front of it, fracturing into two parallel Rays that plunged into the furry side of the Rat.

It screamed and convulsed, its leap carrying it thirty feet away in a blur of motion as the Rays dumped their loads inside it.

d6 Shards, +6 Warcaster, +2d6 Banespell, +1d6 Sneak Attack, all x2. 14d6+12 damage should be in the range of 60 damage, and should have taken it out. Its insides would basically be nothing but pulp at this moment, the damage distributed evenly and made most deadly by the anathemic force of the Banespell.

However, it had screamed, and I had no doubt my spell’s color would be noticed in the night; if not the silvery-crystal flashing of the Shards, the Banefire and the Light were sure to attract attention. I promptly ran for the cover of the trees once again, trusting some light-blindness to cover me, especially with the motion distraction of the Rat.

The big Rat was thrashing madly over there, squealing and shrieking up a storm as it did so. I stayed away from the tree I’d been under, but definitely stayed in the shadows, drawing the careful energy necessary for another spell if it was needed, and moving behind another old forest giant after carefully not smashing my head and knee and elbow and foot into its roots, nopers, not me, graceful as a lark I am.

The dying Rat lasted less than twenty seconds. Then something big and quiet swept down from above on a wingspan of at least forty feet, extended down some talons spread as wide as I was tall, latched onto it, and clutched tight with a crunch of bone and one last squeal of pain from the Rat.

I saw a flash of golden eyes, and had the distinct impression that I’d been spotted in my little hiding spot. The massive Owl beat its wings once, and ignoring the fact that there was no way it had the aerodynamics and lift necessary to do so, it soared into the air and took that massive Rat with it in almost complete feathery silence, save the last gasping squeal of the Rat.

Okay, there are definitely megafauna magical lifeforms here in these woods, you newborn, Fae, you, I told myself, very happy I hadn’t gone wandering around. Just my luck I would have run into a super-rabbit or something and been kicked to death.

I definitely had to get off the ground. I didn’t know if it would stop another big Rat from climbing the tree, but it would stop them from charging me. It had reflex-jumped thirty feet, like taking a short hop. I did not want to be charged by one, and those had been some dangerous-looking claws and teeth.

Not as dangerous as the Owl, obviously, but enough.

More to the point, Rats were social creatures. Where you found one, you were likely to find others. I didn’t know if the death call would warn them away or bring them to investigate, but I couldn’t take the chance.

The reason I’d taken Disk as an option was precisely for this. I swirled up the concave yard-wide circle of translucent force, hopped on top of it, and bid it rise as I kept my hand on the trunk of the tree.

Yes, it was a poor man’s levitation option. You had to stick close to a vertical surface of some kind, and it was not fast, but it was enough to get me up the side of the massive tree, twenty feet to the lowest limbs, and up a bit more as I scanned it to make sure there was nothing alive up here ready to eat me, like, oh, a squirrel or chipmunk... or a spider or centipede or snake.

I didn’t sense anything major, although there’d been smaller squirrels and birds up here earlier. They were staying quiet as the alien primate with odd fur came up into their territory, and they watched me take a seat on a tree branch thirty feet off the ground, with a convenient triple branching that made for a nice place to lay back and sit.

I could Featherweight back to the ground, so I dispelled the easily-spotted Disk, and sat back on the branch, looking up at the strange sky through the large leaves of the tree, and listened as the small nocturnal animals took up their chatter again, waiting as my Renewal pushed nearer.

-----

My Renewal wasn’t Highmoon. Maybe there wasn’t such a thing here. So, it looked like the morning default it would be.

I opened my eyes as the animals chittered about another intruder. I recognized the sound, no, sounds.

More Rats, and this time there were two of them.

I’d used Prestidigitation to hide my scent after moving trees, and I doubted they followed a visible trail like humans would. So, they shouldn’t be able to see me readily up here, unless they were right below me and looking up.

On the other hand, if they went out into the open, I could probably make sure they died quickly. They could probably just see the edge of the faint illumination of the Light spell I dropped to greet them out there, and were probably not bright enough to realize it was like a flashing ‘Eat Me’ sign to the silent hunters up above.

I murmured the Assay 0 under my breath. I just wanted to find out the name and Combat Rating of these things. Any deeper information would take a Spell Slot, and I wasn’t wasting those.

The sounds over there advanced to the edge of the clearing, and I could see them as they came stealing out, stacked eyes fixed on that source of betraying Light.

Fire-Eye Rats, CR 5.

NOT Giant Fire-Eye Rats, most tellingly. The name meant these were the average, normal size of the species.

Didn’t that have all kinds of implications. CR 5 was about right, as it had taken a sixty-point hit and not died instantly. Tough mother’s sons.

If I used a Cantrip, that would be a whopping 2d4, +2d6 Bane, +d6 Sneak Attack, x2. Thirty-two points, couldn’t possibly kill it, unless it had a whopping Vulnerability to Elemental magic...

I would have loved to have had the Snowcasting Feats right now. Ceremony of the Frozen Soul meant I was all the ‘ice or snow material component’ needed for any Snowcasting.

I would operate under the assumption it was at least resistant to fire, although it didn’t look like an actual Fire creature, nor was it resonating with the fiery Mana all about. Slowly and carefully, I began to pull in the frost Mana from the air, as the Rats twitched and contemplated moving out into the open.

My little Stars all suddenly crystallized and winked, gathering around the Elemental magic of the Ice Darts I pulled up, ladening the iceforce fingers of energy down with spiraling, artful extensions, like razored snowflakes around the Darts.

The damn things did store energy! There wasn’t a lot there, like a Valence per Star right now, but it must have keyed off my Affinity to drop onto the Darts...

I didn’t know how much extra damage it was, but suddenly the Darts were at least the equal of a Valence I, that was certain.

Converge into a Spellwarp, Split them...

The two icy Rays still weren’t as powerful as my base Shards, due to the lack of the Warcaster Razor bonus, but the icefire/flake around the two Rays drove into the thick neck of the second Rat as they scuttled towards the Light.

Their fur had some kind of ablative effect I hadn’t felt with the Shards, probably because they’d been a Force effect, but it didn’t seem to be working against the Ice Magic. It still wasn’t enough damage to kill the Rat, but it had an effect similar to the Rime Metamagic, encapsulating the front limbs, neck, and part of the head of the creature in a layer of ice.

It writhed and kicked, trying to get itself to move, while the one in front whipped around, following the trail of ice motes back up to the tree as its vertical-set eyes glowed red.