It had been a couple of weeks since Fire's arrival in the base. Shadow had really missed her brother, she was happy that he made it out of the quarry. The silent hallways and expansive rooms could get very lonely. There were some demons roaming around she could talk to but only by drinking demon tongue potion, which tasted terribly and gave her a headache whenever she tried to think in regular words while under its effect. She did log out from time to time to drink, eat or walk for a bit but she kept those times to a minimum since every minute she spent outside of the server was an hour of time she could put to good use inside of it.
In the year that she had been alone Shadow had used the contacts she had all over the server to help prepare Fire's plan, he hadn't told her much before he was taken away and she only recently had been told the rest. Fire rarely planned ahead in detail and he had good reasons for it. He had rough outlines for plans but if there were any uncertainties or external factors he couldn't control he would fill in the details in the short term. For example freeZe being a mage altered his plan significantly. Shadow herself had also contributed to the current version of the plan quite a bit, the recent developments in the world would make some things easier and others harder.
The training was coming along well, all of their apprentices had done quite nicely. Although Ambigious hadn't been off to a good start, in the first two weeks his mood could be described as perpetually miffed at best and furious at worst. But he too quickly got the hang of his discipline and now worked on creating weapons and armor for the group along with Fire.
TehLulz was doing quite well too, he had made good progress with learning how to enchant. He did occasionally have problems with runes escaping his influence but that wasn't too much of a problem since an escaping rune would just lead to having to start over. One of his most recent artefacts was a glass bottle that could hold much more liquid than its size would allow. While this was by no means a new thing, it was one of the harder enchantments to perform.
The most remarkable of their apprentices was Unchosen, every time Shadow came by the potion lab he would be inside of it experimenting with something new. She had even once tasked her shadow with watching the door to see if he ever even left it to sleep. To her surprise, he didn't. He seemed to have created something like a drinkable substitute for sleep. When Shadow asked him about it he revealed that it was the first ever complex potion he had successfully brewed and that it didn't have side effects as far as he knew. Fire had been impressed by his discovery or more accurately by the fact that Unchosen had managed to brew his potion without causing side effects, which he himself hadn't managed yet.
As for Shadow's own student… freeZe had made progress in controlling her magic but still was far from done, she had no problems controlling Fire and Air magic as long as the power of the spell was average or high. The problems came in when she tried casting low-power spells such as creating sparks in her palm. The sparks would either not come out at all or emerge as a jet of fire. Where freeZe had problems casting magic, her ability to detect it were impressive. If Shadow cast a spell, freeZe could mimic it on the first or second try. This was a relief to Shadow since teaching spells to students was the most difficult part of teaching magic, that way Shadow could focus on helping freeZe with her lack of control.
While thinking about the current situation Shadow had been pacing up and down her room, which looked much like the other bedrooms in the base in basic design but Shadow had added a lot of things to it over the thousands of years she had lived in the base. One of those things was a desk with a glowstone lamp above it, this was where she wrote books, most of the time about magic but she had also written a couple of novels. Right now she was trying to get into the right mindset to write again, the book she was currently writing was one of those that would store her memories and pass them on to the reader. When writing those books it was very important not to include unrelated or personal memories, which was not only impractical for the reader but could also be dangerous to the author if they revealed sensitive information that way. If the book itself was improperly enchanted it could even result in stealing the memories of the author instead of copying them, fortunately Shadow didn't have to worry about that since the books she used had been enchanted by the collective of the Enchanter Guild of Rockhaven.
The book she was currently writing was about her mentorship over freeZe. This was a common thing to do for mages teaching apprentices, writing down words and memories about an apprentice could help themselves or other mages teach their own apprentices. Sometimes other apprentices would also read those books to get more insight, Shadow had instructed freeZe to do so as well.
Shadow was thinking about how to best describe the training session they had earlier that day. It had been quite a difficult one. Magical training wasn't gradual, it went in bursts. An apprentice would sometimes gain insight into their own magical potential or into magic in general due to some thought process or experience, an epiphany so to speak. Shadow knew that freeZe was close to one such epiphany but she wasn't quite there yet, freeZe felt this as well and had been getting increasingly frustrated, not unlike her brother. At the end of their last session she had been so angry that she had sent bolts of lightning through the room in a fit of rage, then apologized and ran off. Shadow sighed. Learning magic wasn't easy, not physically, not mentally and most definitely not emotionally.
Just as Shadow was about to sit back down she noticed something moving at the edge of her vision. It turned out that it was just her shadow returning to the room through the gap below the door, she must have been taking a walk through the base on her own. Not long from her ascension, Shadow had started to refer to her shadow as "Wodahs" since people saying "Shadow's shadow" got silly quite quickly, Wodahs didn't seem to mind.
It had taken Shadow a very long while to figure out what Wodahs really was, at first she suspected that she might be her old life force but she quickly realized that that couldn't be the case since Wodahs had a completely different magical composition than life force in general. Her being an elemental creature or a demon was out of the picture quickly as well since she didn't react at all to silver or gold… or any material for that matter. In general, Wodahs was a strange being, she could interact with the shadows that people and objects cast and whatever she did to the shadow would happen to the owner. She could even go as far as to rip a shadow from something and carry it around with her, this was limited to inanimate objects though. Shadow herself was the only thing Wodahs couldn't touch, which was good in a way. She had seen Wodahs kill or restrain people using their shadows when Shadow was in trouble, she had saved her a lot of trouble that way a couple of times. Generally though Wodahs was more mischievous than anything else, normally a tap on the shoulder followed by a giggle would be the most she did to people. In reality, if Shadow would tell someone the true nature of her shadow, only few people would believe her.
As Wodahs walked along the floor in Shadow's direction, she waved at her, then connected to Shadow's feet and assumed the same stance as Shadow. Once again Shadow sighed, she hoped that she would be able to help freeZe with her fine control over magic before they departed. One thing was sure, they would depart according to plan, even if that meant that freeZe would go with incomplete training, they could do lessons along the way but it was far from ideal. Something about the upcoming journey deeply troubled Shadow, maybe it was the astronomically low odds of it actually succeeding, despite Fire's plans. Maybe it was what would happen if they failed.
Another sigh. She picked up her black quill, dipped it into a pot with red ink and prepared to start writing on the white paper again. Black, red, white. Those colors were her colors, hers and Fire's, they had been for a very long time. Soon they would leave the base behind and go to collect artefacts, some of which they didn't even know. Four of them would be new to the world out there, a dangerous world of near infinite possibilities, a world of colors. Right now Shadow only cared about the three colors in front of her. She opened her mind and let her thoughts flow into the paper along with the ink.