I have no trouble meeting up with Last Shadow, of course: I can ‘see’ her from quite a distance, and tell her where I'm headed. And with my new double actions, I can buff us both with the updated set as we travel… which goes REALLY fast after I apply Mythic Fly and Mythic Haste, Augmenting both; we end up with a Fly speed of one hundred ninety. Other numbers go up too: Mythic Heroism has double the bonus and applies to more things, Mythic Divine Favor likewise applies to most rolls now, and Fly gives a nice bonus to armor css and reflex saves… while flying, anyway.

  It takes about an hour to reach the roost: We fly at half speed when going up, and that works out to “only” about nine and a half miles per hour at a “walk”: It's really far up. Yes, I could teleport us both very reliably now, but I want her to appreciate the height. The air up here is very thin and very cold… but between a Resist Energy Spell and Life Buble, we're both fine… it's good that we don't actually need our wings to fly: The air is a bit too thin for winged flight.

  “You have a very high roost,” my Companion nods as she speaks in my head, “now that I'm up here, though… will this cause a problem for our chicks?”

  Of course, “They wouldn't be able to fly, breathe, or stay warm this high without help…” any more than you can, “...which I can give easily.”

  “Hmm…” She twists her head considerably, “...how hard would it be to move this a bit lower, and add a roof to keep the rain off… maybe some walls for wind?”

  Basically impossible, “I can't move it, but I can make another. Here…” I take a moment to use Major Creation a few times to make a canvas and some writing supplies, “...maybe sketch out what you want?”

  She looks at me for a bit, switches to her human form and does so, making a very rough sketch of a mountainside nest while I watch her nude form bend over the paper. Hmm….

  Wall of Force to hold things up, Wall of Stone for the structure, Stone Shape and Fabricate for details… “Yeah, I can make something like that easily enough.”

  “Great…” She considers, “As long as we're alone, though… got dinner?”

  I shrug and cast Bountiful Banquet, getting an assortment of whole roast animals (yes, including a horse), bottles of wine, fruits, berry tarts, and other things on a silk bnket in the ground, all on fine ptes with silverware.

  She smiles, shifts back to her natural form, and digs in. I take a bit to enjoy the food as well, and at the end, she licks her beak, “Come on… my turn now…” and dives off the edge of the structure.

  Taking the hint, I shift to griffon form, and follow. She leads me through various cartwheels, swoops, and somersaulting descents; I have no trouble at all keeping up… we have the same spell boosts for flying, but she doesn't have my css features, so I'm roughly twice as fast as she is while still being just as maneuverable. Eventually she locks talons with me and plunges toward the ground as fast as she can fly (which is nearly two hundred miles an hour when going straight down), only to release me just before we would hit the ground… I have no problems pulling out of the dive, nor does she. After that flight, she starts flying slow and level, wiggling her tail.

  Again, I take the hint, and fly up underneath her, upside-down, trying hard to remember her human form, her generous chest, those wonderful taps, her waist, her thighs… it works, and I manage to slip my lion-like manhood into her waiting folds, thrusting in and out until I spill my currently sterile seed inside her.

  I mean, I did tell her we wouldn't be having kids until after I killed the evil gnome and finished the castle… but I have no issues keeping her sated until then.

  We nd on top of the current tower, and cuddle for a while. Eventually she nods off and goes to sleep, at which point I go back to work, checking on the gnome (I'm still not nding a Scry spell on him), and build more wall.

  That sets the pattern for the next while: I build some wall during the day, have fun with Last Shadow in the evening (we take turns on who's in native form), and build either the nest or the castle at night (she settles on a spot about four thousand feet up… for the chicks, so they'll be able to fly and breathe easily). I also check to see if I can scry on the evil gnome daily, of course, but that takes but a moment of thought. The nest is done in a day; the fact that it looks like a cloud and is four thousand feet up will stop most folks from trying anything… and once there's eggs, Last Shadow will be watching it. Plus, of course, my summons. Until then… there's nothing very valuable up there: It's just a chunk of floating material, a stone house on one side, and a mountain crag nest on the other, all covered by a Mage's Private Sanctum spell to keep things private. Oh, I have a yard for the kids to py in on the house side (I dug up some grass for the purpose), and some nice rocky terrain on the ‘cliff’ side… with a door between. So we have a nice nest for when we want to be griffons, and a nice house for when we want to be humans.

  The castle progresses quickly: I build out the central tower to have a footprint a hundred feet on a side, with the same five-foot thick wall setup for the lower floors, but I switch to stone for the upper floors… so I can pce arrow slits all around (they have a benefit that you can shoot arrows out through them, but most spells won't pass, because a two inch wide arrow slit, four feet tall, doesn't have the square foot of total gap required to pass most spells). The original segment I turn into mostly stairwells and storage; the newer outer sections into bedrooms, barracks, kitchens, baths, and so on.

  My orders arrive by archmage courier. No, I didn't pay for expedited delivery. They also come with a note saying I'll need to pick up small orders in Eastgate going forward, and that I'll need to deliver any products to the same. Which is no big deal: I have Greater Teleport basically at will now.

  But apparently the delivery folks don't want to make the trip through over a thousand miles of magic-free wilderness….

  Regardless, I pay for the goods with coins and gems from the dungeon, and add them to my construction. The Decanter I set on “Fountain” and toss into a big tank with an overflow valve (all made via Major Creation). It feeds water to my upper house; hot water is handled by loops of Adamantine pipes running through a minimum size (and minimum caster level) Wall of Fire spell (the circle version, facing inwards), while the cold water lines are just straight from the tank. At the end of the hot water line, after every tap for taking water wherever is done, there's an overflow valve set for a lower pressure than at the main tank, which dumps the water into the air through a sprinkler head to scatter it. This is basically always running; the only time it isn't is when I'm using enough water on other things to use all the water from the Decanter. Which means it's always raining, just a little, on my castle.

  And now that I have water, the wn actually serves a purpose: It's part of the ‘septic system’. Body waste goes into the toilet, which flushes into a big tank, which eventually seeps out into a bunch of gravel under the grass via long underground tubes with holes, bacteria cleaning the gunk into basically pure water before it seeps out and falls off the edge of my sky nd. Some sludge will build up on the bottom of the tank, and some slime will build up at the top, so I'll periodically need to open it up and cast Purify Food and Water a zillion times to clean it out… I'll probably have a minion do that… but that's a “once every few years” thing, so there's no rush. I also bring a sheep up to keep the grass from getting out of hand… it can't get over the ledge anyway.

  I get a few pings on Seamless Guise for divinations about me while working; I answer with the appropriate fvor of “He's dead” for the spell used, and it soon stops. I wonder who the gnome is going to bme for the regur Scrying attempts?

  I eventually get a bead on Woudrazed when he's in his workshop, making more Symbol spells on banners that he can then hang quickly wherever...he has quite a store of them hanging from the rafters. It should be fine; they can't ‘see’ me to activate if I'm invisible, so I cast Greater Invisibility and then Greater Teleport to the site so I can finally put paid to the evil, evil man….