She spoke slowly, haltingly at first, as Rehtul had assumed she would. There was something different about her now, something... not quite right. She was infused with massive amounts of divine energy, that much was certain. Could she, perhaps, have gone and embraced the stupidity of becoming a god in her own right?

When she began to talk about how she had reclaimed this world, the mage sighed and hung his head. He already knew what it was like to try and negotiate with the Divine from his dealings with the Thayne on Althanas. It was always their way or the highway, no slowing down, no detours. If they had decided to do something, that was the end of it. His suredness increased as he heard her frame his request as a demand.

"Well, I see there's nothing I can do to change your mind. You've embraced the madness of divinity, after all," he said, half to himself as he rose into the air on his dais of ice and smiled sadly down on her. The wind kicked up, whipping his gray hair and white jacket to and fro with as his magic began to pour off of his body in waves.

"I'll just have to seal you away for a couple of years."

The matter of fact tone he took on as he addressed her from up high would have seemed ridiculous if not for the torrents of visible power radiating from his body as he raised a single hand over his head. Blue-white lightning cackled at the tips of his fingers as he directed his energy upward over the blackened, dead expanse beneath him, careful not to damage the greenery that Philomel had already revived. Within seconds a giant magical circle appeared over the forest and held its place in midair for a few seconds before making its use apparent.

Walls of crystalline ice began to rise from the ground at the boundary of the circle, rising with increasing speed until a giant dome of twenty meter thick ice surrounded the forest, and with it the Mystic and the Goddess of the Forest.

Satisfied that his work was complete, he turned his attention down to the woman with a smile and floated back down to just a few feet above the earth.

"I won't keep you too long, but I can't let you cut the power to those cities yet. I need that data. Once I have it, then you can continue expanding your influence over this world."

The steady, almost monotonous way he spoke to her belied the burning fury in his heart, that someone he had known would cut themselves off from mortal races so much as to abandon any sense of empathy or compromise. His eyes, sharp and keenly trained upon her own, dared her to do something about it.