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You quietly depart Alfheim the next morning. A Serving Orb wakes you an hour before dawn, running you through a checklist of everything you will need. Food, water, and shelter have been covered by your gifts, but there's more to a Travail than those alone. A copy of the Grand Atlas joins your clothes and grooming kit inside of your <span class="mu-i">Heimtasche</span>, as well as Travail Papers prepared by the Eldest. Tools for the wilderness go in another sack, including rope, an axe, and a number of good knives. The largest of them, the Serving Orb insists go on your belt, as a deterrent.
Humes and Stouts would not recognize that the bangle on your wrist is a greater danger than most blades.
To most, it would just be a piece of jewelry to steal.
To you, it's the means by which to channel your divine gifts from the Yggdrasil. Most divine magic comes from prayer and ritual, ceremonies that honor the World Tree and shape the magic flowing through its roots across the world to make miracles happen. With such things, you can conjure bread from thin air, turn water into wine, heal the injured, cure the diseased, curse the vile, and bless the righteous.
The magic focused by your bangle is something more primal and simple, the magic flowing through your <span class="mu-i">self</span> to which the Yggdrasil has opened your inner eye. Rather than ceremonies of themselves, that magic is more like an extension of your limbs. The most powerful prayers will even require you to shape the ritual with your primal and instinctive magic, for using it is no different than a dance you might perform as part of a ceremony to bring forth the rain.
>You have been kissed by flame
>You have been caressed by water
>You have been blessed by air
>You have been acknowledged by stone
>You have been embraced by wood
>You have been touched by metal
>You have been struck by lightning
The maps within the Atlas have both geography and political boundaries, though apparently the latter may be somewhat out of date. The nations all should still exist, even if their boundaries have changed slightly due to border skirmishes and the like. The Atlas also contains a map of the Roots of Yggdrasil, showing where the flow of magic will be at its strongest and its weakest throughout the world, and where the roots blossom to surface in the form of trees both great and small.
The map you have details the continent of Alagonia.
Alfheim lies at the center, among the peaks and vales of nigh-unassailable mountains. Between the fertile valleys where the Draft Rings tend to fields designed by the Children's Agriculturalists and the steep hills which make logistics a nightmare for even Stout Golems, it simply is not worth the effort to conquer. An invading army would be massacred by a force not even one tenth its size, before accounting for the weapons of war that the Children of Yggdrasil would prefer not to make use of.
Best of all, every road from Alfheim goes downhill instead of up, making travel quite a bit easier, you think.
