After leaving the Den, we travelled with the wolves, heading back towards the old, imperial road. It would take us about a day to reach it, now that the wolves we were travelling with were healthy, and from there, we would need about two more days to reach the area where the Centaurs were operating. It was beyond the eternally blowing wind, in an area between a lake, currently frozen, and a forest, a strip of land that was similar to the windswept plains but lacking the punishing wind.

That wind was something I had asked the wolves about and their reaction had told me that they knew about it, while their evasive answers told me that they wouldn’t speak about it, at least no without good reasons.

Over the days we travelled with the wolves, I got to know a couple of them and I was rather intrigued. They were all looking forward to going after the ponies, as they derogatively called the centaurs, and almost giddy at the idea to pay them back for hunting wolves. But, while those traits were shared by all of them, the underlying personality was different for each of them.

For example, one female, Bright Cloud, was an avid astronomer, without telescope, without any way to write down what she saw, she simply enjoyed watching the night’s sky, trying to see patterns and figure out the meaning of them. And she had a prodigious amount of knowledge stored in her head, more than I would have expected, really, allowing her to give me quite detailed information about the current season and, based on past observation, what the future would bring. I was curious if her prognosis - that within the next few days, a major shift in weather-pattern would occur - would hold true. She claimed spring was coming fast and would melt some of the local snow, despite the cold, northern wind.

If she was right, I had a few ideas how to abuse such a shift to harass the Centaurs, using mud and thin coatings of ice to hinder them, using their higher weight against them. Essentially, I was planning to use tactics used against cavalry on Earth against them, just to see how they handled something like that.

Another wolf, Crisp Ice, told me quite a bit about the local monsters, the dangers inherent to them. He taught me how to get a feel for the snow beneath us - not necessarily using magic, he managed without, merely with his paws - to feel the vibrations and use them to detect dangers lurking below. Or prey, that was possible as well.

When we had first arrived on the windswept plain, I had been taken aback by the emptiness, that there seemed to be no life at all in the area. After the lessons Crisp Ice taught me, I learned just how wrong I had been, I had just failed to look in the right place. Where I had looked at the surface, now, I was able to look beneath the surface and that, hidden in tunnels of snow and earth, was where the life was.

Plants, sleeping in the frozen earth, waiting for the spring-thaw, martens, rabbits and all kinds of small animals, sleeping in their burrows, waiting for the plants to grow, it wasn’t the lifeless desert I had thought it was, not at all. It was just hidden.

Those lessons and the swift pace they set towards the centaurs, made the days go by quite fast, but during the night, I was able to leave the game and get a few things done in reality.

As I was preparing dinner, I saw a new advertisement, after my own had been out for a while, they had a new one. This one featured a daimon, at least I was quite sure that that was her race, playing up the mystery and intrigue angle. There were a few things that stood out to me, the biggest that she had ostensibly shown her face during the clip. Somehow, that seemed slightly strange, if she wanted to keep herself hidden, but, given that I had used my own advertisement-clip to add a few false trails, what were the chances that she had done the same? At the same time, an information-broker might have some juicy details, knowledge about old ruins, with interesting, lost magic, so I made a note to contact her ingame, or maybe even using the forum. I doubted that I would get anything using the forum, at least not without something to trade, but I might visit the town she was based in. My path was leading me into that direction, even if only very generally.

What I did next, was trying to find out if there was anything about centaurs, maybe allowing me to get a read on them, before we ever encountered them. Just using the keyword “Centaur” in the video-database of Road to Purgatory produced quite a few hits, a few thousand, that is. Looking through them one by one would take not just hours, but days, so I filtered, first using keywords related to hunting, curious what their normal tactics would be, and starting there.

After watching a few of them, I realised that their tactics were rather similar to what I had seen in documentaries of mounted archers of earlier times, the centaurs were using their fast-speed over short distances to sprint, turn, shoot an incredibly large bow, sprint some more, either to catch up or to keep distance between them and their prey. Otherwise, they also seemed to favour tactics to encircle larger prey, almost like native americans in western, riding around a circled wagon-train and slowly whittling down their defenders.

Obviously, the clips I saw were not from the centaurs we would fight, but it gave me a baseline to gauge their abilities. Unless I missed my guess, the centaurs we were up against used similar tactics but only during times that favoured them, so mostly during the day, when the light allowed them to use ranged-attacks to their best effect.

Afterwards, I deleted the filter and applied one that looked for snow and ice-themed videos, sadly, the few that were there, were rather useless. They showed centaurs in small tents, sleeping, acting generally domestic and all that. Nothing about tactics for hunting during the winter, nothing, really. That lack told me that they likely had trouble on shifting ground, like ice and snow, so they mostly stayed inside. It might be another weakness I might be able to exploit.

With that information, I started looking at historical records how had people fought - and more importantly, won - against swift, mounted archers before? My search quickly brought me to documentaries about the Mongols and their mounted cavalry, talking about their campaigns into Europe, their victories and their defeats. Some of the information, I would be able to use, other parts were virtually useless. At the end of the day, I would be fighting against Centaurs, not Mongols and, given my hypothesis about Travellers helping the Centaurs, I had no doubt that those Travellers would look at similar sources as I had looked at, at least if they had any sense.

So, it was a case of knowing your enemy and knowing yourself. Part of me was looking forward to seeing how they stacked up and what I, personally, could do to throw a wrench into their plans.

Finally, after doing some exercises, I logged back in, timing it so I had spent the night outside the game, which would make me a little tired during the day, but nothing problematic. The wolves had kept watch during the night, so when dawn broke, we headed out, towards the centaur-camps. Not that we would get there, or even want to get there on that day, but we wanted to get near, hopefully without being spotted from afar.

“Lenore, can you scout ahead?” I asked mentally when I felt the wind weaken around me. It was quite sudden and without any discernible reason, making me even more curious what caused the wind, I couldn’t think of any natural reason for the wind to blow all the time in a highly defined area. It just didn’t seem right, sure, there could be mountains, funnelling the wind in a certain direction, but that only went so far, I thought that I would see such a mountain-range, if there was one.

“At least we are out of the wind.” Lenore grumbled a little, she was still not a fan of the cold, something I still thought funny for a being that grew up in the frigid north. While I wasn’t looking forward to getting further south, mainly because of my own sensitivity to heat, I was curious how Lenore would deal with it. Maybe there, she would complain about the heat and the stinging sun.

As I suppressed those thoughts, to make sure she didn’t catch them, she left her Hallow, taking up position on my shoulder before hopping off, strongly beating her wings to gain height and speed.

“Good luck, dear friend.” I mentally sent after her, before she left the range we could communicate in.