After dissecting the Centaur and discussing with Rai what the best spots to attack were, Lenore and I used magic to scatter the remains, plowing them into the snow and making the snow look as pristine as it had looked before the battle.

“Snowdust, we are finished here. Do you know if Windpaw has finished his task?” I asked, looking around to take stock of the wolves in the area. I had noticed that some of them had been watching what I had been doing, but I had been too focused on my task to pay too much attention to them.

“We focused some time ago, the tracks to the battlefield are gone.” Windpaw told me, stepping closer.

“Good. Unless you see anything that hints at the battle we fought, we can leave.” I told the two large wolves, while looking around, trying to see if I missed anything. When I didn’t see anything, I waited for the wolves to finished their inspection.

“Nothing that I can see. There is a smell of blood still hanging in the air, but I doubt that it’ll linger long, not after you made sure that no blood remains.” Snowdust said, sounding confident.

“Let’s leave. I’ll stay in the rear and hide our tracks. Move in a line, to make it easier on me, please.” I asked, causing the wolves to form a line, orderly moving one after the other. As I said, I took the last spot, using Ice Magic to remove any sign of our passing. We had to fight a battle of misdirection, of that I was certain. Just the single camp, even with our relentless attacks, had more than enough centaurs to devastate the hunting pack we had, and that was without considering reinforcements. No, if we wanted to win, we needed to play this smart, not hard.

After a short hike through the snowy forest, we were back at our den and filed inside, the wolves seemed quite giddy with the successful attack. That was something I needed to step on, we needed to keep our wits about us, or we would fail.

“We need to talk.” I announced, once every wolf was inside and I had placed a thin sheet of ice over the main entrance. We had dug a couple air-vents into the hill above us, in addition to an escape-tunnel, so it was no problem to close the entrance, hiding it under a snow-drift.

The wolves looked at me with wagging tails, likely hoping that I announce further massacres. Sadly, I had to dampen their enthusiasm.

“We managed to strike a successful attack, wiping out one of their patrols without losses on our side. The centaurs will undoubtedly try to find out what happened to their people, so the best we can do, is lay low. We don’t want them to get a whiff of us or they might bring in enough forces to deal with us.” I announced, causing grumbling and growling.

“We managed to wipe out about ten percent of their camp today, maybe twenty if we consider all our attacks to this point. What you need to remember is that that is only from one camp, there are at least two more camps out there, near enough to reinforce the camp we attacked. We have yet to find out how many more there are and how big they are.” I explained, letting sink it how many of the silly ponies were actually left.

“We need to avoid making them too mad, or they might try to strike into the Windswept Plains which risks our whole mission. I don’t know what they plan around the Den but if it involves magic and the centaurs bring a decent spellcaster out there, they might sense changes, we can’t risk that. And if they really want to go into the plains, we can’t stop them.” I explained, causing ears to drop and tails to stop wagging. It felt bad to shatter their glee about our successful attack yet, it was necessary.

“What we will do, is make it look like the attacks came from further west. Maybe we can attack a few patrols of the next camp, making them concentrate their search in that direction.” I continued, mentally considering the best course of action.

“That’s it for now, we will stay near the den for now.” I finished, retreating to the part of the cave where Sigmir, Adra, Rai and I had placed our bedrolls. I needed to come up with a good way to distract the centaurs, directing their ire about today’s losses away from the Main Den. During dinner, I discussed the problem with Windpaw, Snowdust and my party and we soon agreed that we should change our camp, attacking patrols further afield, maybe even attacking one of the other camps.

“There’s another thing we might want to consider.” I spoke up after some time, realising something else.

“I’m reasonably sure that the centaurs need a rather sturdy supply-chain, even with magical bags, there’s only so much food they are likely to have stored away and their huge bodies in the cold weather with constant, strenuous activity? That’s bound to burn a lot of energy, we might want to consider attacking those supplies. I once heard a saying that an army marches on its stomach. Having the centaurs go hungry has a certain appeal to me.” I explained, remembering the huge digestive tract, likely designed to squeeze even the smallest bit of nutrients from the food the centaurs ingested. If we forced their attention to their supply-chain, they would be hard pressed to investigate the windswept plains, not if they were busy hunting phantoms through the forests, trying to make sure that they had enough food. Sure, they might be able to hunt, but that, too, would reduce their potential for operations.

“That sounds like a good plan.” Adra agreed and the two wolves nodded along.

“We’ll start with that tomorrow. Today, we’ve done more than enough.” Sigmir stated. We had a little talk about reckless attacks and the stupidity of jumping around like a fool on the walk back with me making my failure during the attack into a lesson for Rai. It had been a stupid mistake, born from the exultation of jumping from tree to tree like some sort of squirrel but it had been a mistake, one that almost cost me my life. Hopefully, Rai would learn from my mistake, I certainly had. Until I had some consistent way to shift my course in the air, I’d refrain from aerial maneuvers.

With our plans for the next days lined out, I returned to one of my usual evening activities, trying to figure out the growing selection of magical materials I was carrying around with me.

One of the materials I was trying to figure out was the Eternal Ice, mostly, I was considering the small shards, keeping the large chunk in a cocoon of Hard Ice that I replenished on a regular basis, it was just too problematic to handle otherwise. The small shards, those I could handle, but not the big chunk, not without being in a world of pain.

The Eternal Ice was the goal I was pursuing, trying to form it by myself, and Liquid Moonlight was what I thought was the stage before that. My talks with Old Ice had been quite enlightening, even if they had failed to produce actual skill-advancement. I had a feeling that the next steps in Ice Rune Mastery would be hard, requiring me to understand what I was doing, instead of merely using the runes I had used before. Sadly, changing Liquid Moonlight into Eternal Ice was a feat I had yet to achieve, despite the time-investment. But I was reasonably sure that I was getting closer, using a medium crafted from Hard Ice and Liquid Moonlight as a base on which I projected Stillness-runes, trying to freeze the Ice in time itself. That was my current idea for producing Eternal Ice, alas, I had no success thus far.

Another project was centered on the Crystal of the Northern Wind, the gem I had been given by Sirius. I had experimented with it, trying to channel power though it and it worked, allowing me to work with Ice easier and I had let Lenore try to use it for her wind-magic, and she, too, had reported that it felt easier, the magic flowing more smoothly, compared to normal.

Sadly, I was far from ready to use it, there were certain pieces missing, but those were part of my final object of investigation: The Athame I had been given by Thekk, the smith in Neyto. I was quite sure that it was the key to understand how to make a magic item for myself. I was reasonably sure that the gem used by Thekk was not as valuable and powerful as the Crystal of the Northern Wind but despite that, the Athame was superior as a spell-focus. He had told me that it was enchanted, meaning I needed to figure out what had been done to make that focus into what it was now. Sadly, the enchantment was incredibly complex, I had stared at it for hours on end, using Lenore’s sight and was not even close to understand it. Whoever had placed it, they knew what they were doing, that was for certain.

I kept trying around, studying the enchantment and experimenting with Liquid Moonlight for hours, before finally deciding to get to the other, all-important evening activity: Snuggling with Sigmir.