Misdirection. That was what it all came down to. Everyone agreed that trying to face the centaurs head-on would produce only one result, our death. Originally, I had believed that we might be able to actually push them back but once I had fully realised just how many of the silly ponies were in the camp and that there were more camps further west, with us merely attacking the one furthest in the north-east, I had changed my opinion. To stall them, we needed to avoid their focus, otherwise we would fail.

After killing the complete centaur-patroul, we had split our group, three small groups of nine wolves each had been sent out to run around the area, simply producing a lot of wolf-tracks in the west of the camp we had already attacked. The rest of the wolves, all four of them, were with my group, scouting and maybe even killing a few centaurs from the camps further west. The other groups had promised to avoid combat if at all possible, leaving my group as the one that would engage our foes.

Once again, Lenore was a key-part of our strategy, with her ability to fly and while being relatively inconspicuous, she could keep an eye on things from above, telepathically telling me whenever she saw enemies, allowing us to attack or circumvent them, at our leisure.

Another thing we used, and I quickly got proficient in, was scrying. At first, I had needed to sit, centering myself before taking a few minutes to produce a large spell-circle around me and only after that, I had been able to use a patch of darkness to shift my view around. With quite a bit of training and careful experimentation, I had managed to take away the need for the large spell-circle, reducing it to a simple spell-formation that I could draw with my hands, creating a dark cloud in front of me that I could link to distant shadows, using the new viewpoint to leapfrog to shadows even further away. While the effect was virtually unchanged, I was able to quickly cast it on the fly, allowing us to prepare ambushes while having more information about the enemy forces than even their own leader had.

The first day after making our way west, Lenore and I simply kept an eye on the second centaur-camp, both of us making note of the differences between the camp we had seen further east, near the windswept plains, and the one here. I was rather impressed by the disciplined way the centaurs had set up their camps, their organisation was virtually identical, the various tents looking like they had been places with a straight-edge. During noon, Lenore returned to our small camp, allowing us to directly talk about what we had seen.

“I think there’s another camp, further in the south. I noticed some smoke.” Lenore told me, after we had discussed that the basic layout was just like the one we had already seen.

“That’s not good. I have trouble understanding just why they push into this direction that hard, unless they want to conquer. But conquer who? I mean, it’s not like there’s some sort of political power in the region, at least not from what we’ve heard.” I stopped, pondering just what they might be up to. “And if we call it settling, that feels a little wrong as well. Sure, they might only be the security for settlers that’ll come later, but for that, there are far too many of the silly ponies. I just don’t get it.” I grumbled, annoyed that I had no idea what was going on.

Just from what we’d seen, there were about a hundred of the silly ponies in each camp, so we were talking about a force of at least four-hundred centaurs, in an area only about hundred square-kilometers. Sure, the area was large, but if one assumed that each of the camps only patroled a five-kilometer radius, that wasn’t too much for their man-power. They couldn’t create an air-tight security, as we were proving, but bringing an army this way would be impossible.

And that was the conundrum, the man-power would easily make sense if it was a border-fortification against some other, at-least medium-sized political power but the only thing even close to one was the city of Kolyug, a few hundred kilometers away. Unless one counted the wolves in their den but they lacked the motivation to venture west. That left only the Ankhegs, according to the wolves, they were quite smart but their minds were too alien to even consider communicating with them, it seemed to be impossible, at least for the wolves. Maybe they had some sort of desire to spread towards the west but I somehow doubted it.

When I asked Sigmir what she thought, whether there was some force back in the east, she just shrugged, telling me that she’d never heard of any really organised force, merely tribes of different people, similar to her old one, some more nomadic, others less.

Ultimately, we only found two answers that explained their presence in such numbers, one was that they were an overblown precaution, securing the border against some threat that we either didn’t know or that didn’t existed or, which we considered the much more likely variant, that they were the first step, securing a foothold from which the centaurs were able to expand east.

If the second idea hold true, we needed to make sure that they were unable to achieve security before the den was ready, because once they came in force, we would be unable to hold them back.

We continued to talk about ways to make the centaurs live as miserable as we could while eating lunch and once that was finished, Lenore went back into the air, watching what the silly ponies would do. One of the biggest things we had in mind was finding out how they actually supplied the camps, as cutting off that line would seriously hamper them, forcing them to deal with the disruption or spend a lot of time hunting, if they even managed to get enough food in the area.

I considered scrying again but at the end of the day, my vision was just too limited to observe a large area, I was only able to look out of shadows, which meant I was limited to a single viewpoint below the tree-tops, using the shadows cast by those trees. Out in the open, I was unable to observe, at least during day-time.

Instead, I, once again, experimented with the Crystal of the Northern Wind and my Athame, watching the flow of magic through either focus, especially feeling out the differences between channelling magic through the Athame while holding its grip and thus using it as intended and merely placing a finger on the gem set in the pommel, which, in my understanding, should limit the gem to its material properties, without the added enchantment. It turned out, I was right, using the gem like that, it was quite a bit weaker, confirming my theory that the Crystal of the Northern Wind was the better focus, at least once I got it into an enchantment similar to the one in the Athame.

Without Lenore in the area, I was trying something slightly different, carefully and with a lot of focus extruding Astral Power in its base form, even filtering out the small stream of Ice Astral Power that was naturally flowing through me and using that unaligned Astral Power to feel out the enchantment. It was slow-going, controlling the Astral Power was a headache and a half, yet, it slowly but surely allowed me to map the enchantment. It wouldn’t allow me to duplicate it, at least not straight away, but I was relatively sure that I should be able to use it as a reference, just as I used spells crafted for other purposes as references to make my own spells, often getting quite far from the originals, making them purely my own.

As I mapped the spell, part of me considered the best way to actually use the Crystal later. The Athame was great, not just because of the focusing-effect but also because of the spells that helped with my blood magic. Those were centered on the blade, in a separate enchantment than the one I was mapping, which I would tackle at a later time.

But the Crystal of the Northern Wind was only partly aligned to the element of Ice and discarding the part that was wind-aligned would be wasteful, so I needed to make a tool that allowed Lenore to use it, just as it would allow me to use it.

I quickly realised that I already had such a tool, the perch I had made a while back, it could serve me as a staff, something almost required to use as a spellcaster, while allowing Lenore to sit on it and if I made the enchantments right, both of us could use it to its fullest effect. It would be a good solution, at least if I could figure out the enchantment in the Athame.