Success had never been so miserable.

Lenore and I had managed to keep our ritual going for a little over sixteen hours, pumping an insane amount of Astral Power into the storm. After that, I had slept for a good eight hours, securely held in Sigmir’s arms until waking again, to realise that the storm was still going strong, dumping buckets of water, snow and hail onto the landscape. Obviously, that included us and by the time I woke up, we all had been thoroughly drenched.

All of us had were wet, cold and miserable, well, all but Lenore and Ylva, both of whom had decided to retreat into their Hallows. Nothing drove the unpleasantness home as much as the fact that even Ylva, who’d never been one to try avoiding hardship, wasn’t willing to stick things out. Sadly, none of us others had the option to hide in a mystical Hallow but now that I was awake again, we could do the next best thing, hide within a magically constructed igloo. While it wasn’t much warmer, it was mostly dry and out of the wind, which increased the creature-comfort by a lot. We even had some dry wood remaining, gathered before we had entered the windswept plains, allowing us to make a fire, quickly increasing the temperature to pleasant levels. But just getting into the igloo wasn’t enough to make me comfortable, while the cold didn’t bother me, being drenched was supremely unpleasant.

As a result of that feeling and knowing that, even in the comparatively dry igloo, it would take hours for my clothes to dry, I started to consider other options. One was to return to the real world for a few hours, given my clothes time but that felt as if I was letting Sigmir and the others down, using a reprieve they couldn’t access to make myself comfortable.

That left either trying to stoke the fire, which would quickly burn through our small reserve of dry wood, the forest outside was soaked to the point that the wood was saturated with water making it questionable if we would get more or I could try something with my magic.

Knowing that, if I failed to come up with a good idea, I could still fall back to one of the other options, I started to consider what my magic could do in this regard. All three types of magic that I used had some potential associations to what I wanted to do, even if some were more strenuous than others.

Darkness-magic was, at least partially, the magic of change and that was what I wanted to do, changing my wet clothes to being dry. Sadly, other than some rather outlandish ideas in the vein of trying to magically devour the water in my clothes, I had no idea where to even start.

Blood-magic on the other hand dealt with blood, obviously, and, at the end of the day, blood was about fifty-percent water. But the magic I was using dealt mostly with the more esoteric aspects of blood, its connection to life and vitality. So, again, I had no idea where to start, unless I wanted to wash my clothes in blood before removing that.

And finally, the magic I thought had the best chances to do what I wanted to do, Ice-Magic. After all, water was just Ice that had yet to be frozen. I was quite sure that I would be able to simply freeze the water within my clothes, but unless I made sure to keep it from forming a combined structure, I’d most likely damage my clothes if I forcibly removed the formed ice afterwards. That meant, I needed to make sure that the formed ice-crystals were as small as possible, before controlling them in a manner similar to the control I could exert on the mist I could magically create or the few times I had used snow to obscure vision.

Before I could start questioning if I was doing the right thing, I drew a simple magic formation made from mist, cold and ice, but didn’t instantly start to channel power into it. I needed to add the mental image I wanted, the image of tiny ice-crystals forming from the water in my clothes before turning into a fine mist and floating away from my clothes. Diamond Dust, that was what the phenomen I wanted to emulate was called, a mist made from uncountable, microscopic Ice-crystals, small enough to hang in the air.

With that mental image strongly fixed in my mind, I started to push Astral Power into the magic formation, feeling the water in my cloak, my first target, coalesce into ice before the ice started to drift away, drawn by the call of my magic. It looked quite interesting, a fine, wispy mist, starting to form above my cloak until I took control with my normal Ice-Magic, guiding it towards the smoke-hole in the middle of the igloo.

The others looked at me, at first with confusion but once Sigmir stretched her hand and touched my cloak, realising that it was perfectly dry, if a little cold, she had a look of comprehension followed by a smile.

“Do mine once you are done with yours, please.” she asked, looking adorable, almost like a drenched puppy.

“Of course, love.” I assured her, adding a soft kiss for emphasis.

Now that I knew what I wanted to do, I quickly changed the target of my magical formation and the image fixed in my head, going after the water weighing down the rest of my clothes. When I added Astral Power, an inadvertent shiver run down my back when my magic turned all water in my clothes, down to the wetness on my skin, into the finest ice-crystals. Luckily, they didn’t stay on my skin for long, I quickly took control and guided them away leaving me dry and much happier.

“Love, you might want to take off your clothes or it will be painfully cold.” I warned Sigmir, carefully hiding my smile when she instantly started to strip off her clothes. Mentally, I considered if there was any way to keep her from feeling the inevitable cold, I wanted her to be as comfortable as possible. Sadly, I had no idea where to even start, in a magical sense, so I decided to simply work quickly. I started with her clothes, so she had something to wear after I dried her off, even placing them next to the fire so that they would be at least a little warm, once I completed the procedure. It worked just as it had before, the water forming diamond dust ice and being whisked away.

After a quick kiss of apology, I froze the water on her skin and in her hair, causing her to shudder from the cold. But, at least she was dry and huddling by the fire, while pulling on her clothes again, would quickly warm her back up. Turning around, I noticed that Rai and Adra were just as naked as Sigmir had been, their clothes next to the fire and both looked at me hopeful.

I dried them off, just as I had Sigmir, only without the kissing, causing another cloud of tiny ice-particles to drift off.

“Adra, how long do you think the rain will last?” I asked, once they all had stopped shivering.

“Good question. I felt the amount of power you used, that was no joke. But it depends how strong the storm had been before, how long it would have lasted normally. There are storms that blow themselves out in a day or two, but other storms last for days, maybe even weeks. We’ll just have to wait and see.” Adra reasoned, mirroring what I had expected but it helped to get a second opinion.

“I’ll have to check what the centaurs are doing, hopefully, they are just as miserable as we are.” I joked, before turning to the igloo-wall and starting to draw up the magic formation I had used to scry before. I would be seriously limited in what I could see but sadly, Lenore was still deep asleep after the marathon-ritual we had used the day before. And even if she was awake, I doubted that she would have been happy to fly out into the gusting wind, the cold, almost icy rain and the piercing hail. No, we had done a good job to make the weather as unpleasant as possible but now we had to live with it.

I quickly formed the darkness that I used to form a window, allowing me to peer out of shadows around the centaur camp and what I saw looked quite promising. Where before, the guards had patrolled at almost all times, there were now only a few guards visible, all of whom stood beneath specifically created shelter. In addition, every tent was venting smoke into the air, making me quite sure that they were occupied. Sadly, the centaurs had a magical ward erected that prevented me from shifting my scrying-focus into their camp-proper, I could only look into their camp from the outside or I would have taken a look into a couple of their tents.

But it looked as if the storm was achieving what we had hoped, keeping the centaurs in their camp. I’d have to keep watching to make sure, but it was a good start.