Smiling, I let my latest experiment float in front of me, inspecting the runes closely. Walking along the old, imperial road had allowed me to fully focus on my work, without even having to watch my steps. The last week, I had simply been walking next to Sigmir, letting her make sure I wasn’t running into something and had focused on my experiments.

That had led to a few slightly surreal moments, when I hadn’t paid any attention to my surroundings for the day and, when I finally did, villages, mountains or forests suddenly appeared, at least from my perspective. Similarly, I wouldn’t notice the weather most of the time, unless things got truly unpleasant and even then, my new dwarven-made clothes were marvelous. They kept my nicely cool, even in the warm sun of early summer, and were nearly impervious to wind and water. While I greatly enjoyed the cold, I didn’t like being wet.

“That looks quite interesting.” Lenore told me, landing on my shoulder and looking closely at the object floating in front of me.

“If it works as I want it to, it might be my most lethal attack, at least for now.” I admitted, letting it turn while inspecting the runes closely, trying to make sure they had come out exactly as I wanted them to.

“What is it supposed to do? You already have weapons to cut people, and this one doesn’t look like it’s made for combat.” Lenore asked, as she looked at the runes with similar intensity, only that I doubted she could understand them. They stood out quite a bit, a stark, almost glowing, ruby-red in contrast to the silvery-blue ice around them.

“I decided to take a page out of someone else’s spellbook and use my Athame as a reference. Remember, it allows me to use my blood-magic easier, draining the blood through a spell-formation into those two receptacles and helping me to create blood-stones? Not that I’ve used it like that all that often, but it can be used that way.” I began my explanation, holding the slender, silver blade next to the floating ice-knife.

“While I’m not quite able to reproduce the spell-work, I was able to get some inspiration on guiding-runes for Blood Magic flowing through the spellwork and designed a simple enchantment that does one thing, reinforce itself. If my spellwork works as I think it should, it will drain power from the being the blade is stuck into and use that power to drain more power. It’s a self-reinforcing loop, until the enchantment breaks, releasing the power in a hopefully unpleasant fashion.” I continued on, admitting that the last part was a big question mark.

I was reasonably sure that it would shatter the dagger and release a lot of miasma, enough to make me leery of testing it, even if I had someone to test it on. But just as unsure I was of the final release, I was certain of the lethality of my creation. My Hard Ice was sturdy and the frozen, magic-infused blood I had used was a good conductor for Blood Magic, even if creating it was a pain, literally. Once the dagger was stabbed into someone and I had started the draining-process, it couldn’t be stopped, unless the target died or the dagger broke.

“That sounds nasty.” Lenore admitted, before continuing, “And a good first step, what do you want to do as the next step?” she asked, knowing that just letting the power explode in an undirected fashion was one of the least efficient ways of using it.

“Two ideas, one is to restrain the flow of power to the point that it just keeps the drain-spell going and condense the remainder into solid blood-crystals, similar to how my Athame is supposed to be used.” I told her, thinking about how that would look in practise. It would require quite a bit of trial and error, to gauge just how strong the flow to keep the drain going was needed to be but otherwise, it seemed reasonably simple. I knew the runes already and, as I said, it was quite similar to the enchantment on my Athame.

“The other one is a lot more complicated but infinitely more unpleasant.” I continued, feeling a grin spread on my face.

“It’s similar, but not. Again, I’d have to split the output-flow, one to strengthen the drain and keep it going, the other would have to be transformed into Ice-Astral-Power, to keep the dagger from breaking. That way, I could add a single-use enchantment in the hilt that spreads out barbs and breaks off the hilt, leaving the blade stuck inside, making it incredibly difficult to remove.” I explained and once I was done, I could feel Lenore’s horrified fascination.

“Combine the two, condense a small part of the drained power and maybe we can add a final enchantment that reanimates the corpse as an undead.” she suggested, the mental image of a corpse, dessicated by the drain caused by my Blood Magic, rising as a mindless husk, driven only by a vile hunger. At the same time, I could feel her consider the needed enchantments, questioning if there would be a way to use the miasma produced by my blood magic to strengthen the resulting husk.

“Could we make the enchantment communicable?” I asked in return, letting my imagination run wild, trying to come up with a way to create a zombie-plague, something that could be used as a real, biological weapon of mass destruction. Not just area-of-effect magic attacking large swathes of land, with ice-, wind- or death-magic but something that could wipe out entire populations.

Sadly, while I had some information on poisons, mainly thanks to two books, one from the herbalist in Yaksha, the other from Mrs. Wu, my knowledge on disease, which would be the obvious template, was limited to a few biology-classes in school and life-experience. For me, that meant I had some knowledge with psychological problems but was rather ignorant of everything else.

“I doubt it.” Lenore admitted, but I could feel that she was just as intrigued at the idea as I was.

“But just the second version you explained would be incredibly deadly, especially against large enemies. The only thing I can think of to get rid of such a blade, without the appropriate magic, would be to cut out the flesh it is stuck in. Otherwise, it would just become stronger and deadlier as time passes, at least until the enchantment itself reaches its limits.” she brought us back to the original topic, away from the fancy ways of murdering a lot of people.

“Yeah, I agree. Just think of some massive creature, slowly dying to a tiny wound. It would be the ultimate cursed blade.” I replied, while transmitting what I had designed of that particular enchantment so far. It was a clear work in progress, with a few simple place-holders with descriptions of what I wanted to accomplish. It would take quite a while to finish it up, let alone test it.

“We could really do with a group of silly ponies.” I admitted, laughing to myself.

“Eh, the last few villages have seen neither hoof nor hair of them, I doubt they came this far.” Lenore chuckled in response. And she was right, the last few days we had been travelling, we had come across two villages, one filled with a mixture of various beastmen, the other an orc-settlement. We hadn’t spent the night in either, the timing simply hadn’t been good, but had ventured into them, with me mostly hiding in Sigmir’s shadow, letting the others do the talking. They had asked about the centaurs and their spreading from their normal range and, while the locals had seemed to be a little concerned it didn’t seem to really worry them.

Apparently, there was always some force around that made moves, trying to claim territory until they spread too thin, ran into someone more powerful or had their leader die in some way. If the centaurs came, the locals seemed confident that they could come to an agreement.

“Want to go for a flight, to see if we can find something to test my dagger on?” I asked Lenore, hoping to find some beastie I could stick and observe.

“Warn Sigmir and we can go.” she answered, both amused and intrigued at the idea. In addition, she knew that I loved flying with her but hadn’t done so in the last few days, instead focusing on my experiments, something I wouldn’t even try to do in my Hallow.

“Love? I’ll go for a flight with Lenore, don’t worry about me.” I told Sigmir, who was walking next to me.

“Keep an eye out for danger, please.” she replied, giving my hand a gentle squeeze.

“Sure. See you soon.” I said as I returned the squeeze before shunting myself into my Hallow and letting Lenore take wing.

Now, what could we scare up to test my new weapon on?