The sleet kept going for four days and by the second day, all of us were bored out of our skulls. On the first day, I had enlarged the Igloo to create multiple chambers, one for Sigmir and me, one for Rai and Adra one for the wolves with us and finally, a chamber to be used as out-house, allowing our waste to fall outside and be washed away by the rain.
But even with those chambers, there was only so much we could do inside and the conditions outside were far too unpleasant to brave them without need. What I focused on was training Rai in his Darkness-magic, experimenting with the limitations of the shadow-scrying I had used before and spending quality time with Sigmir.
Adra also joined in my magic experimentation, trying to expand her own magic, while she didn’t use elemental magic as it was, her magic had some commonalities that allowed us to compare notes, so to speak.
Rai made good progress, his Shadow Cloaking was getting excellent, in that skill, he was even better than I was, simply due to the amount of training he had put into it. Sadly, that meant he had to experiment on his own, trying to pin down the best way to use it, when to drop it or maybe even ways to attack while he was still cloaked. To facilitate that, I had created an Ice-dummy in their chamber, which he tried to assassinate dozens of times each day. After repairing it a few times, I upgraded it from normal Ice to Hard Ice, making it harder for him to damage it which allowed me to get a good look at his progress. And his progress was quite pleasing, the wounds he dealt would be lethal on any creature with anatomy similar to humans, which I had based my training on. I would have made him a Centaur-dummy but sadly, that would have been too large.
As I continued to experiment with the shadow-scrying spell, quite often using it to keep an eye on the centaurs, I realised that it was an incredibly powerful spell but that it also had a few major downsides. My first order of business had been to actually use my class-ability to make the spell into what I wanted it to be, creating a fixed mental process so that I didn't just use the seat of my pants when casting it. That way, I hopefully would be able to create a stably performing spell, without any major surprises included.
The spell essentially allowed me to create an orb of shadows, roughly the size of a soccer-ball, shifting my awareness into that ball and, if I used it with together with Lenore, let me shift that orb of shadows around in three dimensions. It wasn’t tremendously fast, moving roughly the same speed as a jogging human, and it was limited in its shape, meaning it couldn’t just squeeze through every gap, it needed to remain roughly spherical. Those two were new limitations that had cropped up when I had formalised the spell, I wasn’t quite sure why they had manifested but it meant that I would have to improve the spell further, I had already managed to send my awareness through small gaps but the current spell didn’t allow that.
Other than those limitations, I learned one rather painful lesson and that was that I needed to keep the spell in darkness, not necessarily total darkness but even direct starlight was enough to disrupt it and give me a painful headache. Torches seemed to disrupt it when I got to close and daylight, even when concealed by clouds, meant that I was unable to get it to work at all.
All in all, I was quite happy with the new spell and earned two skill-points in my Darkness Magic and one in my Darkness Rune Mastery, bringing them to forty-six and sixty-seven respectively.
Another spell I was trying to get to work reliably was the strange teleport-spell that I had discovered when attacking Sigmir’s tribe a few weeks back. It had taken me some time to even begin to understand what I had done, my memory of the evening was more than a little fuzzy, but it seemed as if I had managed to use Sigmir’s presence as a beacon to move myself through the shadows, escaping the Shaman’s hut and landing next to her. Sadly, I had been more or less out of my mind due to the backlash from abusing my Mind Magic and the strengthening effect of the New Moon that had pushed my Darkness Magic above anything I could normally use. The combination had caused me to use magic in ways I had been hard pressed to understand, let alone reliably recreate.
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Finally, on the fourth day, the rain and snow eased up, it was still raining but no longer the brutal, freezing storm that seemed to drain the warmth right out of your body. My scrying had shown me the surrounding area and it was rather appaling. Where before, there had been open fields or meadows, hidden beneath a cover of snow, now, there was a swampy, boggy mess, the ground saturated with water, partially frozen and churned by the wind. I doubted that anyone would be able to easily traverse the area but we were willing to try, due to the fact that I had noticed a group of centaurs and oxen slowly making their way towards the camp we had been observing. While it would be impossible to attack them before they made it to that camp, we would be able to get there in time to stop them from getting to the camp closest to the windswept plains.
I considered if there were any ways to make it look like an accident, maybe burying them with a mudslide or something along those lines but sadly, there were no adequate slopes in the area, making that an impossibility. But drenching them in water and mud before cooling them down, effectively making it look like they had been frozen to death, that would certainly be in my repertoire. If the centaurs were stupid enough to try resting out in the open, I would be willing to try.
Before going into battle, I wanted to gather the other wolves of the pack, I was relatively sure that the storm had driven them to ground, just as it had the centaurs and I hoped that they had withstood it, even without shelter. At the end of the day, they were creatures of the wild, used to living in the outdoors year-round. Before we had split up, we had made sure that there was a series of scent-marks that any of the wolves could detect, calling for a meeting at the cave where we had made our camp in the first place. While I hadn’t originally considered using such large-scale magic as I had, mainly because I wanted to keep my involvement hidden, it had worked out quite well, using the local weather to our advantage.
Making our way to the den, while leaving scent-marks was harder than I had anticipated. While I had been able to see the soggy ground when scrying, was even able to watch the centaurs struggle with the frozen mud, it was a whole different beast to walk on it. For me, it wasn’t a real problem, I was small, slender and light, so as soon as I created snowshoes out of ice and affixed them to my boots, I could simply walk atop the frozen mud, without ever disturbing it. Sigmir, on the other hand, had a tall, muscular and strong frame that, coupled with her being heavily armoured and armed, made her break the surface as soon as she stepped out of our igloo, almost falling in the mud. From the look on her face, she was mortified but sadly, there was nothing that could be easily done. I made her wide snowshoes, large enough that she had trouble walking with them, waddling along with the almost clown-sized shoes, but even with them, she had trouble.
Ultimately, and hopefully without her knowledge, I used some of my magic to lessen the load she was pushing through the snowshoes into the ground, using the fact that the snowshoes were made from ice to work through them It reminded me of an annoying limitation in my magic, that I was unable to move myself with my Ice-Magic, otherwise, I’d have made myself a set of icy armour before using Ice-Magic to levitate the armour, carrying myself that way. But sadly, that was simply impossible and I had no real idea why.
Sigmir was remarkably stoic about her problems, I knew that, if I were in her shoes, I would have had a few choice words to say about it, but she simply took it. Yet, thanks to the bond we shared, I was able to feel that it gnawed at her, reminding me that I should be extra nice to her.
In that manner, we managed to get to the cave where we had made arrangements with the other wolves, meeting one of the groups already there. Afterwards, it was a matter of waiting, with me scrying to check where the centaur supply-group actually was.