At breakfast, we discussed our next steps. We had quests to hunt general game for meat and reducing the number of wolves and their Alphas. While hunting above the treeline was overall easier, thanks to Lenore’s ability to fly and find game that way, we decided to head further down the mountain, as wolves generally stayed below, leaving the higher areas for other predators.

Soon, we broke camp and headed downwards, looking for trails that might lead us towards worthwhile game. What we found, surprised all of us, especially me. There was almost no game to be found and the few tracks we spotted were wolf-tracks. And there were a lot of those, more than I believed to be sustainable. With a bit of grumbling, Lenore took to the skies, giving us another view from above and scouting towards Yaksha. What she found made me curious, the woods were teeming with wolves and in the direction of Yaksha, the air was thick with large, flying creatures. She had no interest in getting closer to those, so she returned.

Again, we discussed the best ways to continue as the amount of wolves made all of us rather skittish, a pack of such size could easily do us in if we fought without serious terrain-advantage. I went with Lenore over the memories of her flight, not that there was a lot, using the fact that I was seeing her viewpoint in a different light and was able to detect things that she hadn’t seen in her field of view. In this case, what I noticed that she didn’t was a pattern that just seemed unnatural to me, signs of human, or rather, sapient, activity outside of Yaksha.

“What do you think, can we scry the area?” I asked Lenore, knowing that her help and assistance would be crucial.

“Should work, unless it’s warded.” came her slightly lackadaisical reply. Scrying was not interesting to her, it was something we had done before and she thought it boring, maybe because she was used to shifting her view-point when she entered my Hallow.

I told the others what I was planning, asking them to guard me while my mind was occupied with other things.

Before, I had only used my own line-of-sight to start scrying, now I was using the memory of Lenore’s sight as a guidance, making me wonder how much harder it would be. But, with ideas taken from the grimoire, I had thought up a technique that should work. Forming a triangle by putting the tips of my thumbs against each other to form the base and putting the tips of my index-fingers against each other to complete it, I used the runes of shadow and darkness on the back of my hands to create an area of absolute darkness in the triangle, using that ‘pool’ of darkness as a base to shift my vision. What I was using was a modified version of a water-mirror, so the mental imagery of a pool of darkness helped. The reason why I placed the darkness in a triangle was that I could easily raise my hands in front of my face, letting me gaze into the darkness without disturbance.

It worked like a charm, the memory of Lenore helped me guide the scrying and moments later, I was looking from the shade thrown by an old tree, looking at a slightly familiar sight. It was one of the stooges, hidden in obvious ambush on a game-trail that led towards the mountains. I was no gambling woman but somehow, I had a feeling that his two friends were not far away, waiting for someone, quite possibly me, coming down from the mountains to attack.

Lenore mentally agreed with me, that it was very likely that they wanted revenge and had heard that we were out, hunting wind raptors, and decided to give us a greeting on the way back. We put our minds together, trying to decide what to do with them, if we wanted to get creative in our attack or simply kill them.

Part of me wanted to put them to sleep, take their blood with Blood Magic and make a necklace that glowed whenever one of them came close, at least until they managed to get themselves killed. Sort of like a rather famous sword that glowed when orcs were nearby, but with stooges. I was not entirely certain how something like that would be done, so I shelved the idea. No, there would be no excessive creativity in this one, just Lenore sitting on a tree, allowing me to channel Mind Magic from a distance.

Before breaking the scrying, I shifted it from shadow to shadow, looking and finding the other two stooges nearby, making me wonder how they knew where to wait. Maybe, I would keep one alive and ask him. But maybe not.

I told the others about the ambush and my decision to blow it up, and we started our way towards the three of them, looking for anything worthwhile to take down. We did run into a small pack of five wolves, hitting them with everything we’d got to keep them from calling in reinforcements, not even skinning them on the spot, but putting them into our packs after I ripped the blood from their carcasses so it wouldn’t spoil the meat or our packs.

In the small fight, I noticed that it was harder to fight with the filter that kept Lenore’s Hallow warm in place but not impossibly hard. Still, it was just a stop-gap measure and I was not too happy with it. But until we found an alternative, it was the best we had.

After about an hour, we were near the ambush the three stooges had set and Lenore left her Hallow again, taking part of my mind with her.

She quickly found the stooges, right were they had been, having barely moved while they waited for their prey to come to them. Lazy cowards.

Lenore sat in a tree, overlooking all three of them, and I channelled Mind Magic through her, our wills uniting to strike the first of them. Not with the crude hammer-blow we usually used, I wanted to know if I was able to slowly infiltrate his mind without him noticing.

I was not quite sure if it worked, maybe it was the distance but the sensation of his mind was hard to grasp so after a few minutes of trying, I switched tactics and formed runes of disorientation and madness, using them to shift the texture of my magic into something interesting.

At the same time, I added runes of devouring and vitality, letting his life-energy drain from his shivering body. After a minute or so, he sunk into the snow, dead.

I had already selected my next target, so I stretched my mental tendril towards him, quickly finding his mind and, this time, I started with the madness and disorientation. But I added something else, I tried to add whispers, soft words telling him of the cold, of freezing to death, describing how his body would slowly chill, his mind sinking into darkness.

The result looked rather promising, after just a few moments, he started screaming, drawing the attention of his remaining friend. When said friend tried to help him, he drew his sword and started to madly hack at his buddy in an insane fury, heedless of anything he did to his friend. After a few moments of that sudden, insane attack, I felt bored and brought the full power of my mind to bear, shattering his in the process.

But those few moments had been enough to cause brutal wounds in his friend who had been too overwhelmed and surprised by the sudden assault. Just from the wounds and the fact that the assault had broken his legs, I had no doubt that the third stooge was dying. But that would be just boring, so I nudged Lenore who flapped her wings, landing on the fallen body of the friend I had just killed.

When the last living stooge focused on her, she started to madly cackle, cawing in laughter, making her caws deliberately sounding like the word ‘Nevermore’.

“The mistress has a long arm, a long arm indeed.” she cawed and the stooge seemed to recoil in horror.

“Insulting her, that was a stupid thin, a stupid thing indeed. But what do I expect, indeed, stupid meatsacks that you are, indeed.”

With those words, she used her own magic, taking some of my power to add punch to it, forming her native ability to rip the soul from his body. It was not something I could copy or even really detect. It needed time and quite a lot of power, which limited her, but when she was able to fully use it, it was devastating. Her eyes flashed with power and an eerie, green light washed over the stooge, causing him to slump down, dead.

I focused back on my body and saw a nice notification, telling me that my Mind Magic had leveled, bringing it to thirteen. With the three of them done in, we continued our hunt, looking for prey.