By morning, they were at the edge of the foothills, passing through a village just beginning to stir in the darkness. Morning came very late that far north, so far north that the Skybands dominated the entire southern sky, so far north that the sun only came up for a few hours on Midwinter Day. The Ungardt would rise well before sunrise and stay up well past sunset, using the light of the Skybands and the moons to navigate the night. And that far north, the Skybands cast a great deal of light down on the land, more than enough for Tarrin to see as clearly as if it were day, and more than enough for a human to easily be able to move around. It was never truly dark on Sennadar unless the clouds blocked the night sky, and the larger the Skybands were in the sky, the more light they shed down upon the land. As far north as they were, they were a constant lantern in the night, turning darkness into a dim pre-dawn kind of light that by which anyone could easily see.
They moved well past the village, and finally stopped in a stand of thick fir trees that helped break the biting wind. Jesmind swept snow off a log and flopped down, panting and breaking some frozen sweat out of the hair of her red eyebrows, but Tarrin showed no signs that he was winded from the long, heavy run. He simply wove a dome of warmth around their small clearing in the middle of the fir grove, then swept all the snow out of it before it melted and turned everything soggy. Jesmind gasped when all the snow suddenly picked up and flew out of the clearing, then she laughed as Tarrin seated himself cross-legged on the ground, wrapping his long tail around his legs to keep it out of the way. "Nice," she said, looking around, then shaking her head while her paws scrubbed through the unruly mane of her hair. "What do we do now?"
"Rest," he answered in a distant tone, taking the metal bracers off his wrists and putting them in his lap, then summoning his black-bladed sword out of the elsewhere and setting it in his lap with them.. "Go find us something to eat. I have something to do."
"What?"
"Make you a weapon," he told her, then he closed his eyes and put his paws over the bracers.
"No, what do you want to eat?"
"It doesn't matter, and you won't find any problems finding something," he answered. "Caribou are migrating through this area right now."
"Is that what I'm smelling?"
He nodded.
"Then it shouldn't be too hard to run one down," she agreed, standing up. "They're all over the place."
"Just don't let youself be seen. Ungardt hunters are out doing the same thing right now."
"You're insulting me, my mate," she teased. "Before I go out there, do you think you could make me something a little warmer?" she asked, picking at her thin shirt. "This doesn't do much about the wind."
He opened his eyes and absently Conjured her a heavy fur-lined jacket of sorts with sleeves that ended at her elbows and a deep hood to hide her colorful hair, with white fur at the collar and cuffs and hanging down to her thighs. The fur on her arms and legs would keep them warm, and the pads on her feet were thick enough to defend her against the cold of the ground. The only parts of her she needed to protect against the cold were the parts with no fur.
Jesmind pulled it on over her head, then waved her paw in front of her face. "This thing may be too hot," she complained.
"You're hot from the run," he told her.
"Don't you need something?"
"Cold doesn't bother me, Jesmind," he told her distantly, eyes closed again. "The Weave is keeping me warm. Now go on. When I'm done, I'm going to be starving."
"What are you going to do?"
"You'll see when you get back."
"You're getting too secretive," she complained as she pulled up her hood to hide her flame-colored hair, a color that would attract every eye to her within a league out in the white snow, then she bounded off into the snow and quickly disappeared, her white coat blending with the snow perfectly.
What he was doing stretched his powers of Sorcery to their limit. The Cat's Claws were powerful magical devices, and they would be perfect for his mate. He had no real need for them, because he had a weapon against which the Demons could not defend, and his magic made him their equal. But Jesmind had no protection from them, and what was worse, no weapon to harm them. He intended to change that. He focused all of his power on the Cat's Claws, and then reached deeply into High Sorcery, causing his entire body to limn over into Magelight, then have it condense down and form the concave four-pointed star that marked a sui'kun using his maximum power. He turned his full, true power against the bracers in his lap, his magic and his awareness sinking down into the black steel of their substance, deeper and deeper, until he was at a point where the tiniest bits of their substance were made aware to him. It was at this level that he unleashed his power, weaving flows of such microscopic smallness that it would have boggled the mind of nearly any other Sorcerer, manipulating the very core of the substance of which the bracers were made. He had to go very slowly and very carefully, for the substance of the bracers also housed the weaves that gave the Cat's Claws their power, and he could not disrupt that magic. Magic of that kind was strong, but it was also very delicate and very carefully designed. If he interfered with the way the weaves worked with one another, they would break down and destroy themselves, and render the items powerless. So he moved with painstaking care, Transmuting the metal of the Cat's Claws piece by tiny piece, moving methodically through them a section at a time, changing the metal very carefully around the weaves without disturbing them. It was exhausting work, and the effort of it was very quickly and very steadily draining him of his energy.
It took nearly two hours, but when he was done, almost in a swoon from the effort it had cost him, he was very pleased with the results. The metal of the Cat's Claws had been Transmuted into the exact same kind of metal of which his sword was made, that same strangely light, almost indestructible alloy that was not natural to his world, because all of the metals of which its alloy had been made did not exist on Sennadar. Though it was a creation of native magic, he could sense that the metal of the Cat's Claws were now harmful to a Demon, able to breach their invulnerability and strike them true injury. Though created by native magic, the result was a substance that still had no native existence in his world, and as such still constituted a weapon not of his world where it concerned a Demonic opponent. Just as the Ironwood of his staff had been raised in Sennadar and still had the power to harm a Demon, so this metal, created in his world, still had the power to do a Demon injury. He had used his own sword as a guide in how that metal was arrayed at its basest level, an organization of the tiniest of all pieces of solid matter, all of which did not exist in the natural order of his world. He saw that it was this alloy's properties that gave the sword its incredible edge and hardness, a toughness inconceivable to modern metallurgists, a metal so strong that it would take magic to make it bend or even break. The sword had been created by some strange alien magic, shaped into the form of a sword and given an edge that narrowed down to a single line of those tiniest bits of matter that made up its substance, quite literally because that was the only way it was going to be done. No smith's hammer could shape this metal, because it required a heat so intense that no smith could survive the temperatues required to melt the metal. The metal would not even melt in a volcano, it was that strong. He remembered when it had gotten red-hot in the desert after his battle with Spyder, how he'd been afraid to pick it up because he feared the blade would bend. Now he knew that it had never been in such danger. Though the metal did become red-hot, it would have been just as strong as it was now. The sword itself was curiously non-magical, but the properties of the metal and the need to shape it with magic, a magic that allowed the maker to give it as sharp an edge as could possibly be given to the weapon, made it as good as one.