Denice doesn't need as much sleep as a normal cat, conveniently; she'll meditate some more while the others do.

Time passes beneath the earth and snow as she meditates on the nature of the soul and the rhythms of nature, and learns how to tie the former into knots and thereby affect the latter, aided and abetted all the while by a displacer beast who supplies her with ... honestly, more meat than she can reasonably eat, in the form of snow-hares and ptarmigans and on one occasion a whole deer. 

After a month of this, she successfully pulls forth the profound cosmic powers, touches, in the shallowest way possible, upon the grand cycle of birth and death and rot and rebirth, and suddenly, a shank of deer that was quite past it's prime, at this point, is no longer past it's prime - in fact, it's smells as good as it was the day it was killed, even to the finely-tuned senses of a cat. Exactly as expected. 

Oh thank goodness. Good grief that was stinky. Also! She can do this new kind of magic! She was genuinely unsure if it was going to work, but it did!

That's really cool!

And the meat is tasty, too!

Now they just have to see what their host makes of it. Denice is pretty sure, at this point, that the displacer beast is smarter than a normal cat, if not quite up to the level of a human, so it wouldn't be that surprising for her to figure out that it was druidry, or to realize that it means something strange is going on here.

Thier host has certainly been aware that the smallest, smartest, kitten has been Up To Something. This is not what it was expecting, though it wasn't sure what it had been expecting.  

It will tentatively taken a mouthfuls of the purified deer meat. It seems good? It will leave the rest for the kittens, who are still very small and in need of fattening up. 

The kittens are working on that. Well, mostly the littlest one, who has definitely put on some weight, and feels much less bony; none of them have really gotten any bigger, though. And it seems like they just aren't as interested in food as she'd expect, from kittens, or as lively, though they don't seem unhealthy at all, just weirdly calm.

At any rate, they're eating now, and snuggle up to her when they're done.

Good, Good. It's important for children to eat well and grow up. Maybe in the spring she will let them out and teach them to hunt. For now, she will keep them safe and hidden and make sure they have everything they need. Even if they are filled with kittenish delusions of adequacy at surviving exploration.

(Yeah, it's pretty stressful how they can't leave the cave without being tracked down and brought back; she's given up on it, herself, but her familiars keep trying from time to time. She is pretty confident that they could get away if they needed to - she's extended the little bolthole she made the first day into an escape tunnel, digging for half an hour every day after the monster falls asleep, and she's not sure she's outside her range yet but it's got to be reasonably close - but it's still cold out there, and she has no way of bringing the book with her. It's a tough tradeoff, but the long-term benefit of having more magic wins out.)

A few more weeks pass and Denice's progress in magic continues at a good pace. She won't have the full extent of even first circle druidry mastered without a full cycle of the seasons passing, but what she does have is still useful enough to make the practice useful.

Spring arrives, in due time. The warmth doesn't penetrate this deep into the earth, not yet, but the drip of melting snow does, creating muddy puddles around the entryway of the den but mercifully leaving their sleeping space dry.

Spring! Perhaps it's time to take the kittens to learn to hunt? That's an important skill for kittens to learn, and it might not be too cold.

Yes yes yes let them ouuuuut!

Outside! Hooray!

Denice flattens her ears slightly and looks back at the displacer beast, lashing her tail once - can you believe these guys - before bounding off after her familiars.

She will follow! Her appearance is even more disconcerting when she moves at full speed to keep up with the kittens, since her image will appear to collide with trees that the real beast has smoothly mived past, and then it will flicker and jump to another displacement in another direction. Moving at full speed through dense forest, this will happen every second or so. 

They are all going to get covered in snowmelt-mud pretty fast. 

A bit of mud is fine. They do try to avoid the worst of it.

They're much more interested, right now, in putting distance between themselves and the displacer beast than in hunting.

Denice tries to keep up, but she's smaller, clumsier, much less experienced with mud, and in worse physical shape, and she quickly tires out and scurries under a bush to catch her breath.

They rush past sparkling creeks and trees shedding their loads of snow. Was that an eagle with a crown of flames? Was that mask carved into a tree-trunk? No time to check!

Wait, what. Dammit, where did they go? She has superior stamina but they can take paths she can't fit into, so they can, with difficulty, loose their pursuit. For now, at least.