The spell takes a while longer, but the druid does not speak further.

- and then there is a gnome. A female gnome, not that it's easy to tell. Much younger than Regill.

"...Lann?"

She blinks a couple times, and sits up and stares at herself.

"Well that's... different," says a distinctly un-Lann-like voice.

"You're so cute!"

"Thanks, Ember." She sounds exasperated, and also like she's maybe trying to make her voice deeper than it ought to be on purpose, now, but it isn't really working very well.

"Well, you're not a hobgoblin or a troglodyte. I'm sure Finnean will resize to fit you, if you want to go back to using him."

"We'll be going now," she tells the druid, "Unless there's - anything else important we ought to know about the transformation."

The woman watches them impassively. "Very little worth learning can be spoken to strangers."

"All right. Thank you again, for all your help."

"Nenio, take us home."

She'll... go find Marit and tell him how it went, she guesses. And then afterwards check on Lann again, since she's - not really entirely convinced that Lann's okay, but he'll - she'll? - probably be as okay as before, not that that was incredibly okay, as long as people actually check in on her and help her adjust.

" - well, that's good to have as an option, and potentially really good to have as an option, if it combats old age, there's rich people who'd pay for that. Do you know how long it gives you after people are killed, is it as Raise Dead?"

"Given that she reincarnated Lann immediately after killing him, and wouldn't tell us anything else, no. If we find a way to get the oil, we can test it. I can try the spell without it, but I strongly expect that the oil is a necessary material component."

"I suspect that it is possible to leverage the nature-themed powers into the ability to tend and process the necessary plants. But we don't have any of them, and don't even know which plants they are, yet, so right now I expect we can't replicate it. There are lots of different people we could ask - other druids, if we can find any, and the people on the island, or other powerful spellcasters who may have run into it, but - I'm not incredibly optimistic about getting any more before the bodies we have rot. Especially not if we have to grow our own plants, although then again I have grown the occasional tree in seconds, so - I guess it's hard to say."

"I can spend nights recruiting adventurers for us in Absalom, though I don't expect that to be productive without revealing I'm a swordmage. We can take out a loan from the Church of Abadar, get diamonds from Arsinoe, and Raise people. ...we can do that, and then also negotiate loan forgiveness to whatever extent we're doing more than our share of the work of holding the Wound, I'd need to read the relevant agreements in a lot more detail but Abadarans of all people really ought to remember how this is supposed to work even when it means they are paying more when they can afford it less. We can bring in a host of angels. We can try to do a ring of Mansions. I can probably look farther afield for options, but I don't strongly expect to find good ones we're missing."

She frowns at the map.

"How many mansions does Tanat get?"

"Three. Maybe four if she's doing nothing else."

"Okay. Nenio gets two. And I can extend them, I checked with Nenio, at which point they last for two days each and we can have ten going at once. It'd tie up all of our seventh circle wizard spells, if we went for all ten, but - we can."

"If they're spaced close enough together, then I think we can send troops out without endure elements, as long as they have decent cold-weather gear. We cycle them in and out of the mansions every couple hours, instead of all day, and have the patrols responsible for smaller stretches of the barrier. More patrols, and much larger groups that include newer troops, so the newer people can engage demons under safer conditions. We lose fewer, and more of them get stronger. We're more prepared for summer, instead of less."

"You pointed out before that this trades off against using the mansions for food, as we've been using them, but - I'm not sure it does, if we station enough troops in them? Then the bulk of the force is still eating mansion food, but they're also living in the mansions and defending the barrier. Of course, if we field enough troops along the barrier to take full advantage of that much mansion food, we end up leaving Drezen mostly undefended. But at that point our endure elements spells aren't spoken for, and we can begin using them to instead march troops that are currently stationed in Kenabres up to Drezen. We have lots more down there, there just wasn't a good way to get them up here before spring."

"It doesn't fix the earlier losses, we're still going to have to decide whether to raise them or not. And - it's just a patch for the real problem, it won't fix the thing where everyone else is also seeing elevated losses. But I think it holds the barrier, and I think if we do it right it leaves our forces stronger after than they were before, and more prepared for combat in the springtime, instead of - eating the crusade's seed corn, like you said before."

" - you know, that sounds feasible to me. 

Can Worldwound fortresses call in emergency powerful backup when there's a concerted effort to take a wardstone fort?" It seems like there has to be a mechanism for that, or the wardstone forts wouldn't mostly still be standing after a hundred years, but apparently it was direct miraculous intervention that saved them in Kenabres and maybe that's standard (Iomedae the goddess must be so annoyed, if so. Well, She probably isn't capable of annoyance. Still.)

"I think most forts have emergency sendings. You don't see demons trying to take the wardstones that often, so I don't think they end up going through enough of them that this becomes infeasible."

"...If Drezen is attacked while I'm out, the thing to do is just to sending me, though, I think we already have more powerful people stationed here than almost any other fort along the barrier. Our problem is mostly that we advanced, and left behind the defensive fortifications that were set up along the previous barrier location. And that a lot of our people are new, I guess. But Drezen itself ought to be defensible."

"We could possibly use those rings of friend-finding to have one person keeping track of almost every mansion, and each mansion keeping track of Drezen. Then if there's an attack on Drezen - they wouldn't all get here in time, but some of them would, if we saw the demons coming from a ways out."

"I will certainly Sending you if Drezen is attacked while you're out, I'm just thinking how bare we could conceivably strip it. How many do we have in Kenabres?"

"Around a thousand, mostly new recruits. Not enough to fully replace the people we have in Drezen now, but at least as many as a normal Worldwound fort is staffed with. And they're Mendevians, so we ought to be able to get Nerosyan to increase our supply shipments for them."

"Sounds like a good plan to me. I suspect the men will be in favor of living out of Mansions, even if it means fighting more demons, and in spring we can replace some of those Mansions with actual fortifications, if nothing's changed by then."

"The plan is to move the barrier even further in, once the snow relents, which means we're going to have the same set of problems all over again anyway. I suppose from that perspective it'll be good to come up with something that can keep handling this problem. Although hopefully next year we won't be starting at the end of Sarenith, and we'll have more time at the end of the season to fortify the new lines. And the further we push, the shorter the lines between the wardstones should get, and the stronger the barriers themselves will be, making everybody safer. It's just going to be a while before we see that making things easier."

"Fair enough. - you will want fortified fallback positions for when that plan goes horrendously wrong, though, because when things go horrendously wrong you can't afford to be in a position of needing all your powerful spells a day just for logistics."

"...that's fair. All right."

"For now, I think, we figure out the specifics of doing it this way, to patch the current problem. We find and kill the ritualist, and give ourselves some breathing room again. And then we go over the spring plans again and figure out what the plans are for better fortifications, and for falling back if we can't advance."

"I think closing the net bit by bit is a good plan and will probably, in broad strokes, work. We will definitely suffer unimaginable losses to our own stupidity along the way, though.

Any word from Galfrey on your charter?"

"Not yet."

"Once we've got the situation at the front stabilized it might be in your interests to invest more in knowing what's going on in Nerosyan, but it's not a top priority. 

I'm expanding my surveillance forces. I want to capture a enhanced demon if we have the opportunity, I want to be able to tell the men a bit more about how to fight them, and I want to have some diplomatic currency with our allies to the north and south."