Redsand Canyon scrinium

Her eyeballs were beginning to ache in a way reminiscent of her long chats with Wraen. Ignoring the sense of nostalgia that entailed, Towhee mulled the Imperator’s latest slew of intelligence.

So… the Saints and Ursus are both at large. They’re both dangerous and unpredictable. And we’re standing in the Saints’ previous territory. Once more, she was simply seeking to keep her facts straight.

She wondered if the latter really meant much. What would she do if she found a pack living at the caldera? Even with all the Redhawks’ history—hell, the place was named after them—it wasn’t like she could stake a claim anymore. Towhee supposed she would be kind of annoyed about it, though.

You want my advice, she echoed Germanicus’s earlier words. My advice is to pit them against each other and hope they achieve mutual destruction. I’m not really sure how we’d pull that off, though, Towhee said dryly.

She fell into a pensive silence, reaching far back into her memories about the war with Blackfeather Woods, her only real combat experience. It was so long ago, she had trouble recalling specific details. What she did remember clearly was that despite planning carefully, combining forces with allies, preemptively attacking and even winning the fight, the Blackfeathers had only popped back up again like none of it had mattered.

We can’t make any decisions without thinking this through very carefully, weighing the possible consequences and all. We could could plan an attack on Ursus—helping those kids is a worthy cause—but at what cost? Even with all the training in the world, it doesn’t mean a damn thing sometimes. Remember how there were for our five of us against one on our own borders? And yet we failed to do almost any damage at all? Shit like that happens all the time, Towhee posited out loud, teeth grating.