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You watch as snow blankets the valley in an immense unbroken sheet, coating the landscape in a white haze and obscuring its furthest reaches from even your impeccable eyesight, while the gale whips the treetops in the pine groves to and fro. The snowfall is not nearly as heavy nor the wind nearly as strong as some of the storms you experienced in the far north, but it is cover enough that you might fly right above a troop of orcs or men without them ever knowing it, and that is plenty enough.
With a vague sense of where you left off the other day, you spread your wings and fly, letting your weight carry you into a slow descent until your underbelly is almost brushing the treetops. A flap or two keeps you airborne until you pass over a sheer cliff that looks familiar - the same cliff the huntsmen had camped beneath. You bank into your turn and ease yourself into a gentle landing atop the cliff’s edge, making sure to avoid clipping your wings on any sharp boughs.
You inhale long and deep, and from the missing wedge of rock below you can still smell clearly the mellow spice and smoke you now associate with the face of men. Gripping the weather-battered stone and folding your wings in, you scale your way down, leaving long gouges in the rock face and knocking chunks loose as you go before landing in a shallow patch of snow. Already you can tell that the trail of the men is strong only where they spent so much time in one place, and becomes significantly weaker as it leads off, doubly so for the snow covering it.
Nonetheless, you set to work. With the mountain men’s scent firm in your mind you start following their path through the woods, brushing snow aside as you go, never once losing the trail and making excellent time because of it. It seems you have something of a gift for discerning things by scent, a natural even by the standards of dragons.
At your pace it isn’t long before you come across a familiar scene. You step into the clearing, Gimtog’s corpse still in the same messy black heap of twisted limbs and half-chewed innards in which you left it, though now nearly unrecognisable by sight due to the quantity of snow covering the orc like a shroud. His foul stench persists, however, as does that of his diminutive companion further on.
You breathe through your nostrils again, picking apart the different smells in the air as easily as you would shades of green in the trees around you. Hidden beneath the reeking orc guts is the earthy aroma of the mountain men, and slightly stronger than before. They stopped here, likely wondering what brought these orcs to such a gruesome end and milling about in morbid curiosity. Perhaps the manling took to jabbing at the bodies as he did with the stag? And if that curiosity carried their eyes just a little upward…
