I've come up with a possible weapon we can use during the coming battles. The concept is using Mathilde's Matrix to place Pall of Darkness into an animal which is placed in a cage. The cage can then be thrown into a group of enemies to put then into a field of bewildering impenetrable darkness. I can see it being very effectively used to counter charges, quite possibly even causing a charge to completely fail and only cause casualties on the enemy side.
Of course there are a number of potential problems.
1. It might not even work, Pall of Darkness is a new spell for Mathilde and I don't think she's ever used it for a matrix. The result might cause the target animal to explode and successfully release the spell or to release the spell and not explode (good results), or it might result in complete failure such as the darkness remaining only inside the animal and thus being pointless (who cares if an animals insides are dark).
2. The dwarfs tend not to think much of human magic so I very much doubt the dwarfs would want to be given an animal that explodes into a cloud of impenetrable darkness that Mathilde cooked up over an hour or so.
Admittedly the dwarf's acceptance of human magic makes giving this to the dwarfs worse that pointless (it would probably antagonize them) but there are almost certainly at least some human auxiliaries around and they might be far more accepting, especially if this Darkness grenade works as well as I expect it might to counter charges. Considering that any humans here are going to be relatively soft and desirable targets compared to the dwarf forces we might pick up some decent customers and popularity if this concept works out well.
Regardless it only takes about an hour to test so it's something we should give a shot at some point to see if it has potential.
