Holding his sword low, dripping with the black ichor of Demon blood, Tarrin turned to look at the six ships. They were nearly two longspans away, well out of reach of Sorcery. They sat there, mocking him, threatening him with their presence, and he suddenly felt helpless to do anything about them. That helplessness ignited a sudden storm of anger, anger that they would not come close enough to face him with honor, not come close enough to where he could kill them. They would not threaten him! He wouldn't allow it! He had come out here to draw them away from his friends, but he would not run to the desert with six skyships hovering over him the whole way! He focused on that single thought, letting the anger take him over. Only in fury could he control his power, and he needed that anger now. He had to work himself up to the point where it would be safe for him to use his power, because that power was the only thing that could get rid of the Zakkites. He could feel it build inside him, and he fueled that anger with images of his sisters, his friends, in danger because of the Zakkites, because of him. And that was all it took. Even the fleeting thought of Allia or Keritanima in danger was enough to send him into a mindless fury, but this time all it did was give him the anger-fueled willpower to risk using his magic.
Throwing the sword aside, Tarrin closed his paws into fists and raised them to his chest as his eyes suddenly ignited from within with a blazing, incadescent light as Tarrin reached out and touched the Weave. The raw, unadulterated power of High Sorcery raged through the Weave and then broke over him, threatening to drown him with its incredible power, a power that no single living Sorcerer other than him could control. His anger gave him the power, the will, to harness that rampaging flood of magical power, a power that caused his paws to limn over with the ghostly, wispy white radiance known as Magelight. Tarrin absorbed the power that the Weave thundered into him like a thirsty man drinking water, allowing it to fill him, coarse through him, infuse him with the might of the Goddess. Tarrin sought to draw the power faster than the Weave could supply it to him. Tarrin threw out his paws as flows of the seven Spheres of Sorcery emanated from his body, the tendrils of magic of which the Weave was constructed, and they twisted and wrapped together into groups of seven flows as they issued forth from him. Those braids of flows that struck the strands of the Weave held fast, while the rest dissipated, and when all of them had found purchase, Tarrin yanked on them. In a visible flash, every twisted braid of flows that had touched a strand flared with a brilliant light, then vanished back into invisibility, itself a brand new strand. The new strands were all joined together in a vast spiderweb of magical ropes, and they joined within Tarrin, giving him a direct pathway to the magic he sought.
His entire body literally exploded into Magelight as the power filled him at a rate that would have destroyed lesser Sorcerers in the blink of an eye. He screamed out his anger and the pain he felt at drawing such power, the living fire that ignited inside him as the accumulated power sought to consume him in holy fire from the inside out. It hazed over his sight, but his control over that power did not waver in the slightest as he used the pain to drive his fury, to focus his attention on the distant Zakkites, the ones that had to be destroyed. The anger, the pain, the power, they dulled his thinking as he devoted most of his conscious mind to controlling the rampage of unstoppable power that had pooled within him. He only knew that they were out of range of conventional Sorcery. That meant that he had to create a weave that would release near him, yet have a residual effect that would carry all the way over to them. His first thought was the weave of pure, raw magical power of which he was fond, a beam of pure Sorcery whose destructive power was unrivalled for a weave of its type. But such a weave required physical aim, and they were too far away for him to hit all six ships with it before he was drained to the point where the weave would dissipate. No, that was too grand. For this, he had to think small, use something elegant for its simplicity.
Wind. Wind, pure wind, a force that, if it was strong enough, could destroy almost anything.
Tarrin's preference for air magic was something he had never actively admitted to himself, but the simple truth was that weaves of air seemed the most natural for him to create. Tarrin reached out, reached within, using the vast power within him to draw out flows of Air from the Weave, draw them from strands a longspan away, a vast network of flows that all conjoined in the air above his head. That confluence of combined power grew, and grew, and grew, growing systematically more vast, more energized. Tarrin wove the single flow together in a simple weave whose dimensions were absolutely staggering, a feat that not even a Circle of joined Sorcerers could accomplish, a singular weave whose dimensions could be measured in longspans. The effort had not only drained every fiber of magic out of him, it forced him to continue to feed the weaving by simultaneously drawing power from the Weave and then channeling it into the weave he was creating, something that he was told was impossible to do, yet he could do. Such redirection of magic was ten times more exhausting than simply drawing power then discharging it, and the fringes of his vision began to blur as the monumental effort of creating such a massive weave began to make him feel as if his bones were turning to powder. But his rage, his fury, absolutely would not allow him to falter. His wobbling knees suddenly became strong, straight, and Tarrin raised up to his full height and looked up into the sky, looked up at the titanic weave forming over his head, feeling in one instant the horror of what he was about to do, the resolve to carry through to protect his life and Sarraya, and the ecstatic feeling of absolute invulnerability, the feeling of being the most powerful being on the world, a sense of nearly godliness.
But all such feelings vanished as the glow around Tarrin's body suddenly went out, and he motioned in the skyships' directions with both paws in an overhanded sweeping motion. He did this as he released the Weave. And when he did so, the sky split open as a sudden shift in the atmosphere caused a powerful blast of wind, moving at the speed of a hurricane's gale, erupted from the magical spell over him and raged towards the south, expanding as it moved.
Absolutely nothing could withstand the absolute power of the magic he unleashed. When the weave touched the ground, it scoured absolutely everything away. Grass, branches, raintrees, animals, even the upper layers of topsoil, absolutely everything. It grew larger and larger and larger, growing wider and wider, until it formed a crescent dome whose edge was nearly half a longspan wide, whose top was more than a thousand spans high. But this was no solid weave, it was simply the leading edge of a blast of wind that would last for nearly ten seconds. The invisible weave began to take on coloring from the debris it scoured from the ground, turning a muddy color, hiding the ships from his view.
Tarrin sagged to the ground, panting heavily. He could feel the Weave begin to rebuild the energy he had expended, but then it suddenly drained away harmlessly from him. Sarraya had cut him off, protected him from the power in his weakened state. He could no longer see the skyships, but that no longer mattered. They would not get out of the way in time, and the wind would hit them. It would rip their ships to pieces, and everyone on those ships would die.
They would not threaten him again.
The weave dissipated about the same time he gathered his breath and managed to stand back up, Sarraya patting him on the leg in concern. Before him, there was grass and life, but about two hundred spans past him there was nothing but a massive brown scar, an area of earth stripped of everything that had been over it just seconds before. As if the grass had been a rug, and some immense hand had reached down from the heavens and plucked it up from the ground. There was a huge cloud of dust to the south, but it was turning from brown to beige as the dissipated weave began to lose its energy. He knew that the wind would continue in that direction, but it would not move at such incredible speeds. It would simply be a strange gust of strong wind, that would move towards the south. It would grow wider and weaker as it moved, until it finally expended its energy back into the atmosphere from which it had been formed.
Tarrin
looked at the devestation, and it did not move him in the slightest. He had been threatened, and now he was not. The how of reaching that conclusion did not matter to him. Panting, feeling strength slowly seep back into his body, he knelt down for a moment to rest, to gather himself.
"My, that was...excessive," Sarraya said carefully.
"It got them, didn't it?" he said bluntly. His body quickly melted down into his cat form, and he sat down sedately on the ground. "Come on, we have to go while we have a good chance to escape unnoticed," he told her. "Anyone close enough to chase us now has other things to worry about."
"If they're still alive," she grunted as she climbed up onto his back, but then she slid off quickly. "Wait, Tarrin, the sword. It's laying over there. We can't leave that behind."
Tarrin looked to his right, and saw the black-bladed sword laying on the ground. She was right. He shapeshifted and reclaimed it, then shifted back and allowed her to climb back on. "We can't stop tonight," he told her. "We need as much distance as we can get. We'll rest when the sun comes back up."
"I really miss my wings," she muttered, then he rose up, turned towards the west, and started off at a bounding pace. "Tarrin, I think we need to talk about your Sorcery," Sarraya said as he ran.
"Why?"
"You're getting stronger," she replied. "Every time you use that much power, you seem to be able to handle more the next time you do it. You're growing stronger, and you're going to grow past my ability to control you if you don't stop doing that kind of thing. I'm not saying to stop using Sorcery, I'm just saying to stop trying to crush a bug with a mountain. You need to learn how to do what you need to do without trying to drain the Weave dry. If you don't, I'm not going to be able to control you much longer."
That was something he never considered. But...she was right. He did seem to be able to go another step every time he drew power to his limit. Almost like working a muscle, every time he exhausted it, it became stronger. But it was not balanced. His ability to control that power was not increasing with the power itself. Sarraya was right. If he exceeded her ability to control him, he was going to be in very real, very immediate danger. And so would she.
"I can't promise anything, but I'll try," he replied after a moment. "Most of the time, I do things by impulse. I guess it's a Were-cat thing."
"Did I mention how much I hate Were-cats?" Sarraya said with a grunt as Tarrin bounded away from the devastation behind him.
"I wonder how those Zakkites conjured those Demons. Phandebrass told me that no Wizard would be insane enough to try."
"You'd better ask him, because I have no idea," Sarraya replied. "Then again, considering what we have, maybe they were insane enough to try."
"You have a point," Tarrin acceded as he bounded into the setting sun, leaving behind him a scene of tortured landscape.
Chapter 2
Eternity.
The days flowed together in an eternal moment, a sensation that time does not move. Every day dawned just as the last, every day seemed to be the day before, every day became the day tomorrow would have been.
Time flowed in different ways for many people, but for Tarrin in his cat form, it was a life of an eternal moment, where concepts of past and future blurred in the power of the moment. It was the happenstance existence of the Cat, an animal who understood the concept of time of day, but could not distinguish one day from another within its memory. There was only past, or present. There was no future that did not exist beyond the setting or rising of the sun. The days ran together within his mind one after another, becoming a jumble of sameness that could not be counted, nor even remembered. Every day was the same. He would sleep during the day in a covered place, a place to hide, oftentimes evicting or eating the prior inhabitant of his daily den. The night was spent on the move, moving in the direction that the Faerie told him to go, a night spent in near complete silence and sensitivity to his environment. Sarraya seemed more than happy to chat or while away the time, but the savannah was a vast plain full of huge animals, many of which would consider the small cat to be a meal rather than part of the surroundings. There was no sense of progress, no sense of anything other than the needs of the moment. He would sleep, eat, or move. There was nothing else to him.
He had no idea how long he had followed that daily pattern. There were only very broad, vague concepts of the passage of time. One was Sarraya. At first, she rode on his back, rode him like he was a horse. But her wings did indeed grow back--how long it took, he had no idea--and then a distinction arose in his mind. There was the time when she rode him, then the time when she flew near him. There was nothing to remember about the time when she rode him, but that memory remained inside him, a distinct memory of the past. She had also changed during that time, that was another thing he understood as the Cat slowly dominated his thoughts, as it did when he spent extended amounts of time in cat form. She had become less chatty and capricious, less irreverant and waspish. She became quieter, more distant from him.
Though he had a sentient mind, the time in cat form had brought the Cat out in him, causing his personality to succumb somewhat to the instincts within, and he had a strange feeling that that was one of the reasons Sarraya began to drift away. The other was the emptiness within.
Emptiness. There was no other way he could describe it. Despite his instincts and his animal-tinted view of the world, that emptiness stayed within him. It was the emptiness of loss, the keen awareness that those he wanted to be near were not near him. Every waking moment, every fleeting thought, they were images of those he yearned to be close to, those who were supposed to be by him. Allia's face haunted him whenever his eyes were opened, a shady image of a beautiful dark princess, an empty feeling that the peace he felt when she was near had been taken away from him. Keritanima's furry face was there as well, the sister long gone from him, whose absence was both dulled by the many months, and more sharp in its cut for the amount of time she had been gone. Even in his diminished ability to track the passage of time, the sense of her distance was not lost to his conscious mind. There were other faces as well, the faces and scents and feelings of friends and relatives, confidantes and siblings, a whirling jumble of security in his mind that had been taken away. They were all gone, far away, stripped from him by his own choice, but that was little consolation to him now.
The missing part of his life had drastically altered his behavior. It was an eternity in pain, an endless moment of feeling the loss of something that was vital to him, a loss that he could not ignore, could not deny, could not dull. The feeling of it did not change day after day after day. Every day was as the last, a day of surviving, of running towards some distant goal which made no sense to his animal-dominated mind, and always there was the emptiness inside, a gnawing pain in his heart that told him he was not where he wanted to be. It did not go away, it did not change, and it was something to which he could not grow accustomed.
His animal mind was not prepared to deal with such a powerful memory, a powerful emotion. It could not get away from it, and even its formidable ability to control him could not affect that singular feeling. It was something against which even his instincts could not prevail. Since it could not deny the feeling, and it was not capable of handling it, it surrendered to it, allowing it to remain in the forefront of his mind at almost all times.
Because there was no moment that did not hold emptiness, Tarrin withdrew from Sarraya. Nothing seemed to hold any meaning for him. There was nothing but the emptiness, a consuming feeling that tainted everything he saw and felt and did. When Sarraya spoke to him, he did not listen to her. He did not reply to her. She was a friend, but she was not one that made the emptiness go away. He did as she said, if only because he understood that she knew where they were going. Every day was as the day before, every day was a monotonous repeat of every other day. Sleep, eat, run, always with the feeling that there was something missing from within him, and that missing something brought a strange hollow pain that would not go away
. Even though his conscious mind was still within him, even it began to succumb to the emptiness, making him listless and slow to comprehend things. It was as if the emptiness were a blanket thrown over his senses, thrown over his coherent mind, forcing him to reach through it to see or do or feel anything else.
There was little sense of continuity. There was little sense of the passage of time, yet he seemed to be aware of time moving. There was the time before Sarraya could fly, and the time after. There was the time when he had a shiny coat, clean, and his body was strong. But there was also the time where he was dirty and matted, after he stopped grooming himself, of when his limbs and body withered from great exertion with little food. Hunting seemed to lose its importance in the face of the emptiness, as did everything else. To do anything at all sharpened the empty pain inside, so to do anything was only done when absolutely necessary.
It was an endless moment, an eternal now of empty pain, a pain within that would not heal, a pain that eroded him from within. An eternity, and even his conscious mind seemed to dully realize that it was going to drive him insane if something was not done to end it. That realization came as the sun rose over yet another day of empty sameness, a sunrise coming after a night of running. The sun rose over the same flat land, as if he had done nothing but run in a great circle during the night, only to come back to where he began. Tarrin sat on a dead log of a raintree, his head hung low as his eyes dully surveyed the land before him. It was a day like any other, a day of weary emptiness, a day like the last. The only thing different was the reawakening of his conscious mind, an act that required something significant from his conscious mind after so long in cat form. But as his instincts affected his conscious thoughts, so they too were influenced by the human in him while in cat form. He had learned long ago that even when he tried to bury his human mind, to forget it, it would not remain quiet forever. It had finally stirred inside him, had finally rebelled against the slow degeneration of body and mind, had finally had enough.
Honor and Blood Page 5
