Each day had become an established pattern. He would wake up and eat breakfast with Sarraya, usually eating whatever was left of the unfortunate victim from the previous night's hunting. Then they would travel until the hottest part of the day, when they would shelter again to give Sarraya relief from the blistering heat. While she rested, Tarrin practiced with his magic. After the hottest part of the day was over, they travelled again until about an hour before sunset. Then they would find a good campsite that would offer shelter from the Sandmen, Tarrin would track down whatever unlucky animal was nearby for dinner, and they would eat again. Then Tarrin would practice with his magic again until he felt ready to sleep. And the new day would start the cycle over again.
Time was something of of a fluid thing for Tarrin. In cat form, he was utterly unable to keep a sense of time outside of the time of day. If he held the form for more than a few days, he became incapable of remembering what day it was. It was a function of his Cat side, a side that didn't care about the past or the future, a side that only lived in the moment. In his humanoid form, he could keep track of time, but only if that time didn't fall into an established pattern. As soon as it did, it all blurred together in a kind of cloud of sameness, and he had trouble counting back the days to determine how much time had passed. Sarraya had become his timekeeper, telling him that the days were marching on, that the winter in the West was beginning to yield to spring.
Tarrin did have one sense of continuity during their travels. His practice of his magic had given him a gauge of sorts to determine how far they had come. At first, it required a supreme act of will and intense concentration to use his Weavespinner magic, but as he practiced more and more, that level of force and concentration became less and less. He went from having to focus his entire attention on his magic to being able to exercise his magical ability with only a modicum of effort. Much as it had been for him before he lost his power, he became intimately familiar with the process, and that familiarity and the practice he had done had elevated his powers to make them quite nearly as reliable as they had been before the accident. He could again summon up his magic whenever he needed it, and it generally did what he wanted it to do. The practice did what it was intended to do, and that was give him the ability to use Sorcery.
But now he could use it safely and efficiently, something he had not had before. It felt strange to him every time he gathered himself to use his power, that he had no reason to fear it now. But it also felt as if he had been healed of some long injury, and had become what he was meant to be from the beginning.
As the days passed, he came to fully appreciate his power, and how much it had changed. Weavespinner magic worked without the initial stage of building power to weave spells, and that was a significant difference. When he had seen the Sha'Kar woman use her magic, he had been stunned by the unbelievable speed in which she could control her magic. Now that he had begun to use the same kind of magic, he discovered it to be dramatically faster. Weavespinner magic literally moved at the speed of thought, though he still had to concentrate to use his power where the Sha'kar seemed to be able to use it instantly. He understood that a Weavespinner could out-weave any regular Sorcerer so effectively it would nearly be ridiculous. By the time the Sorcerer was ready to use magic, the Weavespinner already had total control of the surrounding Weave. Anything the Sorcerer did could be controlled by the Weavespinner. The only time the Weavespinner was reduced to the same rules was when he or she resorted to High Sorcery, and that gave advantages all its own. Speed was the margin of victory in Weavespinner magic, but raw power prevailed when moving up the rungs of the progression of magical power.
One pitfall he had already identified was the ease of Weavespinner magic. It was almost too easy, and he could already see dangers in becoming too close to the power. He would begin using Sorcery without even realizing it, having his will and wish start to affect the Weave in ways he didn't intend. When he did reach the same level of competency as the Sha'Kar, he would have to keep a tight control on his thoughts, on his desires, else he unconsciously start using Sorcery to try to bring them about. That could be disastrous, especially considering his aggressive indifference to the continued life of the people around him he didn't know, or particularly care about. Stray impulses to have them go away could result in killing magic, and that was something that he knew he had to prevent before it happened, else he could get himself into serious trouble, both mentally and socially.
His sense of the Weave had also increased day by day, becoming more and more acute as time passed. His practice had intensified it even more, until absolutely nothing about the Weave could escape him when he actively concentrated on it. He could feel everything within it, every miniscule shift in its pattern of energy, every pulse of the communal heart that powered the flow of magic through the Weave. He could read the Weave like a book, could sense magic moving through it and determine what kind of magic it was, where it had come from, where it was going, and usually who had summoned it. Even Sarraya's Druidic magic became more clear to him. Not because it went through the Weave, because it didn't, but because when she used it, she created something of an echo on the Weave. And with a little practice, he began to be able to sense what she was going to do before it happened, because of the volume, pitch, and harmonics carried within that echo.
During that time of practice and progression, they had not been bothered much by the Selani. Almost all of the clans were at Gathering, but there were a few Selani left here and there, left behind to guard water supplies and verdant belts, to ensure the flocks had something when they returned. Those sentries didn't interfere with Tarrin, but a few of them had taken up following him, most likely as an entertaining diversion in the monotonous task of guarding plants that don't really try to get up and run away. He could see them sometimes in the morning or after dark, when there was no heat-haze to hide them in the distance. He didn't really care that they followed him, as long as they stayed back there.
All of it had a purpose, and that purpose was Jegojah. The Doomwalker was coming, he could even sense its approach now, and it would be there soon. Days, perhaps, but no more than a ride. Tarrin's hatred and fury over the Doomwalker had not eased over those uncountable days of preparation--in fact, they had become worse. Tarrin would never forgive the Doomwalker for killing Faalken, for trying to kill his sister and his parents, and the thought that it just kept coming back again and again had offended him at the deepest level possible. He was tired of looking over his shoulder for Jegojah, and he was absolutely determined to deal with the Doomwalker for the last time. There would be no quarter, no mercy, in this battle, and it would not end until one of them was destroyed. He wasn't quite sure how he was going to accomplish this seemingly impossible task, but he wasn't all that concerned. His impulsive nature gave him a bent of creativity, and he was fairly confident that when the time came, he'd think of something, confident that the Goddess would tell him what to do. It was faith, faith in his goddess to protect and watch over him. It was all he had, because days and days and days of endless thought and planning had not yielded a real plan for ridding himself of Jegojah once and for all. Faith was about the only thing he had left, but it was something that he was willing to depend upon. His goddess had yet to fail him, and with a record like that, he was more than willing to put blind trust in her.
Since he had regained a goodly portion of his power, the focus of his travels had drifted away from magical study and had reached a point where he felt it was time to get ready for Jegojah. That meant that he needed to find an ideal battleground, a place that would suit his needs while eliminating the largest of Jegojah's advantages. It needed to be a broken place, with lots of irregular ground. That favored Tarrin, who was more mobile and agile, who could use that broken land to better advantage than his slower, armored foe. It also had to be bare rock, to deny the Doomwalker its power to draw energy from the land. It needed to be a lot of rock, to keep the Doomwalker from fleeing to a place where it co
uld draw energy when the battle turned against it.
One place seemed perfect to him, a place that both Denai and Allia had mentioned. Some place called the Broken Lands, a place where a flat sheet of rock, hundreds of square longspans in area, had been pierced by innumerable gulleys, canyons, and crevasses. But that place was many days behind them, to hear Denai talk about it. He wasn't about to go all the way back there and travel the distance to where he was again. Since that place wasn't available, maybe something smaller, something a bit closer, would do. But without Denai and Var to guide him, he'd have to just wander around until he found something suitable.
So it was with an eye on the horizon that Tarrin ran that day, absently correcting Sarraya on her Sha'Kar as she practiced by speaking in that language. The corrections were mainly cosmetic, for the Faerie was now more or less fluent in the language, but she had a bad habit of using words of other languages when she felt another word more perfectly mirrored her thoughts. That was something that irritated the perfectionist in Tarrin when it came to languages, so he strove to break her of it now, before it became too ingrained to easily shed. The terrain of that region of the desert was noticably hilly, but lacked the rock spires and mesas more common in the southern reaches of the desert. He had a sneaking suspicion that it wasn't going to be easy to find a good battleground in that section of the desert, but he had to keep looking. There were many more wild animals there than in the southern reaches of the desert, but that made sense in that there seemed to be more plant life to support the food chain.
"Can we stop?" Sarraya asked in Sha'Kar. "I'm starting to get hot."
Tarrin pulled in and looked up at the sky. The sun was pretty close to its noontime zenith, and it did feel a little warm. Ever since he had become a Weavespinner, he didn't notice warmth much anymore. Or cold, for that matter. He could feel heat, but it was as if it had no meaning for him anymore, because it never really felt hot.
"Alright. Let's go to that little hillock over there," he said, pointing at a small tor that rose up from the surrounding low hills. "It's higher up, so we can see anything coming at us."
They moved up to the top of the little tor, which had steep drops on two sides, and Sarraya conjured up a little lean-to to serve as shade against the brutal sun. She also conjured some lunch, and a little ice from some glacier somewhere to put in a tiny conjured cup of wine. Tarrin sat just inside the lean-to, the shade yielding to the sun about halfway up his legs as he sat there with his legs out and ankles crossed, leaning against a large rock that was under the lean-to's protection. He watched in mild interest as a scorpion braved the heat of the sun to climb up his ragged pant leg and perch atop his knee, probably trying to figure out what it was it had just ascended. The little tail sting flexed back and forth rhythmically as it tried to decide just what to do next. Then, probably deciding that there was no food there, it climbed across his legs and down the other side, then scuttled behind the safety of a pile of loose rocks nearby.
"Ah, much better," Sarraya sighed, flitting over and sitting on his thigh. "You know, the desert is actually kind of pretty. Nothing like the forest of course, but it does have its own unique charm."
"You only just noticed?"
"Don't be nasty," she chided, looking up at him. "What do you think Var and Denai are doing right now?"
"Probably something that would make you giggle," he replied absently.
"I'd put money that if they're not married by now, then they're betrothed."
"You'd lose that bet," Tarrin told her. "Selani don't associate trysts with marriage. Why spoil a perfectly fine physical relationship with marriage?"
"I guess I'm a prig," she laughed. "My husband kept trying to get me to go to bed with him for five years while we were betrothed, but I wouldn't hear of it. I liked him keeping his every attention on me, and to be honest, I didn't want to do badly in bed and have him decide that I wasn't worth marrying," she admitted. "After we were married, it didn't much matter. Not that he was disappointed about it. Five years of fun we could have had, down the drain. Ah, well."
"You know, you've never talked about this mysterious husband of yours. Does he mind you being out here with me?"
Sarraya grunted softly. "Oh, yes," she said firmly. "But that's one of the reasons I'm here. I love Danzig, but he's terribly possessive, and he has a fit when I perform my duties as a member of the Druids. Sometimes I take these little trips just to spite him. These little separations ensure we can still tolerate each other when I come home. He's very sweet and accommadating for a while, and then regresses back to his jealous ways. When he does that, I leave again. It does him good to realize that I can take care of myself, and I'm not going to go chasing after every Faerie boy I meet."
"You have any children?"
"Not yet," she replied. "But I'm young yet. I've got a few hundred years to go before age starts becoming an issue." She looked up at him. "Why the sudden interest in my private life? You've never so much as asked me my husband's name before."
"Because you talk all the time, and never talked about it," he replied. "You always chatter on and on about senseless things. For once, I wanted to hear you chatter about something that matters."
She gave him a wild look, then burst out into gales of laughter. "Well, I guess I deserved that one, didn't I?" she acceded, wiping a tear from her eye. "I didn't think you'd be interested in boring old daily life."
"I'd be more interested in things that matter to you than whatever floats to the top of your mind at the time," he said pointedly.
"Alright, alright. I live in the southern tracts of the forest, in a colony of Faeries. It's the closest thing to a city we have. I live with my husband Danzig, who's something of an important figure in our society. Something like an advisor to our leader, which really means that he goes and gets drunk with the other advisors every night and pretends to debate about things that matter. I have two sisters and two brothers, who all live in the same tree as I do, so we stay close. I'm the only one in my family who's a Druid."
"I thought all Faerie had magical affinity."
"We do, but not everyone cares to develop it," she replied. "And we're not all Druids. We have Priests, and we also have Faeries who practice Wizardy. That gives our colony a good mix of magical orders that can deal with a wide range of problems."
"Clever."
"When you find something that works, you stay with it," she chuckled. "No one else in my family really cared to study magic. It takes discipline, you see, and discipline isn't a trait you see often in my people."
Tarrin laughed quietly. "I noticed."
"Would it scare you to know that as far as Faeries go, I'm very disciplined?"
Tarrin looked down at her, then he laughed again. "Yes, that is scary," he told her.
"We're a frivilous bunch, I'll admit it. But at least a day in the colony is never boring."
"It sounds more like chaos."
"Sometimes it is. The only thing we have to bind us together is our laws, and Fae-da'Nar. We have our customs and practices, like other societies. Of course, we don't often adhere to them if our fancy takes us some other way, but that's part of the unique charm of the Faeries. The only things we can really say we obey are our laws, and only because the penalties for breaking those laws are severe enough to even make us afraid of breaking them."
"Heh. It takes something pretty drastic to scare a Faerie. They must be awful."
"The mildest of them is to have your wings cut off and be landbound while they grow back. The worst of them is exile."
"Exile? That doesn't sound bad."
"Faerie are very social, Tarrin. We like to be together. A Faerie robbed of those social contacts doesn't last long, so it's literally a death sentence."
"You're not like that."
"I'm a Druid, Tarrin. I have more discipline than most Faeries. I can tolerate separation from the colony for much longer than other Faerie can, but even I can't stay away from the colony forever. In about another year,
the need to be back in the colony will become too strong, and I'll have to go home."
"There, see? I've learned something. I could have listened to you chatter on about interesting things all this time, and I could have learned a great deal from you."
"Don't rub it in," she said in an accusing voice.
"Truth is truth," he said calmly. "How you--"
He was cut short by something he had never experienced before. It was coming from the Weave, and the only way he could describe it was that the Weave screamed. He jumped to his feet, ripping the roof off the lean-to and dislodging Sarraya as he shot up and tried to discover what the strange, frightening sensation was, where it was coming from. It took him a moment to realize that it was emanating from the Weave, a powerful surge that blasted through all the strands at once, like a ripple playing across a pond. Within that surge came that scream, a horrific sound that wasn't sound, a shriek of emanations of the Weave that chilled him in ways he couldn't describe.
"Mother!" he gasped. "What--"
The scream echoed in his ears, again and again, and he found a voice within the inaudible cries, a voice he knew.
Jenna!
That was Jenna! In an instant, he realized exactly what was happening, and it made his heart lurch. Jenna had lost control! She was very nearly as powerful as he was, and he knew that that meant that she now stood on the precipice, she was now facing the challenge of her power. She had to conquer it, or it would destroy her. The scream went on and on, becoming more and more powerful, making the entire Weave shudder in ways that only ones of his magical stature could comprehend.
Tarrin, she's not going to make it! the Goddess said urgently, with a desperation in her voice that he had never heard before. She's going to be Consumed!
"NO!" he shouted in a mighty tone, clamping his paws into fists. He had to do something, anything! He couldn't stop what was happening, but there had to be something that he could do! Jenna was too young, too young to understand, too young to know what to do!
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