Again, he felt a wave of...something. He looked down at the city, and for the first time, he began to slowly comprehend why he had had such a nagging feeling. He had been feeling the edges of a strong magic, and now that they were nearing the city, he was feeling it again, and it was markedly noticable. He looked down, trying to puzzle out what he was feeling. It was a spell, a woven spell, and it was big. It was impressive how large it was, how it had been created, and he realized that it had to take a circle of seven very good Sorcerers to create and maintain it. He couldn't see the spell, though, he could only sense it, and that worried him. What he could make out, however, was that the spell was laid over Torrian itself, filling its volume within the walls completely, and that it was not a spell meant to interact with the physical world.
Tarrin looked down, trying to make something out. Torrian wasn't a large city by any standard, more of a large town than a small city, with about five hundred buildings safely located within the log walls. But that was still an impressive amount of area to cover with a weave, a weave that he couldn't make out because of the difficulties of trying to see it through cat's eyes and being in cat form, which did impact his ability to use and sense Sorcery. Were there katzh-dashi in Torrian? Was this some part of Arren's plan that had been made when he wasn't there to hear it? His fahter had never said anything about katzh-dashi being assigned to the Rangers before.
No, wait. If they were making the spell, and it was such a large one, they had to be at its center. It would be the only way they could maintain something so large. They had to be at the center of it, so that the power that sustained it flowed as quickly as possible from the Sorcerers and into the weave's every woven edge. Tarrin looked down, swinging his head from one side to the other, fixing the middle of the weave in his mind. He found its center, and it was in a place that looked a little different from the others, a place with lots of torches and a blurry grayish color that made it separate from the rest of the city.
Gray. The only large gray thing in Torrian, a town made of wood and wattle buildings, was the castle.
Sorcerers in the castle, using a large spell that covered the entire city? Arren said that the Dals occupied his castle.
Something wasn't right. Very not right. Tarrin started squirming out of the basket as they crossed over the wall, as Ariana began a tight banking turn to keep Tarrin over the target. She didn't seem to notice that he was trying to squirm free of the basket--
--but he did end up free of it when he heard Ariana curse loudly and suddenly veer off in the other direction, dropping about fifty spans in a heartbeat, which caused Tarrin to get wrenched free of the basket. He began to fall immediately, but caught himself on a hastily woven platform of Air, and used it as a base from which to change form and regain his better eyes. He needed them right now.
It was chaos. Three black, scaly things were banking behind the Aeradalla, who was turning again to try to shake off the pursuers. One of them screeched, and he recognized it immediately as the cry of a Wyvern. He had been right in one's face as it screeched like that, the one that had capsized Rennaè's little riverboat on his first journey to Suld. Wyverns! He looked carefully, and saw that all three had riders. They all had crossbows, wearing black armor, taking shots at the Aeradalla as their Wyverns tried to bite at her wings when they managed to get close to their faster, more agile target.
Wyverns chasing Ariana. But only the ki'zadun used Wyverns as mounts. Jula had told him that.
Jula. Jula had been a Sorceress, and she had been in the ki'zadun.
Sudden horror rising up in him, Tarrin absently smashed the nearest Wyvern with a weave of Air, killing it and sending its rider plummeting to his death below, shrieking all the way down. His paws rose up, and a weave of Air, Water, and Fire spun together between them, causing a vicious blast of bright lightning to lash out from them, striking the rider of the next closest Wyvern squarely in the back, blasting the slight figure from the saddle. Maintaining the core of the spell, he recharged it and unleashed it again, striking the Wyvern with the last rider in the head with it, causing its beaked head to suddenly explode as blood and fluids boiled instantly from the incredible heat of the lightning, rupturing its head in a spectacular fashion. Gore and ichor splattered the rider just as he aimed his crossbow at Ariana, and it made him flinch as the bolt was loosed, just before the Wyvern dropped from the sky and carried the man to his doom. But instead of making him miss, the flinch actually corrected his aim, and the bolt struck his Aeradalla friend in the lower side, in her back. Tarrin knew immediately that it wasn't a mortal wound, but it did cause her to wobble in the air and drop some altitude, then dive towards the trees. She knew not to stay in the air when she was wounded.
The injury to Ariana only made him angry. Where did the Wyverns come from? They were so big, Ariana couldn't have missed them when she flew over the city on her scout! He looked down, and with his humanoid eyes, the nature of the massive weave covering Torrian became clear. He could see a town with empty streets, with torches at intersections, spaced through the streets, but it wasn't real.
It was an Illusion!
A massive Illusion! He penetrated it with his eyes, using his control over the Weave to allow him to ignore its false image, and beneath that he saw streets overflowing with men in Dal uniforms, running all over the place. There were men in black uniforms as well, uniforms he recognized as ki'zadun, and there were also Goblinoids. Dargu and Waern mainly, but he did see a pack of about twenty Trolls. They boiled out of houses, out of every building, running quickly and confidently towards the walls, towards the defenses, moving exactly as if they knew where to go and what to do. Nowhere, nowhere did he see a single man or woman in Sulasian dress. Everywhere he looked, he saw nothing but enemy troops. Thousands of them!
There was no small garrison here, there was a massive army!
He looked down, and to his horror, he saw forces forming up in a large open space near the gate, all of them mounted. They were going to ride out and attack the Rangers! He saw covers being thrown off of catapults, siege engines being readied by their crews, tubs of pitch and naptha ready beside them to hurl fire into the fields outside the city. He saw archers readying bows on the walls, he saw an army getting ready to ride out of the gates of Torrian and attack the Rangers and Woodkin hiding in the fields beyond. He saw a man run to a building and set fire to it, a building near the city gates that the Were-kin were going to try to take in the darkness.
It was a trap!
"No!" Tarrin growled, looking at what was below him as he stood in midair, eyes penetrating the Illusion. They had been waiting for them! They knew they were coming! And they knew what Arren had planned! But it made no sense! Why attack Ariana with Wyverns in full view of the army outside when they could have just let them set the fire--wait, it was too dark now for anyone to see the black Wyverns against the sky, even the Were-kin. It was too far away from the treeline even for a night-sighted Were-kin to be able to see so far. There was a good two longspan gulf between the treeline where the armies were hiding and the city walls, and that was new. They must have cleared the distance since the last time he'd been there. They had stopped Ariana, but they knew something couldn't have gone right for them, because something had killed their Wyverns.
Tarrin looked down at the city in horror. So many...so many of them. The Were-kin were going to slink right into a trap! The Rangers were going to be slaughtered!
Tarrin's heart seized as he realized what had to be done. It was...it was too horrible to think about. But what other way was there? If he didn't stop the Dals here and now, they would be facing a much larger army in Suld, and doing it with less men of their own. It would put his Goddess, himself, his friends, his family, his daughter, in mortal danger! There was nothing else he could do. There was no other way!
His eyes lighting from within with incandescent light, his paws limning over with Magelight as he pulled in the power of High Sorcery, Tarrin suddenly screamed in rage and horror.
The limned glow around his paws became coherent as he brought them together, and he wove together that chaotic mix of Air, Fire, Water, Divine, and token flows of the other Spheres to grant his spell the power of High Sorcery, then he unleashed it with a scream, unleashing it against the castle. A blazing bar of pure white light, as bright as the sun, suddenly came into being across the sky over Torrian, blazing from Tarrin's outstretched palms and slamming into the Torrian Keep, right into the very center of the Sorcerers he could feel there, maintaining the Illusion. The invincible blast of magical power struck the walls of the keep, and they withered to nothing under that incredible blow of magical might, sending stone and mortar and wood spinning away in burning chunks as Tarrin implacably raked that sustained beam of death across the castle, penetrating it all the way down to the dungeons, shattering stone and vaporizing people wherever it went. The initial blast had only killed three Sorcerers, and he could feel them in there, running from the power of his spell. He used it to chase them down, one by one, chase them down and destroy them in the blazing purity of the wrath of the Goddess, the punishment for working for those who opposed her.
When he killed the last, Tarrin wrenched the sustained stream of magical power, and that caused it to explode violently. It started where he was, forcing him to shield himself from the raw force of it with a shield of Air. The coherent blazing bar suddenly became an expanding snake of fire, writhing through the sky with the speed of a cannonball shot from a Wikuni bombard, until it struck the solid stone of the keep. The immense power of the detonation shattered the entire keep from the inside out, sending chunks of fiery debris soaring thousands of spans from the inferno that had once been the Torrian Keep, raining fire down on the city below. The sound of the detonation was like a physical thing, shattering windows all over the city and knocking down soldiers who stopped to look at the blazing pyre burning in the middle of Torrian.
No other way, he thought to himself over and over again as he released the weave and began drawing in more and more power. No other way. More and more of the power of the Weave flooded into him as he sent out flows and snapped them into strands to provide him with a direct feed of energy from the Weave. The Magelight limned over his entire body, and then it expanded from him, forming the concave star at the center of the shaeram, a blazing star that illuminated the city below with milky white light. Tarrin felt the platform of Air dissolve under his feet, felt himself being held aloft by the power itself, felt the power of it flow into him, infuse him, saturate him as he drew in everything that he could, drawing in to the limits of his power. He became the power, felt it flow through him like blood, felt it become a part of him. It moved with him, joined with his mind, understood what must be done, and it did not judge.
It never did.
Tarrin descended towards the burning wreckage of Torrian Keep as the white star surrounding him suddenly turned an angry, broiling red, its elegant, distinct borders flexing and boiling like water in a kettle as the symmetrical star melted into a sphere of ominous, ruddy red, concealing the form within from view as the suddenly terrified Dal soldiers began to panic, rushing through the streets, rushing towards the closed gates.
Closing his eyes, Tarrin descended into the fire of Torrian Keep, and disappeared.
The Dal soldiers stopped running when they saw the reddish ball of magic disappear, the ball that had destroyed the castle. Some thought that it had died out, some thought that using magic like that had worn out the mage that had created it. But some kept running, afraid of whatever may come, afraid of what might happen next.
They were all doomed.
The fires of Torrian Keep suddenly stopped. They froze in mid-churn, their lines and boils and trails of multicolored flame frozen as if stopped in time. The smoke billowing up from it kept moving, entrancing those Dals and ki'zadun that had turned to look, showing a sculpture of fire with a trailing gout of smoke rising above it. They stared at it in awed, horrified wonder, at this sculpture of fire, until it suddenly contracted. It contracted as if it were water draining from a hole in the bottom of a bucket, swirling down into a ball of blazing red light, casting a crimson pall across of the buildings, streets, houses, walls of Torrian, and all the faces and bodies contained therein.
The Dals and the ki'zadun stared in terror, then they turned and began to flee in desperate, hysterical panic.
It must be done. It must be done. There's no other way. Goddess, forgive me!
"Oh, I don't know about that one, Kimmie," Jasana bubbled happily as the Were-cat female showed her a small stone that had flecks of quartz in it, that made it glitter. "I don't think that wouldn't be very pretty, even if it was polished."
"Well, kidlet, if I used it as a decoration, I'd be worried."
"What do you use it for, anyway?"
"Well, this right here is used to create a little ball of light," Kimmie replied, holding it up so she could look at it and Kimmie's face at the same time. "It's part of a magic spell."
"Papa never uses things like that."
"He's a Sorcerer. I'm studying Arcane magic. They're different, kidlet."
"Why--" Jasana began, but then she gasped and put her paws to her head, covering her eyes.
"Jasana? What's wrong?" Kimmie asked in sudden concern.
"Cub?" Jesmind asked quickly, rushing over from where she was looking towards Torrian, fuming over having to stay behind when she should have left Jasana with Kimmie and did what needed doing. She was already worried, because she had heard some strange rumbling sounds from that direction, almost like thunder. But it was a clear night, with no lightning anywhere. "Jasana?" Jesmind said in sudden concern when Jasana cried out suddenly, as if in pain. "Jasana!" Jesmind said in a strangled tone, physically pulling her small arms away from her face, demanding that she look at them.
But both she and Kimmie were unprepared for what stared back at them.
Jasana's eyes were glowing an incandescent white.
"Papa!" Jasana managed to gasp. "Papa! He's doing something, something big!" She gasped again. "Fire! He's making fire!"
And then the ground shook, and a sudden explosion of light illuminated the western horizon.
The ball suddenly shivered, and then it exploded outwards. It was not the blast of Air that Tarrin had used to destroy before, this was a one-weave spell, a spell of pure Fire. It swept out from him in a circle, incinerating anything it touched, causing wood to explode and thatch to simply evaporate and stone to burn and steel to melt, blasting the flesh of anything it touched into ash as it swept out from the center of town as fast as a leaden ball fired from a Wikuni musket. In the span of four heartbeats, the towering wave of fire swept up to the walls of the city, then engulfed them, sending a shockwave of heat and ear-splitting roaring emanating out over the cultivated farm fields surrounding the city. And then they stopped rushing outward and instead turned upwards, swirling up into the sky, creating a cyclone of fire that reached into the night, a vision of hellish proportions that utterly engulfed the city.
Almost as quickly as it appeared, as it had engulfed the city of Torrian, the massive cyclone of fire simply ceased. It left behind a raging inferno of normal fire in its wake, burning what the firestorm did not instantly incinerate, leaving a firestorm that illuminated the forest beyond fields that were being rained upon with burning embers. A firestorm that would leave Torrian a blackened wasteland of ash, charred bones, twisted, melted metal, and shattered rock.
Those who had been outside, the armies of the Rangers and the Woodkin, stood in mute, dumbfounded shock, staring at the wall of fire that consumed the logs that made up the walls of Torrian, watched them fall and reveal an entire city being consumed by a raging inferno, the likes of which they had never witnessed before.
Standing in the center of the firestorm, ankle deep in ash and melting rock, stood Tarrin Kael, his expression one of emptiness, and tears flowing freely down his cheeks.
Chapter 28
The fire burned on and on.
&
nbsp; Those outside had gathered around the destroyed city of Torrian, trying to comprehend what had happened. They had seen the bolts of lightning in the air, and then the white bar, clear indications that something had gone terribly wrong. That was confirmed when they found Ariana not long after the fire had erupted, laying half-conscious in a field not far from the treeline with a crossbow quarrel in her back. Sathon managed to get her conscious, and it was from her that they began to piece together at least the first of it. That Wyverns bearing riders attacked her, that Tarrin had somehow gotten free of his basket, and what was more surprising to her was that he could somehow hover in the air, and he had killed the Wyverns with magic. Knowing this, they could reason that Tarrin was also responsible for the bar of light and the subsequent fire and explosion that erupted from somewhere inside the city. But after that, it was anyone's guess as to what happened, what had caused the titanic magical calamity that had destroyed Torrian. All they could do was gather as near the raging inferno as they dared and watch Torrian burn.
And they did. Centaurs and Were-kin joined Rangers as they crossed the fields and got as close to the burning walls of Torrian as they dared, trying to see something, notice something, that would solve this most dreadful mystery. Some wept at the loss of life; the fire had whipped up so incredibly fast that there was no chance anyone escaped it. Not with the gates closed. Some stared in confusion. Some refused to believe what they had witnessed with their own eyes, angrily arguing that what had happened had to have had some natural, logical explanation.
About an hour after the fire, Jesmind, Kimmie, and Jasana had rejoined the host. Jesmind looked pale, Kimmie looked almost hysterical, but what caught everyone's eye was how sad and depressed Jasana looked. They all knew that Tarrin had fallen into the city, and they all believed him dead. But nobody knew how they had known that, since Tarrin had all but forced them to stay well away from the city. They were surrounded by the other Were-cats immediately, who formed a buffer of protection from prying eyes and demanding questions. None of them spoke from the moment they arrived, but it seemed obvious to everyone that they must know something. It was the only way to explain why they had arrived in such a state.
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