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.
To: Title EoF
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.