It seemed too little too late, sometimes. He had changed since he had left Aldreth, changed in ways that would horrify his mother. He had become… evil. There was no other way to say it. That truth was something that gnawed at his soul, but not even he could deny it anymore. He no longer cared about the people he had started out to save. He didn't care about their lives, their health, their dreams, their rights to survive. He didn't care about the land or the world, he didn't care about anything anymore. Only those things immediately before him, only those things that were so deeply implanted within him that nothing could alter them, those were the only things he cared about anymore. He was no better than a rampaging Troll, or the calculating Kravon. It was only the cause of the destruction they wrought that differed. Trolls or Kravon destroyed for pleasure, or power. Tarrin destroyed in the name of saving the world, which was itself the greatest irony. Whatever was left of the world when he was done would probably not be very fond of him. Tarrin had killed just as many people as Kravon during this mad quest. He had probably killed more than Kravon. Sometimes Tarrin wondered just who was on which side. And just like Kravon, he didn't think twice about the lives he snuffed out. They were things, objects, inconveniences that stood in his path to victory, and that made them worthless in his eyes. It was ironic that all his striving to become a better person, to conquer the savagery within, had turned him even more cold-blooded.
He was no better than Kravon.
That truth still hurt. He hadn't wanted to turn out this way, and he was trying to pull away from his dark nature. But it wasn't easy. His feral nature made showing mercy or compassion very difficult for him, for he would have to show those things to people he did not trust, and his feral nature would not permit that. He found it nearly impossible to extend his paw to someone his instincts were screaming at him to kill. The only strangers for which he could allow that kind of compassion were children. And even they weren't safe from him. He was certain that he had killed children when he destroyed half the arena in Dala Yar Arak. Beautiful children, innocent children, whose deaths had come simply because they were in his way.
That had been the defining moment, he realized now. When he had turned his power on innocents, when he killed hundreds of people just to slow Shiika down, he had gone beyond the point of reclamation. His attempts to climb out of his pit seemed ridiculous to him. He didn't even understand why he was bothering to continue with it. What he did… there was no absolution for it. None. He had placed a deep black stain on his soul with that heinous act. And even now, he felt very little remorse. He had an awareness that what he did was wrong, but there was no real regret. Given the circumstances, he would do the same thing again. To know that he should feel guilt, to know that he had done wrong, yet feel no remorse for his actions… he didn't know what word described that, but he felt that evil came pretty close to the mark.
There was no grief. There was no happiness, no joy, no fear, no anxiety. There was only the mission. That was all he had left. He had thrown away his life, destroyed his humanity, lost dear friends, sacrificed his very soul, all of it to save a little girl named Janette. That was all there was, now. It was the only thing that motivated him to go on. And she was worth his effort. She had saved him, saved him in ways that nobody could ever understand. He would kill a million people for her, he would die a thousand times for her. He would do absolutely anything he had to do to protect her life, protect the world that she would grow up to inherit. And if it meant casting away everything inside him, if it meant becoming just as ruthless, monstrous, and evil as Kravon, then so be it.
They were getting closer. They would have to leave soon. He considered shapeshifting and going out to destroy them, but he dismissed the idea immediately. It wasn't what Triana would do.
"We have to go, Sarraya," he called calmly.
"I was about to say the same thing," she replied. "You ready?"
"I'm ready," he replied emotionlessly. With barely a thought, Tarrin shapeshifted. The large black housecat was suddenly replaced by a towering, menacing Were-cat male, more than a head taller than a tall man, with a stony expression marring a handsome face, and green cat's eyes that would make a man shiver to stare into them. There was no light in his eyes, only a sinister quality that would make a grown man fear. His cat's ears atop his head shivered, and his tail lashed only once before settling behind him. He reached down and opened his huge paw, holding it flat for the small Faerie. She stepped up into his palm and sat down, and he carefully lifted her up and deposited her on top of his head. He felt her burrow her legs into his hair, sitting right on top of his head and between his ears, then grab hold of his hair with both of her exceptionally tiny hands.
Without changing expression, the towering Were-cat turned and started off towards the northwest at a ground-eating lope, letting his long legs eat up the longspans, a pace that a horse could not match for very long. He didn't look back. He never looked back, unless the sound he heard coming from behind him changed enough to make him curious. He knew that the men behind him suddenly could find him again, and those that hadn't already mounted up and started moving towards him were now scrambling to do so. Those that had already began were spurring their horses into a flat sprint, trying to use their horses' superior speed to catch up to him before they tired out. But Tarrin wasn't all that worried. He was more than five longspans ahead of them, and that was a distance that very few horses could run at top speed. Once they wore out, Tarrin would pull away, and this time he would not slow down to let them keep up with him. By then, they'd understand that the Were-cat was just leading them away, had been playing with them the entire time.
For the entire morning and most of the midday, Tarrin ran effortlessly through the savannah heat, keeping that same pace that had caused those chasing him to fall further and further behind. It wasn't the pace he'd kept before, a pace that allowed them to keep up. This was a murderous pace, a relentless expansion of the ground between him and his pursuers, a pace that killed quite a few of their horses as they attempted to maintain their distance from him. Those that understood that there was no way to catch up to him had broken off or fallen behind, saving their mounts to get them back to civilization. But Tarrin didn't really notice it. His eyes were forward, his mind wandering as it tended to do while he was running, allowing his body to carry through the monotonous motions of running great distances and freeing his mind to pursue other matters. But there were few matters that caught his fancy, causing him to run in a nearly dazed state of unawareness, a sense not of past or future, a condition with which he was familiar. It was the eternal now in which animals lived, where only now mattered. It caused him to blink as the sun began to shine into his eyes, a sun that was now lowering into the western sky.
Tarrin pulled up slightly, then slowly brought himself to a halt. He had run the entire day. Sarraya was still on his head, but the feel of it was that she was laying down, tied down by his hair, and was probably asleep. His belly was a little empty, but it was a sudden sense of thirst that got his immediate attention. He was rather acclimated to heat, but he had run in the brutal savannah heat the entire day without stopping, even for water.