James Galloway - Honor and Blood

"Tarrin, are you crazy?" she hissed.

"Crazy or not, we won't go another step if we don't deal with them right now," he replied as both looked in the direction of Sarraya's tiny, whispered voice. Sarraya slid off of his back, and he tamped his feet to prepare to run. "Three, two, one," he counted silently, then he rose up and charged to the right, in an arc that would try to take him around the two Demons.

They instantly looked in his direction, but both cursed vehemently when the grass around them shuddered, and then literally came alive, growing from simple tall grass to huge tentacles of green plant fiber in the blink of an eye. Sarraya's Druidic magic had taken hold on the grass, causing it to grow from simple grass to writhing tentacles of vines in a heartbeat, and it lashed out against the Demon on her left like an octopus, ensnaring arms and legs and twining around its thin midsections and wings. Its strength easily broke the snaring vines, but it distracted it for a critical moment as Tarrin managed to get to where the two Demons were lined up before him. He slid to a halt and shapeshifted in an instant, returning to his impressive, intimidating humanoid form, then reached over his shoulder and drew his sword even as he rushed straight at the surprised Demon.

It did not consider him a threat. It smiled evilly at him and raised its polearm, but not to fend against the sword. It didn't know! It didn't know that his sword could harm a Demon! It was setting itself to swipe him to the ground regardless of what he intended to do with the sword. It couldn't sense that the sword was otherworldly, that it had the power to injure it!

Understanding that he'd only get one free shot on the first one, Tarrin ducked down as the distance between it and him vanished, slithering under the polearm's metal shaft as it tried to strike him to the ground with it. The Demon was three spans taller than him, but the sword was nearly six spans of blade on its own, so it gave him all the reach he needed. He ducked under the polearm and got inside the Demon's reach, then he drove the chisel-tip of the sword straight up the Demon's body. It nearly sliced its chest, so close was it to the Demon as it came up, but the chisel tip struck the Demon just under the beak. And the black metal blade of the sword continued, puncturing the weird joint between the end of the beak and the start of the neck, driving up through the beak, through the top of it and all the way up into the brain. Just as quickly as it impaled the brain, Tarrin snapped the blade out and spun around the Demon, hiding the blade behind his body as he charged the one pulling itself free of the vines. The one he'd stabbed was still standing, its body locked in a paralysis of death, unaware that the brain could no longer send it commands. The entwined Demon raised its polearm and tried to stab Tarrin with it when he came into its reach, but the Were-cat leaped up and out of its path, seeming to hover in the air before it. Tarrin's sword came around in a wide, whistling arc, black blood from the first Demon flying off the sword's tip as its edge homed in on the neck of the second, then neatly and quickly taking the ugly head right off its unnatural body.

Tarrin dropped to the ground easily as both Demon bodies stood stock still, and then started to topple. The first dropped its polearm, then fell over backwards to lay motionless on the grass. The second slumped in its vine prison, held up by the clinging plants, as the head rolled to a stop some spans distant.

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.