James Galloway - Honor and Blood

Tarrin's preference for air magic was something he had never actively admitted to himself, but the simple truth was that weaves of air seemed the most natural for him to create. Tarrin reached out, reached within, using the vast power within him to draw out flows of Air from the Weave, draw them from strands a longspan away, a vast network of flows that all conjoined in the air above his head. That confluence of combined power grew, and grew, and grew, growing systematically more vast, more energized. Tarrin wove the single flow together in a simple weave whose dimensions were absolutely staggering, a feat that not even a Circle of joined Sorcerers could accomplish, a singular weave whose dimensions could be measured in longspans. The effort had not only drained every fiber of magic out of him, it forced him to continue to feed the weaving by simultaneously drawing power from the Weave and then channeling it into the weave he was creating, something that he was told was impossible to do, yet he could do. Such redirection of magic was ten times more exhausting than simply drawing power then discharging it, and the fringes of his vision began to blur as the monumental effort of creating such a massive weave began to make him feel as if his bones were turning to powder. But his rage, his fury, absolutely would not allow him to falter. His wobbling knees suddenly became strong, straight, and Tarrin raised up to his full height and looked up into the sky, looked up at the titanic weave forming over his head, feeling in one instant the horror of what he was about to do, the resolve to carry through to protect his life and Sarraya, and the ecstatic feeling of absolute invulnerability, the feeling of being the most powerful being on the world, a sense of nearly godliness.

But all such feelings vanished as the glow around Tarrin's body suddenly went out, and he motioned in the skyships' directions with both paws in an overhanded sweeping motion. He did this as he released the Weave. And when he did so, the sky split open as a sudden shift in the atmosphere caused a powerful blast of wind, moving at the speed of a hurricane's gale, erupted from the magical spell over him and raged towards the south, expanding as it moved.

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

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.