James Galloway - The Tower of Sorcery

Because of all that, Sorcery was a complete mystery to him. All that he knew was his own brief touch on that vast power, a touch that was made when he wasn't fully in command of his own wits and made in a panic.

Opening the door to his room, he stepped out wearing Initiate red. It felt strange, somehow. After two months of wearing no clothes at all, anything against his skin that wasn't fur was odd, but seeing the color of it in glances and peripheral vision made it feel alien to him. Before he left, it had always been white. Always. And now the color fringing his eyes was red. More than once, he had an irrational impulse to check to see what was bleeding. After two months, the conceptions he had drawn from wearing Novice white for so long were yet to fade.

Although it was not even dawn, Allia was not in her room. Ever the early riser, she had a habit of waking long before him and spending the time walking the gardens. It wasn't an allowed practice in the Novitiate, but she was never caught out of her room when she was supposed to be within it. The gardens held an almost mystical attraction for the Selani warrior. The flowers and color and vivid life of the plants never ceased to amaze her. It reminded Tarrin how he took the things around him for granted. What was everyday to him was something to inspire wonder in his desert-born friend. Then again, he had little doubt that the descriptions of her homeland would pale in comparison to the real thing, when he finally did get the chance to see it for himself.

It was dark outside, with a pale mist hugging the ground, a mist thick enough to dim the light from the Skybands high above, light that only illuminated the grayish fog in a ghostly light that obscured everything within. This close to dawn, only the White Moon, Dommammon, was still in the sky, but it was too low to the horizon to add any light. Definitely not enough to pierce the fog. The air was chilled with the beginning of fall, and the scents riding on the still air were damp and subdued. The foggy air quickly drowned out most senses, giving Tarrin a curious sense of isolation within the misty haze. It obscured his vision of the main Tower ahead as he walked out on the path, and the North Tower behind disappeared into the dim murk. Scents were watered down by the humid air, and sound reflected back off the gray misty billows, amplifying the faint scrapes of his paws on the gravel path. His tail shivered as the damp air penetrated the fur sheathing it, putting a strange cold sensation against skin that was not accustomed to such feelings.

It was a new day. A new start. The day was certainly going out of its way to be different. This was the first time that Tarrin had felt the chill of the coming winter, or had seen the fog for which the city was famous. In the spring, it was said that one couldn't see a candle in a window across the street until well after the midday bell. The fog was a normal fixture from the beginning of winter to the middle of spring. It was a poignant reminder of how much time he had lost. Two months, he'd been told.

He encountered a solitary figure as he walked along the path towards the Tower. The fog muffled the figure's scent, but the bushy tail swaying behind a feminine form marked the person as Wikuni. And there were only two Wikuni at the Tower. The Princess, and her maid. Tarrin hadn't seen the Princess' maid, but she doubted that the maid looked that much like her Royal Bratness. As they neared each other, he saw that it was indeed the Princess of Wikuna, in all of her royal authority, wearing an Initiate dress of red and without the pretty baubles and jewels which had decorated her fingers and neck the day before. Her boxy muzzle was shivering as she seemed to mutter to herself, but her amber eyes were hard and steely. Not the look he expected from the vapid scatterbrain. She looked up at him, and that look evaporated like the fog around them exposed to the summer sun, replaced with a hollow emptiness that made it seem that there was nothing behind those eyes except the back of her skull.

He passed her without comment or acknowledgement, and he heard her stop and turn around. "Hey!" she snapped, her words echoing loudly in the muffled silence of the fog.

Tarrin stopped, but did not turn around. "What?" he asked in a calm, quiet voice.

"It is customary for people of your station to bow," she said in a grating voice.

"My station," Tarrin said in a calm voice. He didn't like the way that this was going. He could see now that if he didn't take a stand immediately, he would have no peace with her. The Wikuni was going to be in his class today, and that meant that there would be long hours of enforced companionship with her. He decided that it was best for his own sanity to put her down now, and put her down hard. "My station is whatever I decide it to be," he told her in a grim voice, turning around. His irritation lit his eyes from within with their unholy greenish aura, making them look as twin pools of utter evil in the ghostly light of the fog. "And I'm going to tell you something right now, little Wikuni. I have no patience for people like you . Stay out of my way, and I'll stay out of yours. But if you get on my nerves, I'll make you regret it."

"I'd like to see you try ," she snapped. "I'm the Princess of Wikuna! You-"

Without hesitation, Tarrin snapped forward like an arrow launched from a bow. Before the Wikuni could even flinch, he had her by the bodice of her Initiate dress. She made a squeak of shock that cut off what she was going to say as his fingers closed on the material, then he yanked her towards him by that precipitous handhold. She grabbed his wrist in both hands and rained curses and demands on him as he dragged her towards the main Tower wordlessly, at a pace so fast that he was half dragging the foxwoman behind him. He entered the Tower with her in tow, dragged her down the main stairs, and entered the baths with her feet dragging along the stones and her grip on his wrist the only thing keeping him from ripping the front of her dress away. There were three people in the baths, two women and a man, all three of them in the bathing pool at discrete distances from one another. All three stopped cleaning themselves and watched as Tarrin dragged the hapless Wikuni by the bodice of her dress, right up to the edge of the pool. At the end where the water hissed and steamed.

The Wikuni shrieked in terror when she realized what Tarrin was going to do. She let go of his wrist and tried to pull away from his grip, willing to sacrifice her dress, but by then it was too late. Tarrin's other paw closed around the base of her tail, something that would not come off easily. Hoisting her up by her bodice and her tail, he took a little shimmying step, and then heaved her into the middle of the hottest part of the bathing pool.

She landed in the water face first, making a spectacular splash, then she broached the surface like a boulder fired from a catapult. She charged towards the cooler water with whimpering cries streaming from her mouth, her fur clinging to her skin and making her look like a drowned rat. Tarrin watched her with emotionless eyes as she managed to reach a temperature that was bearable more than painful, and that was when he was fixed with the most baleful glare he'd ever seen in his life. Had he still been human, it may have taken him aback, but he had no fear of her, so it had no venom. "You are going to be so sorry you did this to me!" she promised in a hissing voice.

"This was your warning," Tarrin replied in a voice so cold that it stole the venom out of her eyes. "I am not a simpering human, Wikuni, and I'm not one of your subjects either. Whoever you are means nothing to me. If you irritate me, I'll kill you. I'll do it without a second thought. Treat me like something not worth your effort one more time, and I'll rip off your tail and hang it on my wall as a trophy. Talk to me like you did again, and I'll hang you off the fence and skin you. And I'll make sure you live long enough to see your own pelt. Do I make myself abundantly clear?"