James Galloway - The Tower of Sorcery

"Do you mind?" he asked. "I'm trying to understand this."

"Sorry," he said a bit tartly, leaning back against the log again. Tarrin looked at the book, not really reading it, turning a page every few minutes. It was worth it to avoid talking. "Could I interest you in a game of stones?" the man asked.

Tarrin snarled at him, his ears laying back slightly. The man gave him a startled look, then hastily stood up. "I think you'd rather be alone," he said, stating the obvious. Then he turned and walked away.

Tarrin put the book down, putting his palm to his forehead. Where did that come from? It wasn't like him to react like that, but the man had irritated him. What scared him was that it came without thought, and he reacted on it just as mindlessly. Were the instincts changing him so much? Like what had happened earlier, with the mage. He'd torn the man apart, literally, and he had reveled in it for one horrifying moment. It wasn't a perverse joy, it more like a deep satisfaction that came with killing an enemy. But it frightened him just the same. He was changing, he knew it, he could feel it. And there was nothing he could do about it. He could only hope that he could temper it. So that there would be some part of Tarrin left once the mental alterations were complete.

"Would you like to talk about it?" asked a voice. It was Tiella. She sat down beside him on the log, fearlessly taking his hand-paw into her hand and stroking it reassuringly. That simple act was devastating in its simplicity, and he was about to surrender completely to her and let her scratch him behind the ears. Tiella turned his hand up and looked at his palm, with its large, tough pad and the smaller pads on his fingertips, marvelling at the paw-like qualities of his hand, which truly made it a hybrid of the two, and not one or the other.

"I'm…doing things, Tiella," he said uncertainly. "I'm not thinking about them…it's like I can't think about them. They just happen, and I'm afraid of it."

"Why?" she asked.

Tarrin blinked and looked at her. "Why? Because it's not what I would do," he told her.

"That's to be expected, Tarrin. This," she said, holding up his hand-paw, "this is not what you were a few days ago. It's different now. You have to let yourself get used to it, but that doesn't have to mean that you have to be afraid of it."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, when something like that happens, ask yourself why it happened," she told him. "What happened?"

"That man kept talking to me, and I wanted to be left alone," he said, shuddering a bit. "So I snarled at him."

"Alright, now why did it happen?" she asked.

"I don't know, because he was irritating me, I guess," he said.

"No," she said. "That's what you think happened," she said. "What about the other mind in there? Why did it do it?"

"To make him leave me alone," he floundered.

"No," she said again. "Because you wouldn't do anything about it," she told him. "It let you try first. When you either gave up or failed, it decided to do something about it. And it worked."

Tarrin stared at her for quite a while. It was a bit crazy, but in its own way, it was perfectly logical. The Cat in him had its own way of doing things, that was true…but it was also true that that didn't happen until after then man repeatedly bothered him. Had the Cat sensed his human desires, and acted upon them? If that were so, then didn't that put the Cat under his control as much as it put him under its control?

"You're going to have to start asking yourself why you do the things you do," she told him. "There has to be reasons for every single thing. And if you can understand those reasons, well, then maybe it won't be so scary. So the next time it happens, don't be afraid of it. Explore it, try to understand it. Experience it. If you try to just ignore it, then you'll never be able to stop it."

He chuckled ruefully. "Tiella, I don't think you know how much better I feel now," he said sincerely. "I think you may be right. Dolanna told me not to ignore what I was feeling and the instincts in my head, but if she'd have said it the same way you just did, I don't think I'd have been afraid. Well, I'm still going to be afraid, but I'll try to understand the why of what I do as well as the what. There has to be reasons the Cat does the things it does. It's not a creature of whim."

"That's where you're messing up, Tarrin," she told him. "Don't keep thinking about it as it and you. There is no it and you. It's just you. What you have in here," she said, tapping his forehead, "it's a part of you. If you treat it like something that's not, then it's going to seem like it's not, and that's not good for you. You may call it the Cat, or the instincts, or the other mind, but it's not. It's just a different part of you, of your own mind. It's not what the Cat does, it's what you do."

He gave her a steady look, and he could see her blush slightly. Tiella was usually a quiet girl, headstrong, but talking wasn't her way. He knew she was smart, but she'd just laid out what he was feeling, and solutions to those problems, like it was something that even a child would have realized. He looked at her with a budding new respect. He reached up and put his paw on her cheek, his huge paw swallowing up half her face, and she smiled at him and put her hand against his paw. "That tickles," she giggled. "That pad is soft and rough at the same time, and the fur on your fingers is smooth. Now, it's my turn," she said, holding out a hand imperiously. Tarrin seemed to understand what she wanted. Without much thought, he brought his tail around and placed it into her waiting hand. She grabbed hold of it, feeling the thickness of it, then probed the fur with her fingers meticulously. He felt her fingertip touch the skin under the fur, then she grabbed it both hands and bent it. She bent it until it was touching itself, and kept doing it until he sucked in his breath. "Sorry," she apologized. "Is the fur hot?"

"I don't think so," he replied. "It just seems normal."

"What's it like, having the tail?"

"Different. Interesting," he replied. "It does its own thing most of the time, but it does help with balance, and it helps me run faster. It's longer than my legs, so I have to keep it off the ground, but that's not too hard. The muscles that move it are pretty strong."

"How does it help you run?"

"It's like a counterbalance," he told her. "I can lean farther down, and that lets me run faster. I don't fall over because of the weight pushing out behind me. It seems to just know when and where to move to keep me balanced too. It's almost eerie."

She yawned. "I think I'll go back to bed," she told him. "Think about what I said, Tarrin. And try to get some sleep. You're starting to get circles under your eyes."

She slipped back into the tent she shared with Dolanna, leaving Tarrin to his own thoughts. She had come very, very close to the mark, he realized. He did tend to think of the Cat as an invader, an alien, something that was not him taking up residence in his mind. That wasn't true. Though it hadn't been there before, it was there now, and it was as much a part of him as his right arm. Perhaps the Cat considered him to be much the same, an usurper out to overthrow it . It did things, things that happend without his rational thought, but that was only logical. They were instinctive reactions, response to stimulus, reflexes. They happened first because he didn't have to think about them. Analyzing his actions also was very sensible. If he could identify what was making him do things, and why they were happening, he would come into a greater understanding about himself, and that would make it easier when it was necessary for him to prevent that particular thing from happening again, or to minimize its effect if it was something either unavoidable or uncontrollable.