James Galloway - The Tower of Sorcery

Grabbing hold of his wrist with his other paw, Tarrin closed his fist.

The man's scream was cut off with horrifying abruptness, for he had no mouth with which to use, and no brain with which to direct the mouth that was not there. Tarrin's fingers drove into the skull and the brain, his inhuman strength digging down and under and then crushing everything that had been below the man's forehead, shattering bone and liquifying flesh. Blood and worse spurted out from between Tarrin's fingers as his fingers closed inside the man's head, literally tearing off the man's face. The other man looked into the door in shock as the dead man fell away from Tarrin, a hideous gaping hole where the front of his head had been, and blood and bits of flesh dripped and oozed from between Tarrin' fingers as he watched the body fall to the floor.

The man shrieked in abject horror and turned to flee, but Tarrin was on him before he could take a single step. He tackled the man and sent him sprawling to the floor, quickly getting on top of him and putting a paw on his chest to hold him down, and then opening his other paw, allowing what was left of the other man's face to drop from his grip. The man stared in desperate terror at the bloody paw raised over his head, claws out, with bits of flesh, bone, and brain dangling from the fur and from the claws. Tarrin's eyes glowed from within with an unholy greenish radiance that made the man squeak once he beheld them, and his face was twisted into a snarl of fury that almost made him like a raging beast. Tarrin very nearly killed him out of rage, but he managed to maintain at least some semblence of sanity. This man had been hired to kill him. Tarrin wanted to know who had done it. "Who sent you?" Tarrin asked in a hissing voice that made the man go very still. "Who sent you?"

"I-I can't say!" he wailed. "They'll kill me!"

"If you don't, I'll make you beg to die," Tarrin told him in a voice so evil that the man tried to sink through the floor to get away from him. "I'll gut you like a pig and drag you around by your entrails until you feel like talking." Tarrin lowered his paw, driving the tips of his claws into the skin of the man's belly. He squealed and writhed, then screamed in pain as Tarrin sank a bit more of his claws into the man's flesh.

The man bellowed as Tarrin slowly twisted his paw, digging the claws in deeper. "It was a Wizard!" he said in a high-pitched voice. "I don't know his name! Belleth knew it!" Tarrin twisted his claws. "Kravon!" he shrieked. "I work for Kravon!"

Then Tarrin felt a coldness at his back. He turned around, ignoring the many Novices that had opened their doors to see what the commotion was about. The shadows behind him seemed to coalesce, and then two slits of pure green radiance appeared. The unearthly cold told him all he needed to know.

It was a Wraith.

The man looked over Tarrin's hip at the apparition, and then he screamed a scream of such terror that it chilled Tarrin's blood. He did himself grievous injury as he suddenly thrashed against the Were-cat, whose claws were still sunk in his belly, but in his wild panic he felt not a whit of pain. The Wraith advanced with shocking speed on them and reached out. Tarrin knew that the touch of a Wraith was the cold of the grave, and it meant death. Even in his rage, he was still lucid enough to know when to bolt. He sprang away from the conjured creature, trampling the man under him in his flight. The man, bleeding freely from his ripped stomach, stared at the Wraith in terror, his body paralyzed by fear, watching that insubstantial hand.

Even as it sank into his chest.

The man made a single gurgling sound and arched his back, and then he moved no more. He remained in that hideously twisted position even after the Wraith withdrew its hand from his chest. The Wraith took one look at Tarrin, and then it simply vanished.

Control returning to him, Tarrin and a few other Novices warily approached the dead man as others screamed hysterically, and more than one Novice cried out or was noisily sick. The man's skin was blue, and the eyes were open and glazed.

The man's body was frozen solid.

Tarrin shivered when he felt the cold radiating from the frozen corpse, then he heard Dar moan and start retching. Tarrin had not left the other one in very presentable condition. Elsa charged out of her door wearing only a nightshirt and brandishing her axe, then stopped when she saw the nude Were-cat standing over the frozen corpse. "What happened?" she demanded hotly.

"This one and the one in my room tried to kill me," Tarrin said in a cold fury, panting to keep control of himself. The Cat was howling for blood, and it wanted to punish the ones who had dared try to take his life. It just wanted to destroy things at the moment, to vent its rage on whatever was handy, but Tarrin's rational mind wouldn't allow that. Such a mindless display of violence would solve nothing. But it still wasn't easy.

Elsa glanced into his room, which now had no door. She shivered a bit. "What did you do to him?" she asked, then she glanced at the blood and flesh still hanging from Tarrin's right paw. "Nevermind, I think I know," she said in a bit of a weak voice. "Tarrin, go down to the baths and wash off all that blood. Take Dar with you."

"Alright," he said tightly. Dar still coughed a great deal as they left for the baths, Tarrin stalking the halls unclad in a fury as Dar followed behind carrying Tarrin's robe. Down in the bathing chamber, Tarrin dropped into the pool and started cleaning off his arms and paws. He was a bit surprised at the amount of blood he had on him; it was even spattered on his face and chest, and smeared over his torso. He'd stepped through a pool of it, and bloody footprints. Dar sat on a chair with his head in his hands, leaned over and still coughing a bit here and there.

"Are you alright?" Tarrin asked as he climbed out of the pool.

"Yeah," he said weakly. "Just imagine waking up to see something like that ," he said with a weak chuckle. "I don't think I'll ever eat meat again."

"Sorry, but he tried to kill me," Tarrin said. "And I doubt they would have left you alive either."

"I know," he said. "But why did you have to-do that?"

"It seemed appropriate at the time," he said. "I didn't even think about it."

"Are you alright?"

"I'm fine, Dar," he said. "I thought I was dead when I saw that Wraith. I'm just lucky it wasn't after me."

"What does that mean?"

"Wraiths are conjured up for a specific purpose," Tarrin told him, repeating what Dolanna had told him so long ago. "That's all they'll do, what they were conjured to do. That one was conjured to kill that man before I could get him to talk," he said with a growl. "All I got was-"

Tarrin's heart seized in his chest when a faint trace of an old scent touched his nose. He bowed down and sniffed delicately at the stone, trying to block out the strong smells of the mineral-rich water. The scent of her passage was still on the stones. Jesmind had been in the bathing chamber. A whirlwind of conflicting emotion welled up in him at that scent, and most primary of them all was fear. He feared Jesmind more than anything else in the world, because he knew, beyond any doubt, that she was there to kill him. And unlike most in the Tower, she was very capable of doing it. It was almost an ironic twist that she would show up so soon after he'd nearly been killed. It was like an omen.

"Dar," he said in a hushed voice.

"What?"

"Get up. We have to get out of here."

Dar looked around. "What's wrong?"

"Jesmind is here," he said in a quiet, forboding voice. "We have to get back to where there's people."

Dar scrambled to his feet, his eyes darting in all directions, handing Tarrin the robe and rushing after him as Tarrin made quickly for the stairs. They mounted the base of the staircase, but Tarrin stopped dead when a silhouette came around a corner and stood at the top. A silhouette with a tail. His heart froze in his chest, and then it was replaced with a calm, almost unemotional void. He had nowhere to run, and that meant that he would have to fight.