James Galloway - The Tower of Sorcery

"Probably not," he agreed. "There are cats all over the grounds."

"It'll also let them get used to not seeing me," he said with a wink.

"Oh," he said, winking back. "That could come in handy too."

"Just a bit."

Tarrin's "gift" had an unforseen side effect, one that very nearly caused him to go into a rage.

It wouldn't come off.

It was held on by magic, about that much he was positive. Though the chain was long enough to slip over his head, it would not. And there wasn't a clasp anymore anywhere on the chain; it was a continuous chain all the way around. He'd ripped off a good amount of his own skin struggling to remove the amulet, and he'd worked himself up into such a frenzy that both Allia and Dar had to work together to calm him down.

Like the rest of his kind, Tarrin had a nearly phobic fear of being trapped or captured. The fastest way to set him off was to put him in a cage, where the Cat was imprisoned, and its desperate need to be free caused it to all but overwhelm the human half. It was that instinctive reaction that had caused Jesmind to go berzerk in Torrian and kill so many people during her escape. The amulet necklace was no cage, but it was a collar, a symbol of his imprisonment. They may have well put a leash on him. To be subject to the will of another was so against the very nature of the Cat that it seemed alien to Tarrin's human half as well. They were fiercely independent creatures, and the amulet represented a limitation, a stricture on that freedom that he couldn't deny. Just thinking about it got his blood seething, and he felt the almost overpowering need to break things.

He stalked about in a white-faced fury for the entire day, and people avoided him like Death herself. He had an entire bench to himself during breakfast. Even Allia and Dar were afraid to get too close to him. The setting for the day was when he woke up, and the door latch stuck as he was trying to get out. Without hesitating, Tarrin ripped the door off the hinges and threw it into the hall, nearly startling Dar out of his wits and sending two Novices running for cover. Elsa had tried to confront him about the door after breakfast, but one look at his face made her blanch and back away. Nothing was taught in his classes that day, since the instructors were too busy jumping every time Tarrin so much as twitched. A guard tried to stop him from leaving the Tower after lunch, and Tarrin left the man groaning with both arms and legs broken and his pike tied in a knot around his waist. He spent the whole afternoon pacing through the city, heedless of the fact that Novices weren't allowed off the Tower grounds, wandering aimlessly and not paying attention to anything. The gate guards had tried to stop him too, but after Tarrin had nailed one of them to the gatehouse with a dagger through each forearm, and hurled another into the magical fence, the others wisely got out of his way. They seemed to realize that he was keeping himself from killing anyone, but he had absolutely no reservations over hurting them. He walked right over more pedestrians than could be easily counted, and had overturned three carts and killed two horses that refused to get out of his way. Eventually a contingent of the city guard was dispatched. Not to detain him, but to clear the path in front of him. The fact that he wandered with absolutely no set pattern or goal made it very hard for them.

And Tarrin never noticed them.

After he'd walked himself into exhaustion, he returned to the Tower grounds, mainly because he had nowhere else to go. He was allowed in unchallenged, and when he was halfway there, Allia and Dar approached him together, a bit wary, and started the task of settling him. It took both of them, and it took them nearly two hours just to get him to sit down. And that took Allia pushing him down and literally sitting in his lap, straddling his legs and holding him down with both hands. "Tarrin!" she snapped in a harsh voice. "You dishonor yourself acting this way!"

He gave her a flat, deadly look, and his ears laid back on his head.

"Don't lay your ears back at me, boy," she challenged hotly. "You won't hurt me, and you know it. Now stop acting like a sun-baked shivat and talk to me!"

Tarrin stood up, picking her up with him. Then he set her gently on her feet and walked away. She moved to follow, but Dar put a hand out. "No," he told her.

"He will hurt someone like this," she told him.

"No, I don't think so," he replied. "I know where he's going."

"This is something he needs to work out for himself, Allia," Dar told her. "We calmed him down, but that was just putting the lid on the boiling pot. He needs more than we can do for him."

She looked at where they were on the grounds. "Yes, that is the only place he would go, is it not?" She sighed. "I think you are right. When he is ready to talk, he will seek us out."

It wasn't until he was standing at the base of the fountain in the courtyard, gazing up at the incredibly beautiful face of the marble statue, that some semblance of rationality returned to him. He sank to his knees in front of it, putting his face in his paws, as he realized just how close to madness he'd went. He'd terrorized people, destroyed things, even killed animals. That rage was replaced with self doubt, loathing, and fear of himself, at what he had almost done. If someone other than Allia had gotten in his face, he wasn't sure if he would have killed him or not. If it had been the Keeper, then he had no doubt what would have happened. She would have died.

It just seemed so complicated, even though it was so simple. He knew how the Cat thought. He even knew what it was going to do most of the time, but it was as if he was a spectator in his own body. Even knowing what it would do, he felt powerless to stop it. The Cat was so much stronger inside him than he ever dreamed, capable of throwing him aside like a forgotten toy whenever the mood suited it. All day it had not been a struggle for control, but a struggle for containment, to keep the Cat from doing something that Tarrin would regret for the rest of his life.

And yet, staring up at that beautiful face, it was as if everything he'd done that day was washed from his soul, and he felt at peace with himself.

And that peace allowed him to think, for the first time in nearly a day. Yes, the amulet would not come off, but it did not control him. He controlled it . And it was not a symbol of his slavery. The shaeram was the symbol of the katzh-dashi , an amulet just like any other. It was up to him to use it to his own advantage. It took him a fairly long time to reach those conclusions, and it was well after dark the next time he bothered to move his eyes off the statue.

He had to control it. If he didn't, it would drive him mad. All his training was about control, all his experiences of life were about control. He had to start using them in his fight with the Cat, or the Cat would overwhelm him, and Tarrin Kael would be no more.

Tarrin had thought he'd reached a balance inside himself. He knew at that moment that he could not have been more wrong. The real battle for himself had just begun.

Sniffling a bit, Tarrin stood up again, looking at the soft light of the Skybands casting multihued radiance over the statue on the fountain, and it all but took his breath away. Such loveliness seemed impossible for the human hand to carve with such perfection. Without quite knowing why, he waded into the fountain and climbed up onto the base, standing in front of the statue. He put his paws on its shoulders, and leaned in and rested his forehead against the shoulder of the statue. "I don't know if I can do it," he admitted out loud, confiding in the statue, voicing the truths he felt in his heart. "I never would have done what I did just a month ago. I'm losing myself, piece by piece, bit by bit. I don't know if I'm strong enough. I never dreamed the Cat could be so strong. I just feel so, so lost. And I'm scared, and I don't know what to do. I'm, changing," he said with a shudder in his voice. "And I can't stop it."