'll have plenty of time later.  So long as you teach me, that's what matters."
	"I'll have to," she said.  "You used your power, and you'll use it again eventually.  You've opened a beehive, so now I have to teach you how you don't get stung while reaching for the honey.  I can supress your Druidic ability the same as your Sorcery, so don't worry about having an accident while I'm around.  I'll protect you until it's time for you to start learning."
	"That's good to know," he told her.  "I think the water is over that way.  Let's go find something to drink."
	"Wow, you're just so overwhelmed," Sarraya said acidly as he reached down and picked her up from the ground.
	"I have too much on my mind to be worried about one little thing, Sarraya," he told her in an emotionless voice.  "I've had too many of these little revelations go by to be terribly impressed by any one of them."
	Sarraya chuckled ruefully.  "I guess you would get numb after a while," she said as he reached down and scooped her up in his paw.
	"Numb is a good word," he agreed as he moved in the direction of the water.
	It wasn't very encouraging.  The water hole was little more than a muddy pool, the center of which bubbled and bulged as water siphoned up from underground.  The stamped dirt and mud around it, and the riot of conflicting scents crisscrossing the ground, told him that it was a very popular location in the area.  Tarrin knelt down by the edge of the pool, debating between drinking the muddy water or simply going thirsty.  But Sarraya made up his mind for him when he felt her use her Druidic magic again, and the muddy color of the water simply disappeared, leaving crystal-clear water in its wake.  The pool had some fish in it, and the bottom was a churned landscape of hoofprints, ridges, and holes where animals waded into the shallow pool to drink.  The water coming up from underground was muddy, and it was quickly beginning to stain the clean water Sarraya's magic had created.  They both quickly drank their fill before the water became contaminated.
	"Much better," Sarraya sighed, looking up at him.  Then she looked past him, and her expression turned grim.  "Uh, Tarrin, I think you'd better take a look."
	Tarrin looked over his shoulder, in the direction of her gaze.  The distant birds he'd seen before were much closer now, and it was apparent that they weren't birds.  He looked with a mixture of surprise and anger as six black-prowed ocean vessels drifted in the air about ten longspans to the south, their squarish sails and the flags on their masts marking them as Zakkite.  They were about a thousand spans in the air, and it was apparent that they were moving in his direction with impressive speed.
	Skyships!  How did the Zakkites get skyships so far inland!  Zakkite skyships could fly, but only for a limited amount of time.  They literally used flying creatures as fuel for their flying, draining away the life energy of avian creatures in special magical devices to give their ships the power of magical flight.  He'd seen them before, had saved an Aeradalla from one of those soultraps quite by accident while blowing it out of the sky.  No flying creature could have lived long enough to get a skyship so far inland!  Not even a mighty Roc could have given a skyship that much range.
	There was little doubt why they were there.  They too could detect the Book of Ages, and they had been tracking him just as the Arakite mages had been.  It had only taken them longer to reach him.
	"How did they get in so far?" Sarraya demanded in exasperation as he picked her up from the ground.  "There's not a living winged creature strong enough to power a skyship ten days inland!"
	"I really miss Allia about now," Tarrin said, shading his eyes from the setting sun and peering at the ships.  They were too far away for him to see very much.  Allia's incredible eyesight would have allowed her to count the men on the ships.  Even see which ones needed shaving.  Several smaller objects suddenly separated from the skyships, and Tarrin squinted to see what they were.  It took him a moment, but he realized that they were large winged beasts.  And by the shapes of their tails, they looked like Wyverns.
	"I think they're sending out scouts," Sarraya said.
	"They're not scattering," Tarrin said.  "They know exactly where they're going."
	"I think that means we should expect company," Sarraya said quickly.
	"Fools," Tarrin snorted, rising up to his full height and glaring in their direction.  How stupid could they be?  They should know that he commanded Sorcery that could sweep their ships from the sky.  They were fools for coming so close, for giving themselves away.  But the Wyverns were getting no closer, he realized after a moment.  They were moving to his left, not towards them, going somewhere else.  To his left was back the way they came, and the Arakite pursuers would be about where those Wyverns were going.  Were the Zakkites attacking the mages chasing him?  If so, why?  What gain could they get from such an act?  It would only help Tarrin, because the Zakkites couldn't bring their ships or their Wyverns close enough to threaten him.  If they did, he would respond with Sorcery, and rip them apart.  They were out of his effective range at the moment.  But if they came in range, they wouldn't be around long enough to realize their mistake.  "What are they doing?" he asked Sarraya.
	"I think they're either talking to or attacking the mages behind us," Sarraya replied.  "Can you bring the ships down?"
	"Not from here," he replied.  "They're too far away.  And they're not moving towards us anymore."
	"What do you think we should do?"
	"Hide," he replied.  "They aren't getting any closer, so let's hide from them and see what they do.  If they wander too close, maybe I can pick a couple of them off.  I do not want a pair of Zakkite triads chasing after us.  Zakkites are way too dangerous."
	"No argument here," Sarraya agreed.  "I guess this means that I'm going to have a sore butt tonight."
	"Better a sore butt than fireballs raining down on us from above."
	"Amen," she chuckled as Tarrin set her down, then shapeshifted into his cat form.  Sarraya climbed up onto his back and grabbed a couple of handfuls of his fur, and he turned and scampered away, towards the northeast.  But a housecat could not move very fast compared to the size of the animals and constructions chasing him, so the presence of those ships did not change for a good while as he moved away from them, looking back over his shoulder nervously every few moments.  The ships did not move, but they weren't getting any further away as he moved away from them.
	The presence of the Zakkites angered him.  Why couldn't they just leave him alone!  Couldn't he get at least one break?  Ever since he had started on this mad quest, everything seemed to be stacked in his way, lined up against him.  He'd had to overcome some ridiculous obstacles to get where he was now, and it looked like it wasn't about to get any easier.  Now, when things seemed to be going his way, the Zakkites had to show up.  Zakkites were a dangerous enemy, even for him.  Their command of arcane magic was impressive, and that made them very, very dangerous.  They couldn't get close to him or use their magic against him, but he knew from experience that there was often more than one way to go about capturing an objective.  He'd used his own magic in some rather creative ways against beings who were immune to it, so he wasn't about to get complacent enough to think that they didn't have something up their sleeves.  Zakkites were not fools.  They wouldn't just rush all the way inland like this if they didn't have a plan.
	That plan seemed to manifest itself as he fretted over things.  Two winged creatures separated themselves from the six ships, and it was obvious that they were moving in his direction.  Their size and silhouette against the setting sun made it very apparent that they were not Wyverns.  They were very large, taller than him if they stood straight up, with large bird-like wings and vaguely humanoid in form.  From the way it looked, both were holding long polearms.
	"What are those?" Sarraya asked as Tarrin stopped and turned around to get a better look at them.
	"I can't tell, my eyes aren't that good in this form," he replied.  In cat form, he had excellent night vision and the ability to make out shapes and see motion, but the clarity of his vision was poor.  Small features blurred together or were lost.  He could easily see a book in the dark, but he couldn't read what was on its pages if it were opened.  He could make out the shapes of those creatures moving his way, but any details about them were lost on him.  "And if I shapeshift, I'll give our position away."
	"Hunker down, let's see what they do," the Faerie offered.
	"Good idea," he agreed.  He laid down on his belly in the tall grass, causing his form to disappear, and then he felt Sarraya use her Druidic magic.  The grass around him shuddered, then pulled over him to form a tent of sorts to hide him from those above.
	They waited in quiet tension for long moments, watching them get closer, until the ground shuddered as one of them landed about two hundred spans away.  Even at that distance, he couldn't make out a great many features, but it was apparent that they were not even close to being human.  They were ten spans tall, and they were strangely birdlike.  As if they were crosses between humans and vultures.  They had arms and legs, but their heads held a large hooked beak, and they had huge wings on their backs.  They had those polearms in their hands, and they stood upon legs with backwards-jointed knees, just like birds.  Not only that, they also had vulture feet.  They were very ugly, even to his diminished vision.
	He had no idea what they were, at least until the wind changed and caused their scents to wash over him.  That made him nearly choke.  They smelled as if they were made up of pure, unadulterated corruption and unnatural evil.  They were Demons!
	"Demons!" Tarrin hissed in shock.  "Why would Demons be working with the Zakkites!"
	"Hush!" Sarraya hissed very quietly, kicking him in the side with her heel to emphasize her command.
	This was insane!  Demons couldn't be summoned by mages anymore, not since the Blood War!  How did two Demons come to be allied to the Zakkites?  Maybe they were the same as Shiika had been, Demons that had somehow made it to Sennadar of their own free will.  Shiika had not been summoned or conjured by anyone.  She was free-willed, ruling the largest kingdom in the world from behind the scenes.  He also had a suspicion that Shiika wasn't quite like other Demons.  All the stories painted Demons as utterly evil, sadistic and monstrous.  Shiika was no fair maiden, but she didn't seem to have those reputed qualities.  She was evil, there was no doubt about that, but she wasn't sadistic.  She was manipulative, but she wasn't monstrous.  Her evil was more of an underlying quality, something that accented her personality rather than defined it.  But he still didn't trust her.  After all, she was a Demon.  So were these two, and that made them a threat not to take lightly.
	Tarrin's ears laid back as they moved towards them, obviously searching for them, but seemingly unable to locate him.  They looked about carefully, moving step by deliberate step towards him, carefully examining the ground.  "What's taking you so long!" a disembodied voice emanted from the air between them.  "He has to be right there!  We saw him lay down in the grass, and he couldn't crawl fast enough to get away by the time you got there!"
	"Patience, human," a horrid voice came from one of them.  "He cannot escape."
	"Don't toy with me!" the voice replied hotly.  "I can banish you just as easily as I conjured you!  Would you like to go back to the Abyss without having your promised payment?  Just find him, and remember that we need him alive!"
	Conjure?  How could he conjure a Demon?  That was impossible!  Even if he could conjure a Demon, he couldn't control it if it appeared!
	But that meant little now.  They knew where he was, and it was just a matter of time before they reached him.  It was going to be a fight no matter what, so the warrior in him realized that it was best to start the fight on his terms rather than their terms.  At least they would have to be careful, where he would not.  They needed him alive.  He wasn't working under such a restriction.  It also meant that he had to bring those skyships down, or he'd never be able to get away.  They were watching him, no doubt with magic, and he'd never be able to get away from them so long as they could see where he was.
	"Sarraya, get down, carefully," he said in the manner of the Cat.  He knew exactly what he had to do.  The idea of battling a Demon didn't frighten him as much as it had before.  He had the sword, and it could harm a Demon.  He had fought one before, and he had won.  And these two couldn't fight back with the same fury that he would fight them with.  They were simply things, obstacles in his path, and it was his duty to deal with them and move on to the next obstacle.  There was very little emotion involved in it anymore.  There was very little emotion involving anything anymore.  "I'm going to bolt right and get them lined up, then turn on them.  If you could do something to distract the one on the left when I change shape, I'd appreciate it.  I'd rather not have to fight both at once."
	"Tarrin, are you crazy?" she hissed.
	"Crazy or not, we won't go another step if we don't deal with them right now," he replied as both looked in the direction of Sarraya's tiny, whispered voice.  Sarraya slid off of his back, and he tamped his feet to prepare to run.  "Three, two, one," he counted silently, then he rose up and charged to the right, in an arc that would try to take him around the two Demons.
	They instantly looked in his direction, but both cursed vehemently when the grass around them shuddered, and then literally came alive, growing from simple tall grass to huge tentacles of green plant fiber in the blink of an eye.  Sarraya's Druidic magic had taken hold on the grass, causing it to grow from simple grass to writhing tentacles of vines in a heartbeat, and it lashed out against the Demon on her left like an octopus, ensnaring arms and legs and twining around its thin midsections and wings.  Its strength easily broke the snaring vines, but it distracted it for a critical moment as Tarrin managed to get to where the two Demons were lined up before him.  He slid to a halt and shapeshifted in an instant, returning to his impressive, intimidating humanoid form, then reached over his shoulder and drew his sword even as he rushed straight at the surprised Demon.
	It did not consider him a threat.  It smiled evilly at him and raised its polearm, but not to fend against the sword.  It didn't know!  It didn't know that his sword could harm a Demon!  It was setting itself to swipe him to the ground regardless of what he intended to do with the sword.  It couldn't sense that the sword was otherworldly, that it had the power to injure it!
	Understanding that he'd only get one free shot on the first one, Tarrin ducked down as the distance between it and him vanished, slithering under the polearm's metal shaft as it tried to strike him to the ground with it.  The Demon was three spans taller than him, but the sword was nearly six spans of blade on its own, so it gave him all the reach he needed.  He ducked under the polearm and got inside the Demon's reach, then he drove the chisel-tip of the sword straight up the Demon's body.  It nearly sliced its chest, so close was it to the Demon as it came up, but the chisel tip struck the Demon just under the beak.  And the black metal blade of the sword continued, puncturing the weird joint between the end of the beak and the start of the neck, driving up through the beak, through the top of it and all the way up into the brain.  Just as quickly as it impaled the brain, Tarrin snapped the blade out and spun around the Demon, hiding the blade behind his body as he charged the one pulling itself free of the vines.  The one he'd stabbed was still standing, its body locked in a paralysis of death, unaware that the brain could no longer send it commands.  The entwined Demon raised its polearm and tried to stab Tarrin with it when he came into its reach, but the Were-cat leaped up and out of its path, seeming to hover in the air before it.  Tarrin's sword came around in a wide, whistling arc, black blood from the first Demon flying off the sword's tip as its edge homed in on the neck of the second, then neatly and quickly taking the ugly head right off its unnatural body.
	Tarrin dropped to the ground easily as both Demon bodies stood stock still, and then started to topple.  The first dropped its polearm, then fell over backwards to lay motionless on the grass.  The second slumped in its vine prison, held up by the clinging plants, as the head rolled to a stop some spans distant.
	Holding his sword low, dripping with the black ichor of Demon blood, Tarrin turned to look at the six ships.  They were nearly two longspans away, well out of reach of Sorcery.  They sat there, mocking him, threatening him with their presence, and he suddenly felt helpless to do anything about them.  That helplessness ignited a sudden storm of anger, anger that they would not come close enough to face him with honor, not come close enough to where he could kill them.  They would not threaten him!  He wouldn't allow it!  He had come out here to draw them away from his friends, but he would not run to the desert with six skyships hovering over him the whole way!  He focused on that single thought, letting the anger take him over.  Only in fury could he control his power, and he needed that anger now.  He had to work himself up to the point where it would be safe for him to use his power, because that power was the only thing that could get rid of the Zakkites.  He could feel it build inside him, and he fueled that anger with images of his sisters, his friends, in danger because of the Zakkites, because of him.  And that was all it took.  Even the fleeting thought of Allia or Keritanima in danger was enough to send him into a mindless fury, but this time all it did was give him the anger-fueled willpower to risk using his magic.
	Throwing the sword aside, Tarrin closed his paws into fists and raised them to his chest as his eyes suddenly ignited from within with a blazing, incadescent light as Tarrin reached out and touched the Weave.  The raw, unadulterated power of High Sorcery raged through the Weave and then broke over him, threatening to drown him with its incredible power, a power that no single living Sorcerer other than him could control.  His anger gave him the power, the will, to harness that rampaging flood of magical power, a power that caused his paws to limn over with the ghostly, wispy white radiance known as Magelight.  Tarrin absorbed the power that the Weave thundered into him like a thirsty man drinking water, allowing it to fill him, coarse through him, infuse him with the might of the Goddess.  Tarrin sought to draw the power faster than the Weave could supply it to him.  Tarrin threw out his paws as flows of the seven Spheres of Sorcery emanated from his body, the tendrils of magic of which the Weave was constructed, and they twisted and wrapped together into groups of seven flows as they issued forth from him.  Those braids of flows that struck the strands of the Weave held fast, while the rest dissipated, and when all of them had found purchase, Tarrin yanked on them.  In a visible flash, every twisted braid of flows that had touched a strand flared with a brilliant light, then vanished back into invisibility, itself a brand new strand.  The new strands were all joined together in a vast spiderweb of magical ropes, and they joined within Tarrin, giving him a direct pathway to the magic he sought.
	His entire body literally exploded into Magelight as the power filled him at a rate that would have destroyed lesser Sorcerers in the blink of an eye.  He screamed out his anger and the pain he felt at drawing such power, the living fire that ignited inside him as the accumulated power sought to consume him in holy fire from the inside out.  It hazed over his sight, but his control over that power did not waver in the slightest as he used the pain to drive his fury, to focus his attention on the distant Zakkites, the ones that had to be destroyed.  The anger, the pain, the power, they dulled his thinking as he devoted most of his conscious mind to controlling the rampage of unstoppable power that had pooled within him.  He only knew that they were out of range of conventional Sorcery.  That meant that he had to create a weave that would release near him, yet have a residual effect that would carry all the way over to them.  His first thought was the weave of pure, raw magical power of which he was fond, a beam of pure Sorcery whose destructive power was unrivalled for a weave of its type.  But such a weave required physical aim, and they were too far away for him to hit all six ships with it before he was drained to the point where the weave would dissipate.  No, that was too grand.  For this, he had to think small, use something elegant for its simplicity.
	Wind.  Wind, pure wind, a force that, if it was strong enough, could destroy almost anything.
	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.
 
Chapter 2

	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.
	He had no idea how long he had followed that daily pattern.  There were only very broad, vague concepts of 