tion of Val, he'd made a couple of trips to the library in the Tower and gotten some books about the Dwarves.  They hadn't said very much, since the race was destroyed over five thousand years ago, but there were quite a few illustrations of ancient Dwarven artifacts and descriptions of some of the ruins thought to have been their cities.  Most of which, to his surprise, were underground; Mala Myrr was one of the very few Dwarven cities that was built above ground.  In fact, he still had one of those books, a book that tried without much success to decipher the written language of the Dwarves, what the author had dubbed Duthak, which was the Dwarven word for their own kind.  Actually, the book was more of a written account of the author's attempts to decipher the language and his study of the extinct race more than anything else.  He had made some interesting observations about the Dwarves, but Tarrin wasn't sure if they were right or not.
	Once again, Tarrin remembered the Dwarven art that the Goddess had removed from Mala Myrr.  He realized that she still hadn't told him where it was.  Alright, Mother, where did you put it? Tarrin finally asked directly, within the vaults of his own mind.
	There came a silvery laugh.  It currently decorates my palace in the dimension where I truly exist, she replied.  And you can't have it back.  I've grown quite fond of it.
	"That's alright, Mother.  I'm certain I can find a few interesting pieces here before we go home."
	Eron looked at him strangely, but Jasana had an understanding look about her.  Sometimes he wondered if Jasana could hear it when he spoke to the Goddess, since she was so strong as a Sorcerer.
	"Oooh, Papa, is that Faalken's tomb over there?" Eron asked excitedly, pointing to a pristine marble building in the middle of the arena floor, shaped like a hammer.
	"Yes, cub," Tarrin answered quietly, looking at it and remembering his old friend, and marvelling at how much of an impact Faalken had had on his life, both during his own life and after his death.  Even now, so long after it had happened, even after the mission to protect the Firestaff was over, he still couldn't think of his old friend without a wistful smile and a pang of guilt.
	"Can we go look at it?" he asked impatiently.
	"Alright, but you will not touch.  Do you understand?"
	"I won't!" Eron promised immediately, then let go of his father's tail and bolted towards the marble mausoleum.
	Tarrin guessed that since he was there, he may as well pay his respects.  He padded towards the building at a much slower pace than his son, with Kedaira and Jasana following him closely.  There was alot of history bound up in this place, the floor of the ruined arena where he and Jegojah had had their last fight.  Over there on that toppled wall was where he'd suffered such a fit of outrage that he had unleashed the power of High Sorcery on the unsuspecting Jegojah, after the Doomwalker had called on Faalken's rotted body for assistance.  That was when he'd discovered what they'd done to his old friend.  They were hoping that the shock of it would make him drop his guard long enough for either Jegojah or Faalken to finish him off, but it had a completely different effect.  The gouge in the earth was still there from where Jegojah tried to sink into the earth to escape, but Tarrin had ripped him out of it as if he was a long-rooted weed.  It was filled with sand now, a patch of beige on the reddish brown floor of the arena, with its hard-packed surface of earth and soft clay.  Tarrin glanced over and saw the hole in the skyline from where the buildings that they had toppled had once stood.  The battle between Tarrin and Jegojah had ranged out of the arena, and they'd done some damage to the city in the course of it.  That was why Tarrin had removed all the Dwarven art and artifacts from all the buildings surrounding the arena, because he didn't want any of the priceless artifacts to be damaged.  Even now, over a year after the battle, Tarrin could remember every stone, every pit and scratch on every one of those stones, and the place had such a feel of famliarity to him, like his own home, that he felt perfectly at ease here.  He had spent days studying and memorizing the layout of the arena and the city surrounding it to give him every possible advantage over Jegojah, and in the end it had paid off.
	It was a violent past, but in many ways, it had been the beginning of modern history.  It was here that Tarrin and Jegojah made peace between them, after Tarrin freed the Doomwalker's soul from the Soultrap.  Jegojah later became a key element of the battle of Suld, killing Kravon before he could use that evil artifact he had to raise another wave of undead to battle, slaying him with that evil sword that caused anyone who was struck by it to bleed uncontrollably and suffer excruciating pain.
	That evil weapon was now sitting in Tarrin's bedroom, because he didn't want anything like that laying around where someone could find it in one of the Tower's many storerooms, and besides, it had been Jegojah's, and it was the one material possession he had that served as a reminder and memorial of the long dead Shacan general.  Tarrin didn't have that one sitting out where someone may pick it up and cut him or herself by accident.  Jegojah's sword was in the trunk at the foot of his bed, the one thing in the house that absolutely everyone in the house knew, even Jesmind, that the were not to open.  Tarrin held his most personal effects in that trunk, as well as some objects which were exceedingly dangerous.  Jegojah's sword was the most dangerous of them all.
	Because of what happened here, history was written in the way Tarrin would have preferred.  It was here that Jegojah became an ally, it was here where he finally came to terms with Faalken's death and put both him and the darkness of the memory that he had caused his friend's death to final peace, and it was here where he had looked inside the workings of a Soultrap, which had allowed him to duplicate the magic of it and prepare the vessel by which his life was saved after he destroyed both Val and himself.  There was alot of history here, as well as the site where so much history had been made.  Both personal and historical.
	While Eron rushed around the tomb to look at it from every angle, Tarrin stood silently before it, his eyes half-closed and a wan, distant expression on his face.  Sometimes he thought he'd never completely put Faalken's death behind him.  Even now, he couldn't think of the Knight without a pang of guilt over having played a part in his death.  He doubted that the cherubic Knight would appreciate him pining like that, but sometimes one just couldn't help but do such things.  Memories of him floated through Tarrin's memory, and those made him smile.  His favorite memory was the time he cut all the hair off one side of Azakar's head.  To this day, he couldn't figure out how he managed to get in there and shave half of Azakar's head without waking the Mahuut up.  He was a very capable and dependable man, but he was never one that got so caught up in himself or his work that he couldn't have a little fun.  Him and Sarraya would have gotten along absolutely famously, had they ever have had the chance to meet.
	But he was not there to visit.  He had to meet Allia, and they had a ways to go.  He didn't want to have them have to come into the city.
	"Alright, cubs, come with me," he said.  "I'll tell you right now, don't touch anything if you don't know exactly what it is, don't come within the length of your tail to any animals you may see, even insects, and don't ever leave sight of me.  Do you understand?"
	"Yes, Papa," they said in unison.
	"Kedaira, keep an eye on the cubs and make sure they don't stray," he told the inu in the Druid's manner, which was simply willing that the animal understand him.  The mottled predator growled shortly in reply, stalking up to the two cubs and hovering right behind them.  She would make sure that both of them remembered that promise.
	Using his lock on Allia, Tarrin guided them steadily southwest, even as he felt the sense of his sister grow nearer.  She was travelling towards him as he travelled towards her, but where she travelled over the rocky expanses on the edges of the city, Tarrin moved along a sandy broad avenue that seemed to run all the way to the edge of the city.  It was flanked by progressively smaller stone buildings, most of which were still standing despite some five thousand years of exposure to the winds and scouring sands of the desert.  This section of the city had been buried in sand the last time he was there, and he figured that the large number of standing buildings meant that this part of the city was buried more often than not...or so he thought.  Or maybe most of the buildings were still standing because it hadn't been buried most of the time.  Tarrin regarded them as they walked, with the cubs close behind him and Kedaira following behind, trying to imagine what the city looked like when there were Dwarves here.  It wouldn't have been a desert, that was for sure.  The desert was created after the Blood War, a scar of that terrible war, during climatic changes that were brought about because of the raw power that the Demons and the denizens of Sennadar hurled at each other, enough power to change the climate.  The entire region in the center of the desert had been burned to ash, and the shift in the climate didn't allow anything to grow back, creating the desert that had more than tripled in size since those days.  Mala Myrr supposedly had been situated on a grassy plain back then, in a lush area much like the bread basket that the Free Duchies were now.  Tarrin tried to envision an entire city full of Dwarves, who the histories said were short, stocky, widely built beings that were broad-featured and physically powerful.  All of them wore beards, even the women, which surprised him when he saw a picture of a female dwarf with her beard divided up into three braids that hung off her chin like dark icicles.  He'd never seen a female with a beard before, but then again, the ancient Dwarves probably would have thought it strange that females of other species were bare-faced.  The histories said they were about five spans tall on the average, which meant that one of them would top out right about at his belt.  They also said that they were warriors without peer, as well as the best stonemasons, miners, and builders that the ancient world had ever seen.  Their building skills were displayed here in this city, where their buildings were still standing strong after five thousand years.
	Such a terrible waste.  Tarrin had always had something of a fascination with the ancient Dwarves, because he, like many others, could find nothing but towering respect for a race willing to die to the last man, woman, and child to defend the world from the Demons.  The Dwarves, the Hobbits, and the Gnomes all died out in the Blood War--or at least everyone thought that the Gnomes had; since becoming a Were-cat, he'd learned that there were a few Gnomes still alive, but they never came into contact with humans.  The Dwarves had fought to the last man, the Hobbits had been exterminated during the Blood War by the Demons, because their homeland was what was now Nyr, and had been in the direct path of the Demons as they advanced out of northern Arathorn, and the Gnomes, which had always been very few in number, had their only two cities overrun and destroyed by the Demons as they crossed over what was now the Sandshield Mountains that separated the desert from Arkis.  There were only a handful of Gnomes left, a couple of hundred at the most, and Triana expected that their race would finally succumb and die out within a thousand years, the final casualty of the Blood War.
	The Blood War had wiped out three races, but it had created two others in its stead and radically changed a third.  It had caused a rift among the Sha'Kar, and those rifts were what created the Selani and the Wikuni, and the Sha'Kar that remained tried to come to terms with the great violence and carnage that they had perpetrated during the war.  Some Sha'Kar fled to avoid facing what had happened, and they had become the Selani.  Some had left the Known World for lands that hadn't been devastated, and they became the Wikuni.  Those that remained underwent a cultural revolution, becoming a race of pacifistic beings who abhorred violence, but trained and prepared for the day when they may have to protect the world from Demons once again.  They had become the katzh-dashi, or more to the point, they had founded the order, and most of the traditions and rituals that existed among the katzh-dashi could be traced directly back to the Sha'Kar who had created them.
	Tarrin mused about that, and about his own personal history in this place, and realized that even the worst events could sometimes have positive effects, if one looked far enough into the future.  The Blood War had been a grievous and absolutely devastating thing, but there had been some good to come of it.  But that good could not balance the destruction that was wrought in the wake of the rampaging Demons.
	For the first time, Tarrin wondered why it was called the Blood War.  Usually a war had a name that in some way explained what the war was about, or where it had been fought.  The War of the Morning over in Wikuna was a good example of that, the one-day battle between Keritanima and Damon Eram over the Sun Throne of Wikuna.  But what kind of name was the Blood War?  It had to have some kind of significance or meaning, probably one lost over the thousands of years since it had happened.
	They continued down the avenue until it opened into what looked to be some kind of square or open area, maybe a place for open-air markets.  It was an empty space devoid of rubble, but there were tiny little bumps and occasional depressions in the sandy ground, ground that was not paved like most of the other streets.  About a quarter or a third of the square was covered in a very shallow sand drift, from where sand had been blown in during a sandstorm and collected up on the leeward side of buildings and obstacles.  The sand had built up on the lee side of a low wall and long three story building on the east side of the square, which covered the eastern quarter of the square.  What was more, there was something about the place that was tickling at Tarrin's awareness, like there was something here that was unusual.  Tarrin slowed down as he looked around, then he knelt by one of the little mound-like bumps in the sandy ground.  It was dirt, not sand, hard-packed, but it had a patch of sand on its leeward side from where it broke the wind and gave the blowing sand a place to fall without being carried away by the wind.  There was a bit of metallic glint at the top of it, and when he reached down and touched the mound, the realized that it contained the skeletal remains of a Dwarf, still clad in his pristine, uncorroded armor.  He had found one such skeleton the first time he was here, buried in a sand drift, and he wondered what it was about the desert that prevented the bones from decaying into dust.
	"Bones," Eron said, brushing some hard-packed dirt away from the mound and exposing a metal gauntlet with two arm bones protruding from it.
	"It looks like they had a battle here," Tarrin said, looking around.  "I think they tried to slow the Demons down so the others could escape."
	"Who, Papa?"
	"The Dwarves, Jasana," he answere, shooing Eron away from the mound to keep him from tearing it up in his curiosity.  "This city was built by the Dwarves."
	"Who are they, Papa?" Eron asked.
	"Cub, do you ever listen to me?" Tarrin asked in more than a little exasperation.  "What do you think those big books I've been reading were about?"
	"I dunno, Papa.  You always seem to have a big book in your lap."
	Tarrin snorted and gave his son a sharp-eyed look.  "The Dwarves were a race of short, stocky people that all died in the Blood War.  I'm sure your mother has told you stories of that."
	"Yeah, but they always sounded like they were just stories."
	"They're true enough, cub," he said, standing up.  "The Dwarves died fighting the Demons."
	"All of them?" Jasana asked.
	"All of them," Tarrin replied.
	"That doesn't seem fair," Jasana fussed.
	"Life isn't fair, Jasana," he told her calmly as Kedaira snuffled around the mound without much curiosity.  "Come on, Allia's waiting for us.  Just don't walk on the mounds, cubs.  They're the graves of the Dwarves, and it's not very nice if you walk on them."
	They picked their way across the open area carefully, so as not to disturb the mounds, but Tarrin's sense of presence seemed to intensify as he crossed the square.  He realized that he was sensing magic, but it was a very old magic, so old that the sense of it had seeped into the area surrounding it.  Tarrin could sense it more clearly for every step he took, until he could tell exactly where it was.
	"What's that strange feeling, Papa?" Jasana asked.
	"It's magic, cub," he said, turning towards one of the larger mounds, his curiosity piqued.  "Probably some magical object that's been laying here since these Dwarves died.  Strange that it survived the Breaking.  I haven't sensed any other magic in the city, and I've explored a good part of it."
	"Why would that be strange?"
	"Most of the old magic was destroyed in the Breaking, cub," he answered her.  "Only a handful of objects survived, and most of them completely by accident.  Something here survived the Breaking, but it's so old, I'm not sure what it is."
	Whatever it was, it was indeed at the largest of the little mounds.  Tarrin knelt by it and brushed sand off its top.  It too was covered in hard-packed dirt, dirt that had somehow not been scoured down by the sandstorms that blew through the region.  Curious to find out what was there but reluctant to disturb the grave, Tarrin turned to Sorcery.  He sent weaves of Earth and Divine down into the mound to determine what was inside it, and found that it was entombing a large Dwarf wearing a heavy suit of that same armor.  The magical sense was emanating from that armor, he realized, or more to the point, the magic was surrounding the skeleton within the armor.  It had to be the armor.  This Dwarf had magically augmented armor, but even that had not been enough to save him from the Demons.
	"Oooh, Papa, look!" Eron said excitedly, pulling something out of the ground a few spans from the mound.
	Tarrin looked up and saw Eron holding a dirt-crusted object.  The young Were-cat shook off the excess, and Tarrin realized that his son was holding an axe.  It was a battle axe, a weapon of war, with a gleaming silvery double-headed axe head with a thrusting spike between the two crescents.  It was affixed to a haft of what looked to have been leather-wrapped metal; no, now that he looked at it, the entire weapon looked to be made of one piece of metal.  There were duthak runes etched into the axe head, as well as a strange symbol that looked like an angular mountain or pyramid with three lines running horizontally in its center.
	"Give it here, cub," Tarrin ordered, and the Were-cat boy surrendered his find to his father.  Tarrin felt its considerable weight as soon as it was put in his paw; it had taken Eron both arms to hold it up.  Someone like Dolanna wouldn't even be able to pick it up off the ground.  It was an impressively heavy weapon, but it had a different kind of metal at the base of its long haft that was heavier than the other metal of which it was constructed, to serve to balance the weapon when wielded.  It was apparent almost immediately that this was a weapon of truly exquisite craftsmanship, a weapon that had served its owner well through many battles, judging from the many faint scratches, nicks, and scars on the axe's heads, imperfections that had been buffed or polished out over the years.  Tarrin used his claws to dig the dirt out of the etched runes, seeing again the angular writing of the Dwarves that was all straight lines and sharp corners.  The Dwarves didn't seem to like a curved line, for there was not a single one in their writing.  He couldn't read it, and he had never seen that mountain symbol before, so the axe presented to Tarrin several interesting mysteries.  Its proximity to this large mound hinted that the Dwarf with the magical armor had been the one that had wielded this weapon, a weapon that was not itself magical, but Tarrin could sense that at one time in the past it had held an enchantment.  The magic within the axe had faded long ago, and it was lucky for the axe that the magic faded before the Breaking, or it would have been destroyed when the magic contained within it was disrupted by the tearing of the Weave.
	Again, Tarrin's eyes drifted back to that strange symbol.  It looked like a pyramid with its top corner chopped off to form a small flat plateau, or a steeply sloped mountain with no peak.  The bottom of the pyramid or mountain was not enclosed; the lines that turned towards one another to form its base did not meet, ending just inside the top edges of the small plateau at the top, forming an open-bottomed device.  Inside it were three horizontal lines, their lengths differing from one another, with the shortest on the top and the longest on the bottom.  Tarrin wiped more dirt away from that symbol, and then used his clawtip to dig the dirt out of the etchings, but found no other symbols or features concerning that unusual glyph.  What made it strange was that it was ten times larger than the duthak writing which surrounded it.  This symbol had some significant importance.  It could be that the weapon itself was special in some way, or it had been made for someone of high military or social rank.  The craftsmanship of the weapon itself hinted that it was made for someone who could afford to have it made, so that wasn't an outrageous conclusion.
	"What is it, Papa?" Eron asked excitedly.
	"It's an axe, you nit!" Jasana told him irritably.  "You've seen Gramma's!"
	"But it has to be a special axe!" Eron retorted.  "I mean, I found it right here where all the Dwarf bones are, and Papa's looking at it real careful, and--"
	"It's a very, very old axe, cub," Tarrin cut him off in a quiet, distracted tone.  "It was probably used by one of these Dwarves."
	"Oooh, can I keep it?  Please?" Eron begged.
	"No, cub, this isn't something for you," Tarrin told him calmly.  "This is not a toy."  Tarrin looked at his son's crestfallen look, and he felt a little guilty for usurping it.  "But I tell you what.  Before we leave, we'll go into one of the buildings that's still standing and see if we can't find some little souvenirs, so you can take something back home with you.  Is that alright?"
	"I can't wait!" Eron said excitedly, completely forgetting about the axe.  Eron was easy to distract that way.  "I want to try that one!" he said, pointing at the largest building he could see, then he started running towards it.
	"Stop!" Tarrin barked.  "I didn't say now," he told his impulsive son as the Were-cat boy started shuffling back towards where Tarrin and Jasana were.
	"Can you read any of it, Papa?" Jasana asked, staring at the axe curiously.
	"No, cub.  I haven't found any books that translate the Dwarven language yet."
	"Papa," she said in a chiding tone.  "Just borrow the Book of Ages from Aunt Jenna.  I'm sure it has what you're looking for."
	Tarrin gave his daughter a surprised look, then he felt a little embarassed.  He hadn't thought of that.  And she was entirely right.  There would be a key in the Book of Ages for translating Dwarven, just as there was one within it for translating Sha'Kar.  In fact, there would be quite a bit of extra information in the Book of Ages about the Dwarves, like where their cities had been, what gods they worshipped, and most of their written history.  There wouldn't be detailed history within, such as the histories of cities or individuals, but there would be a great deal of information within about the Dwarven race as a whole, and the impact they had on the world before the Blood War.  If he dug, he could probably find more information about them in the Sha'Kar books, as well as the older Urzani tomes.  The Dwarves had been conquered right along with the humans, Hobbits, Goblinoids and Gnomes when the Urzani conquered the majority of the Known World.  Their Imperial histories would have some information in them about the Dwarves under Imperial domination.
	He realized that he'd only been playing at learning about the Dwarves before.  If he really wanted to learn, there were any number of places where he could look to find what he was looking for.
	"You're right, cub," Tarrin chuckled.  "I never thought of asking Jenna to borrow it."
	Kedaira made a series of hissing sounds, and then hunkered down and glared towards the large building towards which Eron had been running.  "What's the matter, Kedaira?" Tarrin asked as the inu suddenly turned wary and nervous.
	There was the tiniest of small tremors that shuddered underneath Tarrin's feet.  Tarrin put his paw down on the ground and felt another one, and when he was certain at what he was feeling, his ears suddenly laid back.  "Eron, come here right now," Tarrin said in a voice that would brook no disobedience.
	"What is it, Papa?" Jasana asked as Kedaira hissed threateningly, taking a step back.
	"There's a kajat close by," he answered in a quiet tone.  "Kedaira, come to me," he called.  "I'll keep the kajat off you."
	"Aren't those those really big ones that look something like Kedaira?" Eron asked in a hushed yet excited tone as the inu backed up until she was standing literally on top of the kneeling Tarrin.  Tarrin pushed the predator off of him and stood up, his eyes scanning the buildings facing him.  He knew he'd never smell the kajat, for they had a scent that was so much like sand and rock that it was impossible to detect unless he was right on top of it.  And if he was that close, then he was too close.
	"That's right, cub," Tarrin answered.
	"Ooooh, can I see it?"
	"Eron," Tarrin snapped in a low tone, "if you're close enough to see a kajat, then you're too close.  If you want to see what a kajat looks like, I'll show you an Illusion of one later.  But right now, the last thing I want to see is a kajat."
	"Just magic it, Papa," Eron said dismissively.
	"I'd rather not do that unless I don't have any other choice," he answered.  "I don't want to do any damage to the city, and I don't want it knocking down buildings trying to get past my magic to eat us."
	"Just talk to it," Jasana reasoned.
	"That's not easy when you're trying to talk a hungry predator out of eating you," he told her.  "When they're like that, sometimes they don't listen.  I'm not about to take the chance."  He felt another tremor, and realized the kajat was trying to circle around behind them so it would have a chance to get close enough to run one of them down before they spotted it.  They were massive animals, but they could move with blazing speed for short distances.  They were ambush hunters, not predators that ran down prey over a distance like lions or wolves, but they would try to run down a meal if they felt that they could get close enough.
	Tarrin weighed his options.  The kajat wasn't going to give up, not now.  It knew they were there, and that meant that a confrontation was inevitable.  Tarrin didn't want to deal with the animal here, because it may damage the ruins, and Tarrin didn't want that to happen.  He wouldn't fight, and he didn't feel like trying to slip away from the animal, so that left the third option; using magic.  But instead of trying to deal with the kajat, he would use it to get out of its reach.
	"Move in close, cubs," he ordered.  "I'll have an Elemental carry us out of here."
	"Oh, boy!" Eron said in excitement.  "I love flying!"
	Putting his will against the Weave, Tarrin wove a spell of Air and Divine, and then felt it reach inward, breaching the barriers between his dimension and another.  Once it did that, he felt it call out on the other side, and when a reply came, he used the spell to build a construct of Air and Divine flows, forming a shell of sorts.  He felt the awareness that had answered his call on the other side of the dimensional barrier flow through the hole he had opened, then fill the magical construct he had woven for it.  The force occupied the provided host and then grounded itself into it, and then two pools of light appeared within the invisible shell as the force fully animated his magic.  He felt the mental link between him and the magical construct form, which informed him that the spell was complete and it had been successful.
	It was an Air Elemental; or more to the point, it was his Air Elemental.  The same Elemental being answered a Sorcerer's call every time a Sorcerer used the magic to summon Elementals, forming a symbiotic relationship where the Elemental performed services for the Sorcerer, and fed off the magic that the Sorcerer supplied to allow it to come into this dimension in form of payment.  The Sorcerer benefitted from the Elemental's aid, and the Elemental gained power from the service as payment.  A mutually benefitting relationship, the best kind to have.  Tarrin and his Air Elemental weren't just partners, they happened to be friends.  Tarrin made a habit of summoning all four of his Elementals at least once every ten days, even if he had no need for them.  Elementals gained power from being summoned, and since it was the same Elemental every time he Conjured it, he wanted his Elementals to be strong as well as prove to them that choosing to answer Tarrin's call the first time he tried to summon them had not been a mistake.  He made sure his four Elemental partners were well rewarded for their decision to serve Tarrin, and they repaid his attention to their needs and willingness to help them by always performing to the best of their abilities.  The Elementals that served Sorcerers were probably the most loyal of all Elementals that the orders of magic could summon or conjure, because of the special relationship involved.
	"I need a favor, old friend," Tarrin addressed the Elemental as soon as it was fully formed and cognizant of the material world.  Tarrin never ordered his Elementals, he always requested their help.  He was ever aware of the fact that an Elemental Conjured by a