Sisska laid still on the deck, her tail twitching spasmodically, and beside her laid Miranda, who had a wisp of smoke rising from her chest.
He never remembered running across the deck. One moment he was hunched in the stairwell, and the next he was kneeling beside Miranda. Her simple peasant dress was scorched in several places, but it was the hideous charred wound in her chest, smoking above and between her breasts, that captured his attention. Her burned breastbone was clearly visible, and the flesh around gaping wound was seared. The smell of burnt fur and flesh reeked from her. Tarrin looked at her in stunned confusion, into eyes that were glassy and empty.
"No," he said quietly, hugging her to his chest. She was dead. He couldn't believe it. Miranda, gentle Miranda, with her quiet, wise ways and her cheeky grins. Miranda, who always had a place on her lap for him, always took the time to pay attention to him when nobody else would or could. Miranda, who probably understood him better than Allia, yet never sought to usurp Allia's rightful place in his life. Always favoring the background, even with him, her presence was always noticed by him, even if it wasn't by anyone else. She was his friend, one of the few that she trusted. She couldn't be dead. It was impossible!
He stared into her empty eyes again, shaking his head. The impact of something searing against his back barely registered to him, because his entire world seemed to be dissolving away.
"No," he said more forcefully, as dumb shock was quickly being replaced by rage. A searing, blinding, overwhelming anger that boiled up in him like an erupting volcano, but he did not fight it. He couldn't fight it. Not like this, not now. He welcomed it, joined with it. He knew what it wanted to do, and he wanted that himself. He set Miranda down on the deck gently.
"NnnnnnnnnnnnnnOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" He shrieked as he lost himself. Blindingly white radiance literally exploded from his paws, as the Cat took hold of the Weave and nearly ripped it asunder as he demanded its power, all the power it could give to him. He jumped to his feet as that power began to build, faster than was possible for the richness of the surrounding Weave, until its light limned over his entire body. The scream of denial transformed into an inarticulate bellow of pure, abject fury, so loud that it echoed back from the fogbank and made the entire ship vibrate with the immensity of its power. He raised his paws against the nearest of the Zakkite skyships, which was about twenty spans in the air and about thirty spans off the rail, whose every eye was riveted to him.
A huge bolt of pure, raw, magical power blasted from his paws, the same chaotic weave of Fire, Air, Earth, Divine energy, and token flows from the other spheres to grant the spell the power of High Sorcery. It struck the Zakkite ship dead in the stern. The instant it hit, the wood of the side of the ship simply disintegrated under the immense power of the weave, and debris and shards of wood exploded with the beam as it ripped its way completely through the entire ship. He deliberately raked that magical onslaught across the entire ship's length, from stern to bow, literally cleaving the ship in half, implacably sending a steady stream of fiery debris flying from the far side of the ship as the beam burned and punched through the ship and continued on for nearly a league before finally dissipating.
The attack sent the first ship tumbling to the sea with a loud, frothy splash, and suddenly every attacker's magical attacks came right for him.
Riding a nearly euphoric sensation of the raw power of High Sorcery, Tarrin opened himself up to it more and more, drawing in the power faster than the Weave could supply it, surpassing what he could usually hold without injury. His rage, his fury caused him to completely ignore the usual dangers of wielding that kind of power, and quickly his clothes and fur began to smolder as he drew in so much that his body could not contain it. But he was beyond pain, beyond caring. There was only those who had killed Miranda, and the overwhelming desire, the need, to make them pay for their crimes. There could be no vengeance too merciless, too brutal. They would suffer a million times more than what they had done to Miranda. Tarrin swatted his arm to the side negligently, weaving together a spell made up almost purely of Divine power, with only token flows from the other spheres to grant the weave the power of High Sorcery. The area around the galleon shimmered in a scillinting sphere, and all the magical attacks of the Zakkites struck that barrier, and were absorbed. He turned his attention to the next ship, weaving together a nightmarish weave of Fire, Divine energy, and Earth, infusing it with such power that it almost completely drained him to create it, then he snapped the weave down and manifested it. A black ball, crackling with electricity, appeared in his cupped palm, and he turned and hurled it at the next closest Zakkite ship in a sidearm motion. The ball expanded as it soared at the ship's middle until it was the size of a wagon, causing the Zakkites aboard to turn and flee from it in terror. But there would be no escape.
The ball hit the ship almost perfectly amidships, and in that touch it doomed the black vessel. Wood sheared and snapped as it was sucked into the unimaginable void created by the weave, drawn into that black oblivion with such force that the air itself howled into it with hurricane force winds. It picked up hapless Zakkites and anything not nailed down, sucking it into its effect, sending them into an abyss from which there would be no escape. The ship compressed and crumpled around the black sphere, crushing and crunching to the sound of howling wind, ripping wood, and the screams of the doomed, until the last shards of the bow, the stern, and the masts were drawn into its black depths. After the last pennon on the mast disappeared, the ball shrank steadily, until it too simply winked out of existence.
The lull of sound was from the awed, stunned disbelief of the four remaining Zakkite vessels, and it gave Tarrin a chance to recharge. The energy roared into him, but it did not come fast enough. The Weave couldn't support the demands he made on it. Eyes blazing with incandescent white light, he reached out his paws to the sky and forced the Weave to obey, drawing in energy of all seven flows, then sending them out from him in every direction. They spiralled together as they radiated out from him in every direction, intertwining with each other in groups of seven, until they made contact with other strands. When they did that, Tarrin pulled on them, causing each intertwined finger of flows to suddenly flare with bright white light, then fade into invisibility. Along with the light came a shimmering bell-like sound that vibrated the very air, causing wind to blow away from him with enough force to tatter the fog bank that had been resting to their port. The light faded to nothing, as did the sound. The intertwined flows were gone.
Leaving new strands in their stead.
Standing in the center of a web of saturated strands, Tarrin immediately drew in more power than he could hold, so much that the air around him wavered and the deck beneath his feet began to blacken. There was no pain in his fury, a fury unlike anything he had ever experienced, a fury that did not care if he survived so long as he took those responsible for Miranda with him. He generated a weave of pure Air, not high Sorcery, but a weave of such titanic immensity that its physical manifestation was nearly as large as the ships it was created to attack. It manifested as an invisible wall of pure air, and Tarrin made a pushing motion with one arm-
– -And there was a thunderous BOOM, as the Zakkite ship directly astern simply shattered against the force of a wall of air, as large as it was, striking it at supersonic speed. There was no piece of it larger than a teacup, and the finely pulverized debris sprayed the water aft of the galleon in a spreading fan pattern that turned the waters gray. The shockwave caused by the attack had kicked up a wave ten feet high, that went racing to the southwest at a speed that defied imagination.