As the days passed, he came to fully appreciate his power, and how much it had changed. Weavespinner magic worked without the initial stage of building power to weave spells, and that was a significant difference. When he had seen the Sha'Kar woman use her magic, he had been stunned by the unbelievable speed in which she could control her magic. Now that he had begun to use the same kind of magic, he discovered it to be dramatically faster. Weavespinner magic literally moved at the speed of thought, though he still had to concentrate to use his power where the Sha'kar seemed to be able to use it instantly. He understood that a Weavespinner could out-weave any regular Sorcerer so effectively it would nearly be ridiculous. By the time the Sorcerer was ready to use magic, the Weavespinner already had total control of the surrounding Weave. Anything the Sorcerer did could be controlled by the Weavespinner. The only time the Weavespinner was reduced to the same rules was when he or she resorted to High Sorcery, and that gave advantages all its own. Speed was the margin of victory in Weavespinner magic, but raw power prevailed when moving up the rungs of the progression of magical power.

One pitfall he had already identified was the ease of Weavespinner magic. It was almost too easy, and he could already see dangers in becoming too close to the power. He would begin using Sorcery without even realizing it, having his will and wish start to affect the Weave in ways he didn't intend. When he did reach the same level of competency as the Sha'Kar, he would have to keep a tight control on his thoughts, on his desires, else he unconsciously start using Sorcery to try to bring them about. That could be disastrous, especially considering his aggressive indifference to the continued life of the people around him he didn't know, or particularly care about. Stray impulses to have them go away could result in killing magic, and that was something that he knew he had to prevent before it happened, else he could get himself into serious trouble, both mentally and socially.

His sense of the Weave had also increased day by day, becoming more and more acute as time passed. His practice had intensified it even more, until absolutely nothing about the Weave could escape him when he actively concentrated on it. He could feel everything within it, every miniscule shift in its pattern of energy, every pulse of the communal heart that powered the flow of magic through the Weave. He could read the Weave like a book, could sense magic moving through it and determine what kind of magic it was, where it had come from, where it was going, and usually who had summoned it. Even Sarraya's Druidic magic became more clear to him. Not because it went through the Weave, because it didn't, but because when she used it, she created something of an echo on the Weave. And with a little practice, he began to be able to sense what she was going to do before it happened, because of the volume, pitch, and harmonics carried within that echo.

During that time of practice and progression, they had not been bothered much by the Selani. Almost all of the clans were at Gathering, but there were a few Selani left here and there, left behind to guard water supplies and verdant belts, to ensure the flocks had something when they returned. Those sentries didn't interfere with Tarrin, but a few of them had taken up following him, most likely as an entertaining diversion in the monotonous task of guarding plants that don't really try to get up and run away. He could see them sometimes in the morning or after dark, when there was no heat-haze to hide them in the distance. He didn't really care that they followed him, as long as they stayed back there.

All of it had a purpose, and that purpose was Jegojah. The Doomwalker was coming, he could even sense its approach now, and it would be there soon. Days, perhaps, but no more than a ride. Tarrin's hatred and fury over the Doomwalker had not eased over those uncountable days of preparation-in fact, they had become worse. Tarrin would never forgive the Doomwalker for killing Faalken, for trying to kill his sister and his parents, and the thought that it just kept coming back again and again had offended him at the deepest level possible. He was tired of looking over his shoulder for Jegojah, and he was absolutely determined to deal with the Doomwalker for the last time. There would be no quarter, no mercy, in this battle, and it would not end until one of them was destroyed. He wasn't quite sure how he was going to accomplish this seemingly impossible task, but he wasn't all that concerned. His impulsive nature gave him a bent of creativity, and he was fairly confident that when the time came, he'd think of something, confident that the Goddess would tell him what to do. It was faith, faith in his goddess to protect and watch over him. It was all he had, because days and days and days of endless thought and planning had not yielded a real plan for ridding himself of Jegojah once and for all. Faith was about the only thing he had left, but it was something that he was willing to depend upon. His goddess had yet to fail him, and with a record like that, he was more than willing to put blind trust in her.

Since he had regained a goodly portion of his power, the focus of his travels had drifted away from magical study and had reached a point where he felt it was time to get ready for Jegojah. That meant that he needed to find an ideal battleground, a place that would suit his needs while eliminating the largest of Jegojah's advantages. It needed to be a broken place, with lots of irregular ground. That favored Tarrin, who was more mobile and agile, who could use that broken land to better advantage than his slower, armored foe. It also had to be bare rock, to deny the Doomwalker its power to draw energy from the land. It needed to be a lot of rock, to keep the Doomwalker from fleeing to a place where it could draw energy when the battle turned against it.

One place seemed perfect to him, a place that both Denai and Allia had mentioned. Some place called the Broken Lands, a place where a flat sheet of rock, hundreds of square longspans in area, had been pierced by innumerable gulleys, canyons, and crevasses. But that place was many days behind them, to hear Denai talk about it. He wasn't about to go all the way back there and travel the distance to where he was again. Since that place wasn't available, maybe something smaller, something a bit closer, would do. But without Denai and Var to guide him, he'd have to just wander around until he found something suitable.

So it was with an eye on the horizon that Tarrin ran that day, absently correcting Sarraya on her Sha'Kar as she practiced by speaking in that language. The corrections were mainly cosmetic, for the Faerie was now more or less fluent in the language, but she had a bad habit of using words of other languages when she felt another word more perfectly mirrored her thoughts. That was something that irritated the perfectionist in Tarrin when it came to languages, so he strove to break her of it now, before it became too ingrained to easily shed. The terrain of that region of the desert was noticably hilly, but lacked the rock spires and mesas more common in the southern reaches of the desert. He had a sneaking suspicion that it wasn't going to be easy to find a good battleground in that section of the desert, but he had to keep looking. There were many more wild animals there than in the southern reaches of the desert, but that made sense in that there seemed to be more plant life to support the food chain.

"Can we stop?" Sarraya asked in Sha'Kar. "I'm starting to get hot."

Tarrin pulled in and looked up at the sky. The sun was pretty close to its noontime zenith, and it did feel a little warm. Ever since he had become a Weavespinner, he didn't notice warmth much anymore. Or cold, for that matter. He could feel heat, but it was as if it had no meaning for him anymore, because it never really felt hot .