He looked down at the doorway, which came up to the his chest. There was no way he'd be able to get into one of those buildings in his current form. But looking down caught his eyes on a small bright object partially buried in the sand. He knelt down and picked it up, and found it to be a small knife. A knife held in a skeletal hand.

A little excavation revealed a skeleton of a short, heavy-boned bipedal creature, wearing a massive set of plate armor-at least massive for the skeleton's size. A broken battle axe rested underneath it. The creature had died with a knife in its hands, fighting on to the last breath. The metal worn by the skeleton was clean and unblemished, a sign of being buried in scouring sand with no humidity. That, or the metal wasn't steel, wasn't subject to rust.

"Looks like a Dwarf," Sarraya said after the skeleton was unearthed.

So small, but obviously tenacious and brave. Like a wolverine.

"You want to camp here for tonight?" Sarraya asked.

"We don't have much choice," he replied. "But I don't think we should go into the city to do it. Let's pull back a ways."

"You afraid of ghosts?" she asked with a smile.

"I'm afraid of what might be hiding in those ruins," he replied soberly. "Sandmen are the least of our worries. A kajat could be hiding in there, and I don't fancy the idea of having one pay a visit after dark."

"How can something so big hide so well?" Sarraya complained as they turned around and started back up the incline.

"Practice," he replied absently.

They set up camp against a steep hillside, to at least narrow the avenues of possible invasion. The sand covered hill reflected the light of the fire quite nicely, illuminating much of their surroundings in the ruddy firelight. Sarraya ate her customary dinner of berries, nuts, and breads and pastries pilfered via Conjuring as Tarrin roasted a small umuni he had hunted down just before sunset. Umuni wasn't very tasty, but he was rightly tired of not having any meat. The poisonous lizard was a better meal than another Faerie dining experience. Tarrin looked down at the large city, wondering at who had lived there, what kind of people those Dwarves were. They had to be brave, if they were willing to sacrifice their entire race to stop the Demons. Very brave indeed. They had to be very smart and skilled to build such an impressive city. He had a feeling that they were a race of honor. He wasn't sure how he knew that, but he was pretty sure of it. Probably nothing like the Selani or Vendari, whose honor was their lives, but still very honorable. They had to be tough fighters as well. It was sad that an entire race was snuffed out in the Blood War-not just one, for that matter-but at least those who were saved by the sacrifice of the Dwarves still honored their memory, and honored their heroism.

They still sang the songs. Songs of the Battle of the Line, the titanic clash between the Demons and the natives on the arid steppes of Arak, where the Dwarves had pushed back an army of darkness that would have run back over land that the natives had managed to reclaim from the Demonspawn. Songs of the what was simply called Last Battle, the last of the great battles that had caused the extinction of the Dwarven race, who had rallied to the last man, woman, and child around the banners of the native peoples, then marched headlong into death singing songs of glory. They had shown no fear, shown no regret for what they had done. They had thrown themselves against the Demonic horde, and though they had lost their people, their courage had won the war.

Trying to imagine doing such a thing was hard. He had no idea how he would react if he was called upon to sacrifice not only himself, but everything that he held dear, everything in the entire world that mattered to him, in order to stop something so terrible that there was no other way. It was a terrifying thought. He had no regard for throwing his own life away, but to do so knowing that all his family, all his friends, everything that he had ever known was going to die with him… it was something one did not even think in jest. Such a horrendous cost.

But the memory of the Dwarves lived on, lived on in the songs of the survivors, songs that were still sang to this day. So long as the songs called out over fires and within parlors and taprooms, the Dwarves would never be forgotten, and their memory would live on.

"You're quiet," Sarraya noted as she took a long drink from a tiny cup.

"Thinking of them," he said, motioning back towards the city. "I can't even imagine what they sacrificed."

"I don't want to imagine it," Sarraya said with a shudder. "But they saved us all, Tarrin. No matter how high the price they paid, it's something that we should never forget. We owe them that much."

"Amen," he nodded.

The rest of the night passed in relative peace and calm, but not for Tarrin. The twinge in the Weave was getting closer and closer, and he had a feeling that it was indeed Jegojah. He still couldn't pin a location to it, but it was coming towards him from the northwest, the direction he was going. That meant that any movement forward was going to bring it faster, and he may not be ready when the time came. What he was feeling was very vague, so he had no idea if it was half a desert away, or just on the other side of the ruined city. It told him that if he was going to move, it had to be back the way he came, to buy himself time.

But he had come from that way. There was nothing back there suitable enough for a showdown with the Doomwalker. The land was too open, and too verdant. He wouldn't be able to block off Jegojah's access to the land.

Stupid, stupid! He wanted a cluttered, rocky wasteland for a battlefied, and he was looking at one!

The ruins of the city would be perfect. They were rubble-strewn and broken, with lots of uneven terrain and many places to hide. The standing buildings and rocky piles created a landscape that favored him, the faster and more nimble of the combatants, and the entire city was either covered in rock or paved with stones under the sand. Sand itself was inorganic-it was a kind of rock-and that would deny the Doomwalker the power to draw energy from the land. Tarrin was a little bit wary of disturbing the sanctity of the ruins, one of the last few monuments of the memory of the Dwarves, but something deep inside him told him that the spirits of the Dwarves wouldn't mind too much if he knocked down a few buildings or trampled on a few graves. They had been willing to sacrifice everything for a noble cause. His cause may not have been as noble, but it was rather important. He didn't think they'd get too riled up. Beings of honor fully understood the purity of spirit involved in revenge.

That's all it was. Beating Jegojah to stay alive was a very distant alternate reason for what he intended to do. He intended to pay the Doomwalker back in kind for what it did to Faalken, nearly did to his family, and kept trying to do to him.

The ruins of the city would be his battleground. The Dwarves had stopped the Demons, now they were going to help him destroy an undead monster.

Tarrin shifted into his cat form and curled up by the fire. The first piece of the puzzle was in place. Now he just had to prepare for his playmate.

The new day dawned curiously warm and quite blustery for the desert. High winds whipped sand through the city, and though it wasn't a sandstorm, it was a good imitation of one. Tarrin had his visor on to protect against the stinging sand as they got ready to move that day, or at least Sarraya thought. Tarrin had spent most of the night considering what had to be done to get ready for Jegojah. He had to explore the city and find the best place to challenge it. He had to learn all the ground surrounding that chosen site, in case he had to retreat. He had to set up a few little tricks and annoyances to slow the Doomwalker down if he did have to retreat, and he also wanted to build at least one death-trap just in case things went so badly for him that destroying the Doomwalker's body became necessary. He doubted that Jegojah could withstand having a few large buildings dropped on him. Magical protection was one thing, but there were some things against which no amount of magic could defend. Tarrin had learned that the hard way, that invulnerability wasn't quite as invulnerable as one might think. Magic was no challenge to the almighty mastery of the great power known as Physics. The laws of physics told him that when a creature protected by magic was struck by something weighing as much as a large stone building, the magic wasn't going to protect the victim. It would buckle under the immense power attacking it. That power was physics.