Turning a corner, he started towards the western edge of town. He couldn't wait to get somewhere private and shed himself of his annoying human form.

Travelling west in Arkis was much different than travelling in the desert.

Tarrin moved swiftly yet surely in the dwindling darkness of night, racing the dawn, running along a twisting farm road that led steadily westward, through a surprisingly warm night covered in clouds. Those clouds hid the moons and the Skybands, making his travel a bit less swift that it would have been had he had more light, but enough light was filtering through to allow him to see the dirt road well enough to move quickly. The night was warm compared to the desert, but there was the humidity in the air that had been missing there, a humidity that trapped the ambient heat and caused it to feel much closer to him. It still was cool-after all, it was spring-but the air lacked the bite that it had in the desert at night, so it felt much warmer. There was so much humidity that misty tendrils of fog clung to the surfaces of still water, like ponds or slow moving streams, adding yet another strange distinction to remind him that he was out of the desert. The land through which he travelled was that of very gentle hills, covered with farmland. Strange raised embankments with bushy hedges separated those tracts of farm, making the land look like some vast lanceboard when he could see down into valleys from the few high vantage points to be found in the progressively flattening terrain.

It had taken him no time to revert to a nocturnal pattern. Cats were active at both day and night, but their senses were geared more towards hunting in the darkness of night, so they were diurnal beings with a bent towards nocturnal activity. The darkness concealed him, protected him, and allowed him to travel virtually unmolested through the rather hostile Arkisian territory. For five days, he had moved steadily westward at night, and had concealed himself to rest during the day, hiding himself in cat form in whatever small cubbyhole or barn he could find, hiding from the Trolls that were prevelantly prowling the countryside in small bands, looking for him. At first, he considered simply killing them and moving on, but he realized that that was going to leave a path of dead bodies to show the others which way he was going. That may give them the chance to organize another blockade of sorts near the Frontier, and he couldn't afford to take two or three days to detour around a concentration of Trolls. So he chose instead to avoid them, and that was best done at night. Trolls could see in the dark, but nowhere near as well as he could, and he had the advantage of smelling them long before he got anywhere near them. Nothing that smelled as bad as them was going to come anywhere near ambushing him. He had neatly evaded several such small ambush points, Trolls hiding in hedges at the sides of the road and waiting to pounce on anyone passing by them.

He couldn't fault them for not trying, that was for sure. In the five days since leaving the small Arkisian border town, he had seen no less than fifty Troll patrols, and had avoided no less than twenty ambushes or Troll camps. They had indeed come boiling out of the Sandshield after the news that he had gotten past them had filtered through their ranks, and were now virtually taking over the northern sections of Arkis, tearing the place apart looking for him. He'd seen not a few columns of smoke in the distance, both during the day and the night, smoke caused by Trolls attacking farmsteads. Tarrin didn't care about the people on those farms, but he did have some small hopes that they saw the Trolls coming and fled. Odds were, they were probably very careful right now, and would flee at the first hint of something big marching down the road.

Part of him considered it a brutal concept, but those villages and farmsteads were actually helping him. Trolls delighted in plundering and raiding, and more often than not they would detour to sack a farmstead rather than continue about the business of finding him. Those little delays were allowing him to pull outside of the border of their invaded territory, letting him get away from them. They were continuing to expand to the west, but he had seen fewer and fewer of them as he moved west, and he knew that by midnight, he would be outside of their claimed territory. He would be free to really put his feet on the ground, rather than spend much of his energy watching for Trolls, and going slow enough to react to them in time to avoid them.

The five days and then some had only reinforced his feeling of isolation. He had been alone nearly a ride now, and he did not like it. He did not like it at all. No matter how solitary the Cat was, the Human in him wanted company, companionship, and it missed even the condescending chatter of Sarraya. Her talking would be much preferable to the painful silence that surrounded him now. But unlike what had happened in Yar Arak and Saranam, he only felt a longing pang, not the intense homesickness and yearning for his family he had felt then. He knew that he could talk to any of his sisters any time he wanted, and that brought him a large measure of comfort. Keritanima certainly took advantage of that fact to contact him every day, if only just to talk. She did, however, pass on information in carefully worded phrases, however. Some of her additional forces had arrived from Wikuna, and Shiika's cambisi also were there. The five Alu, as Kerri said they were called, had already begun to prepare quietly on the Tower grounds for both the arrival of their mother and the coming enemy Demons. The Sulasians were a bit perplexed at the large numbers of Wikuni and Vendari that had flooded into their city, but the Keeper was making sure that the Sulasian garrison in Suld cooperated with the Wikuni and the Knights to fortify the city against possible attack. That would be a logical precaution for them, given that Dal armies were in Sulasia, and it helped hide the fact that the preparations were being made with a specific objective in mind.

Talking to Keritanima every day, around noon every day, also helped ease his sense of loneliness a great deal. It gave him something positive in his day, something to await expectantly, something to brighten a quiet day spent staying out of sight and being somewhat bored.

Tarrin slowed to a stop as the sun began to appear over the eastern horizon, a horizon no longer dominated by the Sandshield. He looked back at the rising sun absently, realizing that he'd lost track of time again. It was time to start looking for somewhere to hide for the daylight hours. That usually wasn't a very hard thing to do. That region of Arkis was dominated by farms, and there were any number of farmsteads from which to take his pick. He looked back to the west and saw one sitting on a small hilltop, surrounded by planted fields. There was already activity out on that farm, the workers starting their day early, as all farmers did, and it was relatively close by. It would suit him.

Shifting into cat form, he wriggled through a hedgerow and started moving through plowed fields, fields planted with seed yet not yet showing any green from their growth. It took him about a half an hour to reach the large farmstead on the top of the hill, slinking into the compound in his cat form, stopping to appreciate the prosperity of the place. It had two farmhouses, not just one, and had six other buildings built in a roughly circular array around a grassy lawn in the center. Two of them were barns, one was a stable, and the last one was a small smithy. He sat on his haunches at the corner of one of the barns and looked out to see about twenty people bustling about the central lawn or near the buildings. There were older men and women and children, young adults and lots of chickens. There were three dogs laying on the porch of the house on the right, which was larger and looked older than the one beside it.