The injury to Ariana only made him angry. Where did the Wyverns come from? They were so big, Ariana couldn't have missed them when she flew over the city on her scout! He looked down, and with his humanoid eyes, the nature of the massive weave covering Torrian became clear. He could see a town with empty streets, with torches at intersections, spaced through the streets, but it wasn't real.
It was an Illusion!
A massive Illusion! He penetrated it with his eyes, using his control over the Weave to allow him to ignore its false image, and beneath that he saw streets overflowing with men in Dal uniforms, running all over the place. There were men in black uniforms as well, uniforms he recognized as ki'zadun, and there were also Goblinoids. Dargu and Waern mainly, but he did see a pack of about twenty Trolls. They boiled out of houses, out of every building, running quickly and confidently towards the walls, towards the defenses, moving exactly as if they knew where to go and what to do. Nowhere, nowhere did he see a single man or woman in Sulasian dress. Everywhere he looked, he saw nothing but enemy troops. Thousands of them!
There was no small garrison here, there was a massive army!
He looked down, and to his horror, he saw forces forming up in a large open space near the gate, all of them mounted. They were going to ride out and attack the Rangers! He saw covers being thrown off of catapults, siege engines being readied by their crews, tubs of pitch and naptha ready beside them to hurl fire into the fields outside the city. He saw archers readying bows on the walls, he saw an army getting ready to ride out of the gates of Torrian and attack the Rangers and Woodkin hiding in the fields beyond. He saw a man run to a building and set fire to it, a building near the city gates that the Were-kin were going to try to take in the darkness.
It was a trap!
"No!" Tarrin growled, looking at what was below him as he stood in midair, eyes penetrating the Illusion. They had been waiting for them! They knew they were coming! And they knew what Arren had planned! But it made no sense! Why attack Ariana with Wyverns in full view of the army outside when they could have just let them set the fire-wait, it was too dark now for anyone to see the black Wyverns against the sky, even the Were-kin. It was too far away from the treeline even for a night-sighted Were-kin to be able to see so far. There was a good two longspan gulf between the treeline where the armies were hiding and the city walls, and that was new. They must have cleared the distance since the last time he'd been there. They had stopped Ariana, but they knew something couldn't have gone right for them, because something had killed their Wyverns.
Tarrin looked down at the city in horror. So many… so many of them. The Were-kin were going to slink right into a trap! The Rangers were going to be slaughtered!
Tarrin's heart seized as he realized what had to be done. It was… it was too horrible to think about. But what other way was there? If he didn't stop the Dals here and now, they would be facing a much larger army in Suld, and doing it with less men of their own. It would put his Goddess, himself, his friends, his family, his daughter , in mortal danger! There was nothing else he could do. There was no other way!
His eyes lighting from within with incandescent light, his paws limning over with Magelight as he pulled in the power of High Sorcery, Tarrin suddenly screamed in rage and horror. The limned glow around his paws became coherent as he brought them together, and he wove together that chaotic mix of Air, Fire, Water, Divine, and token flows of the other Spheres to grant his spell the power of High Sorcery, then he unleashed it with a scream, unleashing it against the castle. A blazing bar of pure white light, as bright as the sun, suddenly came into being across the sky over Torrian, blazing from Tarrin's outstretched palms and slamming into the Torrian Keep, right into the very center of the Sorcerers he could feel there, maintaining the Illusion. The invincible blast of magical power struck the walls of the keep, and they withered to nothing under that incredible blow of magical might, sending stone and mortar and wood spinning away in burning chunks as Tarrin implacably raked that sustained beam of death across the castle, penetrating it all the way down to the dungeons, shattering stone and vaporizing people wherever it went. The initial blast had only killed three Sorcerers, and he could feel them in there, running from the power of his spell. He used it to chase them down, one by one, chase them down and destroy them in the blazing purity of the wrath of the Goddess, the punishment for working for those who opposed her.
When he killed the last, Tarrin wrenched the sustained stream of magical power, and that caused it to explode violently. It started where he was, forcing him to shield himself from the raw force of it with a shield of Air. The coherent blazing bar suddenly became an expanding snake of fire, writhing through the sky with the speed of a cannonball shot from a Wikuni bombard, until it struck the solid stone of the keep. The immense power of the detonation shattered the entire keep from the inside out, sending chunks of fiery debris soaring thousands of spans from the inferno that had once been the Torrian Keep, raining fire down on the city below. The sound of the detonation was like a physical thing, shattering windows all over the city and knocking down soldiers who stopped to look at the blazing pyre burning in the middle of Torrian.
No other way, he thought to himself over and over again as he released the weave and began drawing in more and more power. No other way. More and more of the power of the Weave flooded into him as he sent out flows and snapped them into strands to provide him with a direct feed of energy from the Weave. The Magelight limned over his entire body, and then it expanded from him, forming the concave star at the center of the shaeram, a blazing star that illuminated the city below with milky white light. Tarrin felt the platform of Air dissolve under his feet, felt himself being held aloft by the power itself, felt the power of it flow into him, infuse him, saturate him as he drew in everything that he could, drawing in to the limits of his power. He became the power, felt it flow through him like blood, felt it become a part of him. It moved with him, joined with his mind, understood what must be done, and it did not judge.
It never did.
Tarrin descended towards the burning wreckage of Torrian Keep as the white star surrounding him suddenly turned an angry, broiling red, its elegant, distinct borders flexing and boiling like water in a kettle as the symmetrical star melted into a sphere of ominous, ruddy red, concealing the form within from view as the suddenly terrified Dal soldiers began to panic, rushing through the streets, rushing towards the closed gates.
Closing his eyes, Tarrin descended into the fire of Torrian Keep, and disappeared.
The Dal soldiers stopped running when they saw the reddish ball of magic disappear, the ball that had destroyed the castle. Some thought that it had died out, some thought that using magic like that had worn out the mage that had created it. But some kept running, afraid of whatever may come, afraid of what might happen next.
They were all doomed.
The fires of Torrian Keep suddenly stopped. They froze in mid-churn, their lines and boils and trails of multicolored flame frozen as if stopped in time. The smoke billowing up from it kept moving, entrancing those Dals and ki'zadun that had turned to look, showing a sculpture of fire with a trailing gout of smoke rising above it. They stared at it in awed, horrified wonder, at this sculpture of fire, until it suddenly contracted. It contracted as if it were water draining from a hole in the bottom of a bucket, swirling down into a ball of blazing red light, casting a crimson pall across of the buildings, streets, houses, walls of Torrian, and all the faces and bodies contained therein.