Tarrin took a step back from her, looking around. She was right. There were thousands of people on the avenue, as far as he could see in both directions. It couldn't be! It was impossible!
"Liar!" Tarrin accused. "I've never seen you before!"
Her form seemed to shimmer, to change, to take on color. When it was done, he found himself standing before a petite woman, young and beautiful, with honey colored hair and wearing a simple blue dress that clung to her form appealingly. In sudden horror, he recognized her face, recognized her dress. She had been a servant girl under the Cathedral of Karas. She had stood before him, paralyzed with terror, and he had struck her down mercilessly.
He had killed her!
"No!" Tarrin said in a strangled tone, backing away from the apparition. "I was out of my mind! I couldn't control it!"
"Excuses do not concern the dead," the young woman said in a chilling voice, her color and features returning to their eyeless, fearful state. "Do not deny your truth. A murderer you are, and a murderer you shall always be. Never will we be anyone's but yours."
"We are yours," the people around him began to murmur. They all turned towards him, ranks and ranks of the eyeless, their vacant gazes piercing his soul like spears. He turned away from the woman, and found himself looking directly into the eyeless face of a child, a little boy with white skin and cherubic features. A child! He had killed a child!
"No!" he said, closing his eyes and flinching away. "It wasn't my fault!"
"Deny your truth, but you will never deny us," the woman said behind him. "We are yours, and we always will be. We who fell for no reason other than it suited you."
The blatant truth of her words drove into him like a sword. "No!" he screamed at her. "I didn't choose to kill you, kill any of you! I had no choice! I had no choice!"
"There is always a choice," the woman said in a mocking tone. "You have chosen to be what you are. Do not deny it. You have chosen to be evil." The black eyes suddenly flared with a red light, the same light that came from Jegojah's empty sockets, and they were all around him. "Face your choice, Tarrin Kael," the woman whispered to him, a whisper that thundered in his ears. "Face what you have become."
In her eyes, those red eyes, he saw himself. He saw himself as the monster he had become, a heartless killer who had no regard for those around him. A pure killer, unfettered by moral restraint. The monster he had always feared.
The girl reached out for him, and when she did so, so did all the others. Thousands of hands reached towards him, seeking him, thousands of red eyes burned him with the knowledge that he had killed them all, killed people he had never seen, had never known. He had killed children. They reached towards him, moved towards him, surrounded him with the unholy accusation in their gazes, whispering over and over again for him to face his truth. Utter panic swept over him. He sought to flee from them, but there was nowhere to run. He tried to touch the Weave, but even the sense of it was gone. There was no Weave to touch. He was surrounded by their eyes, by their hands, by what he had caused to be. They reached for him, and then they touched him. It was the touch of the Wraith, the cold of death, a burning cold that sought to draw the life from his bones. Their hands were all over him, sucking away his life, draining the color from his skin, turning his fur gray, seeking to have him join them in their eternal prison of death.
A terror unlike anything he had ever experienced swept over him, drove down into the very core of his being. The Cat at first welled up, and then mysteriously shied away, retreated from the fear, leaving him alone to face it. He felt paralyazed, helpless, unable to find his magic, unable to fight off the cold hands of death as they were laid upon him. Hands pressed in on him, killing him, causing his knees to buckle as they pressed in on him, until he sank into a sea of gray death like a drowning sailor succumbs to the sea.
"NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
" NO!" Tarrin gasped, jerking up, a heartbeat away from seeking the power of the Weave to fend off his phantom assailants. He could sense it again, the strands crossing the area, the power they held within them. He could smell Sarraya, smell the rock and the sand and the faint trace of dust in the air left over from the sandstorm the day before, and the return of sensations for his senses to sample reassured him more than anythng else that it had been a nightmare.
A dream! Tarrin flopped back down on the cool sand, breathing heavily to recover his composure. It had been a long time since he'd had nightmares, but at least before, he couldn't remember them. This one was lodged in his memory, every second of it, and it caused his entire body to shiver. He'd never felt so afraid in his life! But it was just a dream, just a dream. It wasn't real.
It wasn't real.
It had certainly seemed real. The pain had been real. Even now he shivered, felt as if the heat had been sucked out of him, and he struggled to put it out of his mind. But he just couldn't. The image of that girl was burned into his memory, the pretty girl with the black eye sockets, and the sense of accusation that had been behind that eyeless gaze.
So many… so many. Had he really killed so many? In his rages, sometimes it was hard to remember exactly what happened. But there had been so many. It gave him conflicting feelings. The human in him was mortified at it, the thought that he had caused such destruction, but the Cat simply did not care. It was a conflict inside, a conflict that was usually won by his feral nature. But even he hadn't appreciated the damage he had done until then, until he could see it, see the numbers of people who had died because of him.
But even as he appreciated it, the Cat within shrugged it off. They were strangers, unknowns. They did not matter.
Closing his eyes, he sought to soothe himself, but found little peace. He could tell that it would be useless to try to go back to sleep. And sitting in the cave would be a torture for him. So he stood up, stretching in the cold night air. He would run. He could try to forget if he started doing something, took his mind off of it, and it was about the only thing that he could do right now.
"Sarraya," he called. "Wake up. We're moving on."
"It's too early," she said in a muffled grunt. He couldn't see her, but he could smell her, and he could see the displacement her body made in the sand in the back corner of the cave.
"The more we move now, the less we'll have to move when it gets hot," he told her. "Just conjure a sling, and I'll carry you. You can sleep."
"I guess," she grumbled, appearing before his eyes. She sat up, then shivered a bit in the cold air, as if waking up alerted her to the temperature.
In moments, without food or water or preparation, Tarrin was on the move. Using the Skybands to tell direction, he travelled westward over sandy ground strewn with small pebbles, along and between the rock spires that peppered the region. Sarraya was already asleep, snuggled into a leather sling he wore behind his neck, under his braid to give her warmth. The activity gave him the distraction he needed to try to get away from the face of the eyeless girl, a face that haunted him no matter how hard he tried to forget.
As usually happened for him, the time began to blur. When he found himself thirsty, he slowed to a stop, and realized that the sun was about to come up. He paused long enough to take a long drink of water, to feel the cold night air against him and allow his skin to warm after hours of running, and that was when he noticed the smell.
Dropping onto all fours, Tarrin put his nose to the ground and studied the many scents he found there. Most of them were unidentifiable, but the distinct coppery smell of the Selani was plain over them all. Many Selani scents, male and female, and all of them moved in the same direction, to the north.