His fear angered him, and that anger festered inside. Why should he fear a dream? It was a shade, a phantom, something with voice and no substance, something that could not do him harm. The Cat did not understand this Human preoccupation, nearly obsession with the image of the girl, and it began to grow impatient, even agitated. The face was unbalancing his Human mind, and that put stress on the delicate balance between his Human and Cat parts, threatened the balance of his very sanity. The Cat took that anger and fed off of it, nurtured it, turned it into an ember bed of seething discontent.

He began growling low in his throat, and it turned into a furious roar. He snapped his paws down to his sides and stared up into the sky, up at all four moons, seeing the ghostly image of the girl reflected back in all of them.

" We are yours, " he chiming voice rang in his ears, taunting him from within the ethereal mists of the dream, burning him with its accusation. " Face what you have become. "

That had come from outside of him.

Whirling, claws out and eyes blazing from within with their greenish radiance, he turned on that voice, fully prepared to destroy it, to get rid of the face haunting him, to be free of the torture.

The face was there, taunting him, but it faded before him and left behind Sarraya, a very frightened Sarraya, who had backed up in the air and was making ready to flee from him. "T-Tarrin? Are you sleepwalking?"

Blinking, coming out of his threatening posture almost immediately, he stood up to his normal height and blew out his breath. It was Sarraya. Had he mistaken her voice for the dream?

He looked away from her. "No, I'm alright," he replied quietly.

"Are you sure? Do you want to talk about it?"

"No," he told her. "I, I can't sit here any more. I have to move."

"It's the middle of the night!"

"Then stay here," he told her in a curt tone. "I can't rest any more. I'm going on."

"Tarrin, you're not being reasonable."

"Like that matters to me," he growled, walking past her hovering form.

He retreived his sword and belt and put them on, then gave her only a single look before turning his back on her and starting to run to the northwest. He meant it. If she didn't want to come, she could stay there and sleep. She could catch up to him later. He wouldn't sit there and endure the dream, the face any more. It was better to move, to engage his mind and give it something else to do.

For almost the entire night he ran, running to keep himself occupied, running because he dreaded what would come when he stopped. He ran beyond hunger and thirst, ran in an almost perfect straight line, even stepping on a deadly imuni and never knowing it, the lethal reptile too stunned that a desert creature had the audacity to tread on it to retaliate before the offending foot was out of its reach. He ran on, running in a kind of mindless daze, running both towards and away from the object that drove his flight.

A beautiful face that had no eyes, whose gaze burned with towering accusation, revealed the dark blight within and forced him to face what he had become.

It was a revelation he could not accept, and so he fled from it. But there was no fleeing from a dream, no escape from that which came from within.

Pushed beyond his endurance, Tarrin tripped on a rock and tumbled to the ground, body exhausted from lack of sleep and the night's efforts. He lay there for a long moment, panting heavily, then he rolled over on his back. He could still see the face before him, but he was too tired to care now, worn out by his hard running. Panting, he lay there and let the cold air cool the sweat on his body, let the sensation of it drown out the pain inside, let physical feeling overwhelm internal emotion.

Didn't they understand that it wasn't his fault? When he killed, it was almost always because he was in a rage, and he had no control over himself then! It was a Were-cat's nature to suffer the rages, Triana herself had told him that! No matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried, he would never overcome that simple truth. It was a part of what defined his existence.

But even that wasn't an excuse. When he destroyed a portion of the gladitorial arena in Dala Yar Arak, that had been a conscious choice. He had deliberately done that, had intentionally destroyed it knowing full well that innocents were going to die. He had killed hundreds in order to simply irritate Shiika, to pin her down and give him time to get to her Palace unhindered. Those deaths were the ones that blighted him, had darkened his soul, had sent him beyond the point of redemption. It had been an act of evil, and it made him no better than the men he hated for the same behavior.

No matter what affected him, no matter how feral he was or how little others mattered, that simple blaring truth could never be forgiven. He hadn't been able to even forgive himself, though he had buried it inside, drowned it in the gravity and importance of his mission. But now, out here in the desert, there was nothing to stop it from returning, to rise up and remind him of his evil, to show him what he was now.

Maybe that was it. Maybe the dreams were his conscious, using the quiet time of the desert to finally voice its objections, to remind him of what had happened.

But it didn't have to paralyze him! He knew what he'd done, and he did feel remorse, but it couldn't matter now. Nothing mattered but the mission! The safety of Janette depended on him, the future of that little girl was now firmly in his paws, and he would let nothing stand in his way, not even himself.

In this instance, the ends justified the means.

That didn't make him feel much better, but it was a truth. It was a powerful truth. The deaths of a few thousand by his paw meant little in the face of the countless hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, who would die if he failed. But they mattered very little to him, even now, so he had to rationalize his devotion to the mission by seeing it in the terms of one life, one future, a life and future that he very much intended to protect. The rest of the world could sink into the Pit for all cared, it was Janette that mattered to him. After everything that had been done against him, to him, he had no more compassion for the world that had destroyed his future.

He sat up, seeing that the first hints of dawn had begun to appear on the eastern horizon, causing the Skybands at the horizon to take on that pinkish cast they showed just before the sun came up. He couldn't go on with the dreams. They were starting to affect him in very bad ways, even had started making him hallucinate. He simply couldn't face what he had done, could not bear the merciless eyeless gaze that haunted him. There was no hiding from the dream, but there was a way to draw its fangs.

But the price of that may be more than his humanity, maybe even more than his soul. To take the bite out of the dream, he would have to completely reject his humanity, to totally eradicate any feeling of pity or guilt inside. He could do it easily, all it would take would be to find a new balance between him and the Cat, where its survivalist outlook on life would overwhelm his human emotions. That would make him everything he did not want to be, a brutal reactionary being that existed for its own survival, at the cost of anything around it. There would be no mercy in that being, and what was worse, there would be no constraint. It would kill without reservation, without consideration, without hesitation.

He could live with the memory of being a monster, or he could become one.

Neither option seemed very attractive, and it left him feeling helpless. That feeling made him angry, and that anger quickly built into an aimless fury. It wasn't fair! Why did this have to happen to him! He'd been trying to change, trying to reclaim some of his humanity, lose some of his feral harshness. Why did the dreams have to upset that? They were forcing him to abandon his goal of being more like Triana, forcing him to become the one thing that he could not bear to become!