It was no easy question, with no easy answer. Every act he had done that he wished he could take back had had an effect that he didn't want to give up. Without his Were nature, he'd be dead. Without his power, his friends may very well be dead as well. Without his feral savagry, he would not have the Book of Ages.
And all it cost him was his peace of mind.
Such a little thing when help up to the millions of lives that depended on him carrying out his mission. Of course, he didn't care about them. He rationalized it, as always, in simple terms using someone whom he did care about, Janette. This was all about her. She was the representation of the entire world, and saving her world meant saving it for everyone else. She was still about the only oasis of calmness in his life, and thinking about her made the eyeless face shrink back into the dark tunnels of his mind. Hers was a selfless, vibrant, genuine love, and she had been his savior. She had literally saved him from insanity, and he would do anything for her. She was as much a mother to him as Triana or Elke Kael, or even the Goddess, only she was the mother of the Cat within, where Triana and Elke were mothers of body and heart, and the Goddess was mother to his soul.
If rationalizing things in simple terms was what he needed to motivate himself, then he just had to pit his Little Mother against the dark images that haunted him. Let the eyeless face gaze into the loving heart of that wonderful little girl, and then he'd see if that haunting face could stare at him with the same venom afterward.
His actions made him a monster, but what he held in his heart was pure, beyond the monster's reach. And what was held in his heart more than anything else was the love of family, of friends. The love of the Goddess, the love and respect for Elke Kael and Triana, the pure love for Allia, the deep love and affection he held for his other siblings, Keritanima and Jenna. And of course, the shining, boundless love he held for Janette, his Little Mother. That love couldn't be tainted by the darkness of his deeds, and it would always be with him. Such powerful love could never be extinguished.
He was tired. He clung to that final though, the thought of the love of family, of letting the spirits that tortured him stare into the face of Janette, as he closed his eyes and allowed the howling of the wind to lull him to sleep.
A sleep that was not plagued by the repeating nightmare.
The sandstorm blew itself out by dawn the next day.
The air was charged. He could feel it around him, a kind of electric charge that hung in it, around him, giving the cold air more energy than felt normal. It tingled his skin as he exited the little shelter he'd raised with his power, thousands of little pinpricks of energy that made him shiver. He couldn't tell where it was coming from, but he could feel that the Weave was… disturbed.
There wasn't another way to put it. The Weave was as it always was, but there seemed to be something different in it now. Something deep, something he'd never felt before. The Weave felt normal, but beneath that he felt a kind of tension, a tautness in the strands around him that shouldn't have been there. The pulse-beating of the energy within the strands was higher pitched, louder, more pronounced, and it seemed strange, unusual… strained.
There was still a thin pall of dust in the air from the sandstorm. Maybe that was it. It concealed a part of the sky, forced him to breathe with the scarf over his face to keep the choking dust out of his lungs. Dust sometimes carried static, and its movements could even generate little static zaps. Maybe that was what he was feeling. Maybe it was disrupting his sense of the Weave in some way. After all, these senses were new to him, and he had no idea how they could be affected by external forces.
He shook himself a bit to adjust to the cold, wishing that he'd Conjured up something that he could have eaten hot, or cooked. Another breakfast of water and fruit did not sit well with him. He was a carnivore… but the problem was that there was nothing to hunt out in this rocky waste. He could Conjure animals himself, but he had to agree with Sarraya in that matter. It did seem a bit, cruel, to Conjure an animal to its death. Almost dishonorable to the animal. Druidic magic respected the balance of nature and of life, and it just felt like a violation to do such a thing. His belly and his Cat instincts disagreed, but he hadn't reached the point where he'd cross that line just yet. He could tolerate another day of fruit, berries, nuts, and water. After all, this place couldn't be a rocky table all the way to Arkis. It had to end somewhere, and he might get lucky.
It had been a strange night. He didn't remember falling asleep, but he did remember the fact that he wasn't startled awake by the nightmare. For the first time in many days, he'd slept through the night without Sarraya's help, slept without the dream or the face of the dead girl to haunt him. That face was back, just behind his eyes, taking up its place within him, but the two consecutive nights of peaceful sleep had done much to renew his strength. He felt ready to deal with its accusing, empty gaze today. He felt ready for just about anything. It was almost like the charge in the air was bleeding into him, energizing him in some strange way. He felt almost optomistic, and was in a better mood than he'd been in for months.
Sarraya flitted out of the shelter and gave him a calm look, but said nothing at first. She pulled up a gossamer little bit of cloth over her face, coughed, then snorted loudly. "Can't this place go one ride without choking me?"
She seemed to be back to normal. Maybe she'd blown off what had happened earlier. That, or she was acting normal for his benefit, since she could probably tell that his earlier weakness had embarassed him.
"It likes you," he said absently, looking up into the dust-hazed sky. He could barely make out the Skybands, but he saw enough to determine which direction was northwest. Visibility was poor, the dust acting like fog, but he could see about a half a longspan ahead. And on this flat, rocky table, that was far enough.
"The air feels weird," Sarraya complained. "Like static."
"I noticed," he replied. "I think it's the dust."
"I don't remember feeling this before."
"I guess not every storm has the same effect," he told her. "Want to ride or fly?"
"I'm cold, so I'll fly for now. The activity will warm me up."
"I know the feeling. Let's go," he agreed, then he started out at a ground-eating pace to the northwest.
"Hey! Wait for me!"
He ran out of the dusty pall around midmorning, and the sun's blistering heat found him without the dusty haze to deflect its might. The heat of the sun didn't really bother him much anymore, nor did the radiant heat of the rocks, or the air itself. He had become truly acclimated to the savage heat of the desert, his body's Were aspects adapting him to his new environment. He was much leaner now, lean and lithe and dangerous-looking, and his black for actually served to trap cooler air next to his skin, insulating his furred parts from the full fury of the sun and leaving him feeling much cooler than someone without fur.
He still saw nothing, nothing but empty flatness, but the appearance of more rock spires on the horizon bolstered him. He began to notice them at noontime, when they stopped to eat a Conjured meal of fruits and water. The Fingers of the Goddess, they were called, reaching up from the desert floor. There were a great many of them. The last time he moved through one of those forests of stone, he'd seen a great deal of desert wildlife. Maybe those rock spires harbored an evening meal. Tarrin squatted down over the little Faerie, giving her shade from the merciless sun as he ate a curiously cold peach.