Now she was confused. She looked around, and saw that everyone seemed as stunned as she was. They stood where they were for long moments, utterly silent, but Keritanima and Jenna had haunted looks in their eyes. It had all happened so fast, and she didn't understand even a portion of what was going on. What had that fire been? Had Tarrin won? If so, then where was he? He hadn't appeared with the others.
She stood up on wobbly feet, totally drained and exhausted. Not a moment ago, she was fleeing for her very life, now she was back at the Tower, safe and sound, and everything seemed to be over. But what had happened? And where was Tarrin? She looked around, but she neither saw him or caught his scent anywhere. She took a feeble step forward, but nearly toppled over. Jasana continued to cling to her desperately, and her crying was the only sound that was coming from any of the shocked, stunned survivors of that most bizarre of experiences.
A touch came on her shoulder. She turned and saw her mother, Triana, who looked down at her daughter with a grim, resolute look on her face. "Mother," she said in confusion and exhaustion. "I have Jasana. See?" She tried to hold up her daughter, but Jasana's claws embedded in her sides made pulling her little girl away a potentially painful experience. "Where is Tarrin? He needs to see her. I have to show him."
Her innocent question sent a severe jag of intense pain through Triana's stony mask of expression, and Jasana wailed loudly. "Papa's dead!" she screamed hysterically, then erupted into an even more intense outburst of tears.
Jesmind stared up at her mother in utter disbelief, but the empty pain within her mother's eyes told her that it had to be true. "No," she said in a bare whisper as the horrible truth crashed down on her. "No, it can't be," she said more forcefully, clutching her daughter tightly to her breast. But it was true, and that truth was more than she could bear. She would have dropped to her knees had Triana's strong paws not caught her, and she closed her eyes in anguish as tears rolled down her cheeks. She gave out a cry of such pain, such loss that it broke the heart of every person who heard it, a cry of one who had just lost everything that had meaning to her.
"NNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
To: Title EoF
Chapter 16
It was a very grim time.
Tarrin's death had terribly affected the entire Tower, from the Keeper down the the lowliest maid or servant. Though not everyone knew him, and fewer liked him, he had been such a integral part of the Tower, such a part of its workings and its power structure, that his loss had affected everyone within it. And as things affected the Tower, so they also affected Suld. The new king of Sulasia, Arren Strongheart, had gone into deepest mourning when he heard the news, and had ordered a day of mourning for the city and the kingdom. Everyone in the Tower was very quiet and somber, all the katzh-dashi wearing mourning black, and very little real business was being done.
It had been three days since the strange and terrible end of the war. They had won. Not many Goblinoids survived the horrific earthquakes, and Val had been utterly destroyed, which had forever removed the threat he had posed, but the cost it had exacted had been more than they had all been willing to pay. All of them except Tarrin, it seemed. All of his friends gathered together and tried to make sense of what happened, but nobody had been close to him when it happened except Jesmind and Jasana, and they were not very helpful. Jesmind had entered a deep black reverie that had struck her not long after she found out what happened. She would not speak unless spoken to, and her responses were often disjointed and made little sense. Jasana was virtually inconsolable, and even speaking her father's name was enough to send her into a crying storm so severe that only Jesmind or Triana could calm her down. But Jesmind was so lost in her grief that the burden of caring for the fragile child fell to her grandmother, and she accepted the burden with haunted eyes. Tarrin had meant a great deal to the Were-cat matriarch, and his loss had struck her just as keenly as it had her family, but she seemed capable of holding herself together. Mist had taken the news better than everyone expected. The destruction she wrought was confined to only two floors, and luckily they managed to clear the warzone of all innocents before Mist got outside of their area of control. They did not try to stop her, they only confined her to areas of the Tower where they could afford to lose what was there, and Jenna wanly joked with Mist after she played out her rage that those were areas that needed remodelling anyway. Kimmie had fainted when they told her, and the shock of it had sent her into labor. She had not been conscious for the birth of her own child, or much to the surprise of everyone, her children. She had twins, a pair of blue-eyed baby girls who looked exactly alike, with Kimmie's blue eyes and their father's black fur. They had dark hair like their mother, but everyone who looked at them said they could see Tarrin in those tiny infants' faces. In honor of their father, Kimmie named her babies Tara and Rina.
The joy of her children did not make up for the loss of their father. It was a bittersweet thing for Kimmie, Mist, and Triana, as her bond-mother and the Were-cat matriarch helped the grieving mother to care for her wondrous burden.
The Keeper had her own troubles with the loss of her brother, so much so that the running of the Tower and the paperwork it required began to fall behind. Duncan and Ianelle did their best to help in that regard, and they kept things running while the young girl dealt with her grief.
The death of Tarrin had had a powerful effect in Suld, but the death of a sui'kun could have a disastrous effect on the Weave. But as the Goddess had told them so long ago, the gods had permitted extra sui'kun to be born to protect the world against another Breaking. The eighth sui'kun had silently been born some month before Tarrin's death, his birth unnoticed until after Tarrin died, and his loss did not damage the Weave. The burden he had represented had passed on to the infant child, and so the Weave had been protected.
Even the gods seemed to mourn. For all three days since the war and Tarrin's death, the skies had been covered by thick clouds, and those clouds reached out to cover the entire world. It cast the world into dark, gloomy shadow, and everything seeemed unnaturally quiet and subdued. The seas did not lap against the land in breaking waves. The wind did not blow. The animals were not themselves. Everything seemed nearly surreal in those gloomy days, as if the gods intended to show their grief upon the land, and their mourning could not help but affect the mortals who depended upon them. Jenna had tried repeatedly to talk to the Goddess, but she would not answer, and even the sense of her that seemed a permanent fixture within the Heart was gone.
Jenna had tried to find out what happened. She tried to coax the story out of Jesmind, but her responses were chaotic and made very little sense. Nobody could speak of such a thing to Jasana, who was so fragile and higly upset; nobody would even want to try. Any hint or mention of her father sent her into a storm of weeping. Jenna was grieving just as much as they, but the need to understand how he had died consumed her, the need to know what had happened, the need to understand how he had somehow managed to destroy a god, but there was nobody to give her any answers. The only reason she knew that he was dead was because Triana said so, and she had no doubt that Triana knew. She wouldn't say such a thing unless it was true.