"It, she, tried to kill me," he returned in a wooden, listless voice.

"Tarrin!" Dolanna said quickly. "Tarrin, did she bite you?"

He tried to find the words to reply. It took a moment as he worked through the haze in his mind. "Yes," he finally replied. "She almost ripped my arm off."

"Faalken," she said in a suddenly strangled voice, tightly controlled, "Faalken, do exactly as I say. Do not argue. Let go of him, Faalken, let go of him and step away from him very slowly."

"Dolanna-"

"Do it!" she snapped.

Tarrin felt a sudden sharp stab of pain in his wounded arm. He winced and grabbed it, but then he felt it again, then another pain in his shoulder. "Dolanna, something's happening," Tarrin said in sudden palpable fear. He could feel something inside him, something that suddenly felt like a knife in his belly. "Augh!" he cried, doubling over and putting both hands on his belly. His left arm was on fire, and that fire was sweeping through him like an avalanche.

In an instant, there was nothing but pain. Blinding, white hot pain that filled him like a cistern, flowing over and washing through him like fire in his veins. His small cry instantly became a howl of such agony that Faalken backed away from him like he was Death Herself come to claim him. The pain scoured away all conscious thought. But some part of his mind knew full well what had happened, and what was happening. Wherever the fire touched, his body began to change.

His hands cracked and split, cracked again as bones were broken and reformed, expanded, changed, and then reset. Fingers lengthened and thickened, and claws formed from the nails of his fingers. His feet lengthened and expanded, the toes becoming larger and more defined, with even larger claws forming from the nails. His back was hunched, but it was obvious that the bones in his spine had reformed themselves, adding to his height as his torso elongated slightly even as his legs and arms grew longer by a proportional amount. Tarrin's ears simply fell off as two black cat's ears sprouted up through his hair, just over and behind his eyes and just behind the hairline of his forehead and bangs. There was a ripping sound, and his tail emerged from behind him, pink with new skin as it grew as fast as a snake could slither, then it thickened and fleshed out. Then black fur quickly grew over it, over his arms to above the elbow, and his legs to above the knee. His teeth all simply flowed into slightly different shapes, slightly more pointed and sharper, except for the wicked fang-like insicors that grew out from the gums on both his upper and lower teeth.

Then his long scream ended. He slumped to his hands and knees, his tail hanging limply behind him and his claws retracting back into their resting positions inside his fingers and toes, as he panted in deep breaths of air. He tottered to one side, then the other, and then fell onto his side, oblivious to the world.

"By all that's holy," Faalken said in a mute, awed voice, staring at Tarrin like he was a live snake.

Dolanna's gaze was on the creature. She looked unsually subdued, her body still wrapped up in the solid air she'd woven around her. Her face carried a strangely remorseful expression, but it was her eyes that caught the attention of the Sorceress. They looked on Tarrin's altered form with pity. The collar, Dolanna could sense, was magical. Foul magic, the type used to control other beings. She could sense the weaves of magic inside it as she probed the black metal collar. It was specifically made to force the owner to do what the collar's owners commanded.

She has been forced into this, the Sorceress thought grimly. Something has sent her to kill him.

Several of the Duke's men arrived at last, and they tried to bull into the chamber. But Dolanna halted them with a single forceful command to stop. She wove certain flows of magic into the collar, disrupting its controlling effects, and then found the clasp to unlock it from her neck. She took it off of her smoothly, and could literally see the hazy, unfocused look in the creature's crystalline green eyes. It looked up at her in confusion. She turned to the guards. "You will take this creature to a holding cell," she instructed in a voice that would brook no opposition. "You and you," she pointed to two men wearing leather gloves, "you will carry her, and you will do exactly as I say. You will carry her to the cell, making sure you get as little blood on you as possible. Once you are there, you are to lock it in the cell and leave it be. Both of you are to remove your uniforms and gauntlets as carefully as you can to make sure the creature's blood does not touch your skin. Then you will burn the uniforms. Is that understood?"

"Is it poisonous?" one of them asked.

"Not a poison, but the creature's blood is deadly to humans in its own way," she said. "So long as you do not touch her blood with your skin, you are perfectly safe. Sergeant, nobody is to enter that cell without my explicit permission. Is that understood?"

"Yes, Mistress," the guard sergeant said in a steady voice.

"Do it," she said. Two guards hurriedly rushed in and grabbed the paralyzed creature by her sides, then carried her statue-like form from the room, keeping her as far from their bodies as they possibly could.

"Madam, what about that one?" the sergeant asked, pointing at the unconscious Tarrin, laying on the floor.

"Leave him to me," she said in a quiet voice. "Now leave us. I will not be disturbed. Faalken, get the cover and use it to pick up Tarrin, and place him on the bed. Do not touch any blood on him. It may be the creature's. Then stand outside the door so that I am not disturbed."

Faalken grimly collected up Tarrin's limp body in the quilt that was laying on the floor and gently placed him on the bed, which happened to be the only piece of furniture in the room that was still whole. "What happened to him?" Faalken asked quietly.

"I cannot tell you that yet," she replied, sitting on the edge of the bed with a look of dreadful concentration on her face. "Now leave me. I cannot afford any distractions."

To: Title EoF

It took a long time for Tarrin to awaken.

It had almost been like he was drifting in a deep blackness, floating in a void where he could not see, but garbled sounds and impressions somehow drifted into his awareness. He registered several voices, but could not make them out. He would drift into and out of these impressions, hearing the voices murmur up from nothing, and the fade away after a time, never understanding the meaning of the words. There was more than sound in the void, there was also smell. Unusual smells and odors touched his awareness, from simple things like the smell of candles and wine and wood and stone, to complex scents that he could not even begin to describe nor understand. Unlike the sounds, the smells were there always, flooding his shrouded mind with its bizarre information.

Tarrin also realized that he wasn't alone in the void. There was something in there with him. It was a presence, a compilation of instincts and motivations that defied rational thought. It was always there, just behind him, as firmly attached to him as was his right arm. But at the same time it was not part of him. It was something that he couldn't describe, and he pondered on it for a long time before the brilliance of light penetrated the blackness, and he realized that he was waking up.

He opened his eyes, the sensations and impressions of his sleeping mind forgotten. The light was…bright. Very bright. He was in a rather small chamber that held nothing but the bed, a small table of some sort with two chairs, the chair Dolanna was sitting in, and a single stand beside the bed holding a lamp. Tarrin didn't feel quite up to moving yet, so he spent the few moments trying to remember what happened. There was…a fight. That cat-creature woman had attacked him. Had almost killed him. She would have, if Dolanna hadn't stopped her literally at the last instant. She'd torn him up too, broke his arm, nearly ripped it off. But the whole thing was a hazy blur in his mind. Only the part where she bit him was clear in his mind.