His animal mind was not prepared to deal with such a powerful memory, a powerful emotion. It could not get away from it, and even its formidable ability to control him could not affect that singular feeling. It was something against which even his instincts could not prevail. Since it could not deny the feeling, and it was not capable of handling it, it surrendered to it, allowing it to remain in the forefront of his mind at almost all times.

Because there was no moment that did not hold emptiness, Tarrin withdrew from Sarraya. Nothing seemed to hold any meaning for him. There was nothing but the emptiness, a consuming feeling that tainted everything he saw and felt and did. When Sarraya spoke to him, he did not listen to her. He did not reply to her. She was a friend, but she was not one that made the emptiness go away. He did as she said, if only because he understood that she knew where they were going. Every day was as the day before, every day was a monotonous repeat of every other day. Sleep, eat, run, always with the feeling that there was something missing from within him, and that missing something brought a strange hollow pain that would not go away. Even though his conscious mind was still within him, even it began to succumb to the emptiness, making him listless and slow to comprehend things. It was as if the emptiness were a blanket thrown over his senses, thrown over his coherent mind, forcing him to reach through it to see or do or feel anything else.

There was little sense of continuity. There was little sense of the passage of time, yet he seemed to be aware of time moving. There was the time before Sarraya could fly, and the time after. There was the time when he had a shiny coat, clean, and his body was strong. But there was also the time where he was dirty and matted, after he stopped grooming himself, of when his limbs and body withered from great exertion with little food. Hunting seemed to lose its importance in the face of the emptiness, as did everything else. To do anything at all sharpened the empty pain inside, so to do anything was only done when absolutely necessary.

It was an endless moment, an eternal now of empty pain, a pain within that would not heal, a pain that eroded him from within. An eternity, and even his conscious mind seemed to dully realize that it was going to drive him insane if something was not done to end it. That realization came as the sun rose over yet another day of empty sameness, a sunrise coming after a night of running. The sun rose over the same flat land, as if he had done nothing but run in a great circle during the night, only to come back to where he began. Tarrin sat on a dead log of a raintree, his head hung low as his eyes dully surveyed the land before him. It was a day like any other, a day of weary emptiness, a day like the last. The only thing different was the reawakening of his conscious mind, an act that required something significant from his conscious mind after so long in cat form. But as his instincts affected his conscious thoughts, so they too were influenced by the human in him while in cat form. He had learned long ago that even when he tried to bury his human mind, to forget it, it would not remain quiet forever. It had finally stirred inside him, had finally rebelled against the slow degeneration of body and mind, had finally had enough.

Sarraya landed just in front of him, on the edge of the log. She was wearing a new dress, seemingly spun out of spiderwebs, and her new wings glistened in the cool morning air. They looked just as the old ones did, chitinous wings mottled with a riot of rainbow colors, each of the four nearly as long as her body was tall, tapered to a smooth rounding end. Just like a dragonfly's wings. Her auburn hair shuffled slightly as the wind picked up, which was normal during the morning and evening as the sun warmed the air, or the setting sun's heat stopped warming it.

He was tired. Goddess, he was tired. Tired and thin, dirty and bedraggled. Looking down at his paws, he barely recognized his own forelegs. He was nothing but fur and bones. How long had he gone without any conscious reasoning? It was impossible to tell time as a cat, but judging by his condition, it had to be a long time. Rides? Maybe a month? The past was a jumbled blur, where only the sense of empty pain, of loss, was strong enough to be relived. Despite what dangers it posed, he had to change form. He just had to. He needed time in his humanoid body, he needed time with his rational mind to make sense of how strongly his need to be with his sisters had obviously affected him. He just needed a break from the emptiness. A few hours in humanoid form wouldn't be that dangerous, and he realized that he had to face the danger, for his sanity if anything else.

Jumping down off the log, Tarrin dredged the depths of his mind for a long moment, recalling just exactly what was required when he shapeshifted. After he found what he was looking for, he willed it to be.

The realignment of his thinking was profound, and the yearning for his sisters and friends immediately eased inside, now that his human mind could rationalize the feeling, and know that he would see them again. He felt… weak. Tired. Exhausted. He looked down at his paw…

And realized that the ground looked further away.

And the back of his head was very, very heavy.

Sarraya turned and looked at him, then looked up at him with an expression of surprise and happiness. "Does this mean you're going to talk to me again?" she asked with a broad grin.

"I… I'm sorry," he said. "I don't think the Cat was ready to deal with how homesick I am." He looked down at his paws. They seemed just a little bit bigger, and those fetlocks that Sarraya had described had indeed grown onto his wrists. They filled up the space between his wrists and the manacles, and they pinched a bit whenever he moved his paws as the hair of the fetlocks caught on the metal cuffs. The fetlocks weren't very long, but they were just bushy enough to be noticed. They ran from just above his wrist to about a quarter of the way up his forearm, and they grew primarily on the palm side and outside edge of his forearms.

"I could feel the edges of it. By the trees, cub, you're as tall as Triana. And your face is different. More austere. And you're thin !"

"What?"

"Remember what I told you before we started out? That the Demon's touch caused your body to age?" He nodded. "Well, it seems that you didn't stop growing just because you were in cat form. No wonder you were getting so thin. Not eating much, running all night, and you also were burning food to grow."

That little revelation seemed laughable to him, but… the ground did seem further away, and Tarrin was a being very much grounded in his senses. He had an intimate understanding of where the ground should be, and it was further away than that. The wind pulled at his hair, and he realized that almost a quarter of it wasn't braided. Even his hair grew during that time, making the braid hang nearly to his knees.

"I see my hair kept pace," he said with a grimace, reaching behind and pulling the braid over his shoulder. "It's so heavy it hurts."

"Then cut it off."

"When I do that, it just grows back."

"Foolish cub, didn't Triana teach you anything?" Sarraya chided. "Were-cats are shapeshifters, Tarrin! When you change form, you change into what you envision yourself to be, and your body responds to that image. Were-cats have long hair because they want long hair. If you want short hair, just want short hair. Look at Mist, her hair is shorter than most human men's. Cut it off, and it won't grow back."

"I never really liked the braid before," he objected. "It gets in the way."

"Then you wanted something that you didn't like," she replied. "Then again, you're Ungardt, aren't you? Doesn't everyone in Ungardt have a braid?"