It came out of nowhere. One minute he was trying to rip a hole in her cheek, the next her foot was right in front of his face, and he went flying through the air. The sky and ground traded places a few times before he came to a stop flat on his face, his tail kinked from where it had been broken during the tumble. He shook his head to clear the stars, but it didn't do any good. She kicked him squarely in his injured stomach, and he fell over and howled in pain. But he continued with the roll and came up on his hands and knees, panting heavily from the pain and suddenly fighting an internal war against the Cat. He was being overwhelmed, and his fear of losing, of being killed or captured by her, was starting to unhinge his mind. If he lost control, the Cat would simply try to take her with brute force, and his conscious mind already understood that it would be a fight the Cat would lose. She would be able to contain even his most savage rage.

"Give it up, cub," she said in a flat voice, a voice that got louder as she approached him. "You can't beat me, and I don't want to have to pound you flat just to make you listen."

"No," he said through gritted teeth, his mind whirling as the instincts struggled to gain mastery over him. "No!" he said again as he felt himself lose his grip on himself, and the Cat roared into the forefront of his mind.

" NO!" he screamed, paws flying up and to his head, as the Cat grabbed hold of the Weave in a crushing grip that forced it to give it its power. The incredible power of High Sorcery roared into him so quickly that his body exploded in Magelight, limning over and causing the air around him to instantly displace away. Eyes filled with incadescent white light opened and bored into the female. His paws came back around his head and pointed at her, and a chaotic weave of Fire, Air, Water, Divine power, Confluence, and token flows of the other Spheres quickly wove itself together, and then a blazing white shaft of pure, raw magical power erupted from his paws and lashed out at the female Were-cat. No physical force could withstand that magical onslaught, which had seared through a hundred spans of stone in the Cathedral of Karas in Suld, and it lanced through the air directly at the Were-cat female.

But she made no move to dodge. Instead, she raised her own paws, and then the bolt suddenly deflected away from her, going straight up into the sky harmlessly.

"Is that all you have?" she chided in a grim voice.

Nonplussed, Tarrin jumped to his feet with a scream and wove together another spell, one of pure Air with only token flows of the other Spheres, one that reverberated inside him like a living thing. It was so large, so charged with magical energy, that it hurt him to put it together, and it took everything he had to maintain control of it until it was time to let it go. But in his rage, he didn't care about how much it hurt, or how quickly it tired him. It was going to eliminate a threat to him, and that made the end justify the means. He felt it reach a crescendo, where he knew that it was ready, and he knew that his entire body was glowing with an angry reddish light, a physical indication that he was about to unleash another spell. He made a vast sweeping motion with both paws, and unleashed the Weave with an inarticulate scream of anger and rage.

The air around him suddenly exploded outward with horrific force, in every direction, shattering the two warehouses between which they had been fighting and sending pieces of them flying far, far out to sea and raining down on the rest of the city. The explosion of pure air damaged buildings all around him, caused one of the mighty cranes to come free of its rails and topple with an earth-shaking whoomp, and cause ships at port to flinch away from the origin, some snapping their mooring lines. It created a large wave of water that raced away from the city's harbor out into the open sea. The sound of the explosion, a ear-splitting boom, shattered windows all over the city and made the ground shake, and kicked up a cloud of dust that rose high into the sky.

It had taken almost everything he had to generate that weave, and Tarrin sagged to the ground beneath him, which was curiously untouched considering all the ground around him showed indications of being scoured by the force of the air as it raced away from him. But the power of High Sorcery quickly began to rebuild inside him, replacing what he had used. But it didn't replace his own power, the power he used to control that energy. It had exhausted him, and even the Cat seemed to sense that if he tried another weave, it would probably kill him. But dying by his own hand seemed better than dying by hers, so there was no regret. He would fight for his freedom, even if it meant he would die for it. The cloud of dust obscured her, and he didn't know if he'd gotten her or not. He managed to regain control of himself with her disappearance, as the Cat could no longer perceive an enemy, and he desperately hoped that she wouldn't be there when the dust cleared.

As the dust cleared the awful truth of what he had done was clear. The ground around him had been scoured, and was lower by about a finger. Absolutely nothing within two hundred spans of him was left standing; in fact, there nothing within two hundred spans of him at all, for it had all been picked up by the powerful force of the air and carried away. The echoes of the tremendous sound of the weave still bounced around the hill, coming back to them.

Except for her. The female remained, totally unharmed, her paws crossed over her face to protect it from flying debris. The ground under her feet was raised, had not been scoured down by the force of his spell, and it marked a perfect circle that extended about five spans out from her in every direction. She stood in a tiny island of sanctuary in the middle of the destructive chaos of his weave. She lowered them and gave Tarrin a brutal look.

Tarrin didn't care to wonder how she had survived, he merely decided to try something else that would hopefully defeat her. He knew that he was about to put together his last weave, so it had to be enough to get rid of her. But he felt the Weave just dissolve away from him, as if someone had grabbed it and pulled it out of his reach, and the power within him simply dissipated, causing him to suffer a backlash of such magnitude that it almost caused him to pass out. He fell to his knees and elbows, sucking in air, trying desperately to get over the pain of losing contact with the Weave.

"Rule number one, cub," he heard her voice as it approached. "Sorcerers are powerless against Druids. Druids can cancel out your magic. I've never met a Sorcerer with your kind of power, so it took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to sever you from the Weave. Rule number two," she said, reaching down and grabbing him by the shirt, then hauling him up. "Never use everything you've got. If it fails, then you die. Rule number three. Never disobey me again." She held him by his shirt as he stared up at her listlessly.

And that seemed to catch her off guard. Tarrin's paws rose up and at her in a broad sweep of each, and the heavy steel manacles on his wrists struck her on each side of the head with a chiming clang. Had he been in better shape or stronger, the crushing blow would have destroyed her head, but in his weakened condition, he just couldn't put enough behind it to kill. But it was still a powerful attack, more than a human could manage. Her Were-cat immunity to weapons and regenerative powers were like his, so he knew that they'd heal the injury, but they would do nothing about the sheer physical force put behind the blow. The blow would stun her, because her magical nature couldn't overwhelm the sheer power of the blow, regeneration or not.

Her eyes rolled back into her head, and she crumpled to the ground like a sack of meal.