Tarrin bent over and panted, holding his injured stomach. She was bleeding from the sides of her head, where human ears would have been, where the manacles had struck her. She was helpless at that moment, and looking down at her, all Tarrin could see was Jesmind.

And that saved her life.

"I've never… been one… to obey the rules," he said in a wheezing voice, then he turned and limped away from the blasted battlefield.

What he saw horrified him.

He had laid waste to the entire docks ward.

Buildings were blown down or severely damaged by flying debris. He had knocked one of the cranes over, and several others were either off their tracks or had been damaged by the powerful wind or flying debris. Several ships were floating aimlessly in the harbor, and one of them had been capsized at the dock. One of the large quays had been struck by a section of crane that had broken free, and had shattered it. Twisted wood and metal lay everywhere, and large piles of rubble marked the location of buildings. Dust still hung in the air, and people were coated in dust, water, or dirt, wandering around in a daze that caused Tarrin to fit in with them. There was more than one person wandering around with blood on them, and he didn't even want to think about the people that he couldn't see.

How could he do such a thing? He had damaged an entire city's capability to function! He had hurt people, brought down buildings, caused untold suffering and destruction. But the truth was a horrible one, one that he had never appreciated more until that moment.

The Cat didn't care about anything else. The end justified the means. So long as it survives, that is all that matters.

Tarrin meandered around several large piles of rubble, moving in the general direction of the ship, hoping that the Star of Jerod was still there. But it was pretty far down the docks, so it had probably survived. He looked like a building fell on him; he was bleeding from numerous rakes from the female's claws, and was beaten black and blue. He was bleeding profusely from the deep wound in his stomach, and his tail had been broken, dragging the ground behind him limply. One of his eyes was swollen shut, and she had broken his nose. She had left him in sad shape, and it was through a pain-induced haze that he looked around him, seeing what he had done to Den Gauche, managing to understand how destructive he could be.

The weight of this added itself to everything else he had done, and Tarrin found himself uncertain how he could live with himself. Not after this. It caused an instant depression in him, and he began to wobble back and forth in his stride, as if dazed, unable to come to terms with the reality of what his actions had caused.

Binter appeared beside him, and then the Vendari's massive hands were around him. Then he found himself off his feet, being carried like a child. "Her Highness is very displeased with you, Tarrin," the Vendari said in his deep voice, but it fell on deaf ears.

Tarrin was unconscious.

GoTo: Title EoF

The ship had pulled out of port during the night, moving against a stiff quartering wind that made the ship rock back and forth rhythmicly. The sky was cloudless, and the multi-colored light of the Skybands and the four moons, all full, shone down on the rolling seas. The ship was anchored near a shoal called Shipkiller Rock, named so because its very low profile made it invisible at night and in rolling seas, and most of the crew and passengers were sleeping below, out of the stiff, cool wind that made sleeping on deck uncomfortable.

Tarrin was not one of those. He stood at the rail, the claws on his feet keeping him perfectly sturdy against the rocking of the ship. The sounds of the clanking chain of the anchor and the creaking of the ropes in the rigging disrupted the strange keening of the wind, wind whipping up the waves that were making the ship lurch to and fro. The fast moving air carried on it only the smell of the sea, purging Tarrin's nose of the foul miasma that hung on the ship, or just about anywhere that humans dwelled. He stood there looking up at the sky, a blanket held loosely around his bare shoulders and a bloodstained bandage around his middle, and his eyes seemed to glow in the light of the night that made Sennadar a place that did not know true darkness anywhere but under the ground.

The wound would not heal. Not even Dolanna's formidable healing ability could so much as urge it to stop bleeding. Its pain throbbed dully on his stomach, through his body, but it had been lost in the turmoil of emotions that were running through his mind. It merely served as a ground to which his mind could cling to, a physical sensation that kept him from drifting too far off in his reverie. And it was not a very happy reverie.

Tarrin felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. And that scared the life out of him.

He fully knew and understood what he had done. He had laid waste to most of the docks ward of Den Gauche, and had probably killed and injured a whole bunch of people. But he felt nothing. No remorse, no sadness, not much of anything now that the shock of it had worn off. There was nothing inside him that was even a bit contrite over what he had done. Nothing. And that scared him, it scared him badly. But yet even that sensation seemed to dull within him if he thought about it for any amount of time. It turned more into an awareness of something, and it seemed to force him to accept it no matter what. The only way he could keep it fresh in his mind would be to relive it all over again, to remind himself of the wasteland through which he had limped after getting away from the female.

And even that was starting to lose its shock value.

Closing his eyes and bowing his head, he looked down at the boiling seas, unsure of what it meant. Why didn't he feel something? When he killed the people in Suld, he'd almost been overwhelmed with remorse, regret, even terror of himself. And now there was nothing. He had acted no different this time, but there was a different reaction. He didn't understand it. He knew that there was a great deal that he didn't know about himself or his kind, but this strange mystery seemed that it should be easy to solve. And yet it wasn't. He couldn't think of any rational-or irrational, for that matter-explanation as to why there was nothing there when he sought to explore his feelings about his actions.

The Cat had changed him a great deal since that fateful day when he'd been bitten, but he couldn't quite come to admit to himself that it was changing him still. Was his lack of remorse from him, or from it? Was the Cat turning him cold, or was it his own reaction to it? It would certainly make things easier. If he no longer felt bad about the things he did while out of control, it would take alot of stress out of his life. But his human morals wouldn't allow him to think about something like that. Tarrin was not a heartless person, and that made his own lack of feeling about causing injury to others so much a mystery to him. By all intents and purposes, he should feel tremendous guilt and remorse about what had happened. But there was nothing.

What did it mean? Was he changing, or was he being changed? Did he want to be like this? To walk through the world and cause destruction and chaos wherever he went, yet be unmoved by the sorrow that he left in his wake?

His eyes caught the glint of the manacles that were still on his wrists, and he sighed. He had alot of burden to bear already. Maybe another stone or two in his burden wasn't making much of a difference. He was a solitary, untaught Were-cat cast into the human world, a world that, should they understand his true nature, would try to destroy him. He was on a mission that he didn't want to be on in the first place, obeying the will of the Goddess, whom he called patroness. It was a mission he had volunteered to do, and that seemed to sting at him now. He didn't want to do what he was doing. He wasn't even sure what he was doing. About all he really knew and understood about it was that he had to recover the Firestaff, because it could be used to make a mortal a god. He was out to find it to prevent that from happening, to keep it out of the hands of people who would use it to raise themselves to divinity, and set off a war between gods that would ravage the world.