Since he had regained a goodly portion of his power, the focus of his travels had drifted away from magical study and had reached a point where he felt it was time to get ready for Jegojah. That meant that he needed to find an ideal battleground, a place that would suit his needs while eliminating the largest of Jegojah's advantages. It needed to be a broken place, with lots of irregular ground. That favored Tarrin, who was more mobile and agile, who could use that broken land to better advantage than his slower, armored foe. It also had to be bare rock, to deny the Doomwalker its power to draw energy from the land. It needed to be a lot of rock, to keep the Doomwalker from fleeing to a place where it could draw energy when the battle turned against it.
One place seemed perfect to him, a place that both Denai and Allia had mentioned. Some place called the Broken Lands, a place where a flat sheet of rock, hundreds of square longspans in area, had been pierced by innumerable gulleys, canyons, and crevasses. But that place was many days behind them, to hear Denai talk about it. He wasn't about to go all the way back there and travel the distance to where he was again. Since that place wasn't available, maybe something smaller, something a bit closer, would do. But without Denai and Var to guide him, he'd have to just wander around until he found something suitable.
So it was with an eye on the horizon that Tarrin ran that day, absently correcting Sarraya on her Sha'Kar as she practiced by speaking in that language. The corrections were mainly cosmetic, for the Faerie was now more or less fluent in the language, but she had a bad habit of using words of other languages when she felt another word more perfectly mirrored her thoughts. That was something that irritated the perfectionist in Tarrin when it came to languages, so he strove to break her of it now, before it became too ingrained to easily shed. The terrain of that region of the desert was noticably hilly, but lacked the rock spires and mesas more common in the southern reaches of the desert. He had a sneaking suspicion that it wasn't going to be easy to find a good battleground in that section of the desert, but he had to keep looking. There were many more wild animals there than in the southern reaches of the desert, but that made sense in that there seemed to be more plant life to support the food chain.
"Can we stop?" Sarraya asked in Sha'Kar. "I'm starting to get hot."
Tarrin pulled in and looked up at the sky. The sun was pretty close to its noontime zenith, and it did feel a little warm. Ever since he had become a Weavespinner, he didn't notice warmth much anymore. Or cold, for that matter. He could feel heat, but it was as if it had no meaning for him anymore, because it never really felt hot .
"Alright. Let's go to that little hillock over there," he said, pointing at a small tor that rose up from the surrounding low hills. "It's higher up, so we can see anything coming at us."
They moved up to the top of the little tor, which had steep drops on two sides, and Sarraya conjured up a little lean-to to serve as shade against the brutal sun. She also conjured some lunch, and a little ice from some glacier somewhere to put in a tiny conjured cup of wine. Tarrin sat just inside the lean-to, the shade yielding to the sun about halfway up his legs as he sat there with his legs out and ankles crossed, leaning against a large rock that was under the lean-to's protection. He watched in mild interest as a scorpion braved the heat of the sun to climb up his ragged pant leg and perch atop his knee, probably trying to figure out what it was it had just ascended. The little tail sting flexed back and forth rhythmically as it tried to decide just what to do next. Then, probably deciding that there was no food there, it climbed across his legs and down the other side, then scuttled behind the safety of a pile of loose rocks nearby.
"Ah, much better," Sarraya sighed, flitting over and sitting on his thigh. "You know, the desert is actually kind of pretty. Nothing like the forest of course, but it does have its own unique charm."
"You only just noticed?"
"Don't be nasty," she chided, looking up at him. "What do you think Var and Denai are doing right now?"
"Probably something that would make you giggle," he replied absently.
"I'd put money that if they're not married by now, then they're betrothed."
"You'd lose that bet," Tarrin told her. "Selani don't associate trysts with marriage. Why spoil a perfectly fine physical relationship with marriage?"
"I guess I'm a prig," she laughed. "My husband kept trying to get me to go to bed with him for five years while we were betrothed, but I wouldn't hear of it. I liked him keeping his every attention on me, and to be honest, I didn't want to do badly in bed and have him decide that I wasn't worth marrying," she admitted. "After we were married, it didn't much matter. Not that he was disappointed about it. Five years of fun we could have had, down the drain. Ah, well."
"You know, you've never talked about this mysterious husband of yours. Does he mind you being out here with me?"
Sarraya grunted softly. "Oh, yes," she said firmly. "But that's one of the reasons I'm here. I love Danzig, but he's terribly possessive, and he has a fit when I perform my duties as a member of the Druids. Sometimes I take these little trips just to spite him. These little separations ensure we can still tolerate each other when I come home. He's very sweet and accommadating for a while, and then regresses back to his jealous ways. When he does that, I leave again. It does him good to realize that I can take care of myself, and I'm not going to go chasing after every Faerie boy I meet."
"You have any children?"
"Not yet," she replied. "But I'm young yet. I've got a few hundred years to go before age starts becoming an issue." She looked up at him. "Why the sudden interest in my private life? You've never so much as asked me my husband's name before."
"Because you talk all the time, and never talked about it," he replied. "You always chatter on and on about senseless things. For once, I wanted to hear you chatter about something that matters."
She gave him a wild look, then burst out into gales of laughter. "Well, I guess I deserved that one, didn't I?" she acceded, wiping a tear from her eye. "I didn't think you'd be interested in boring old daily life."
"I'd be more interested in things that matter to you than whatever floats to the top of your mind at the time," he said pointedly.
"Alright, alright. I live in the southern tracts of the forest, in a colony of Faeries. It's the closest thing to a city we have. I live with my husband Danzig, who's something of an important figure in our society. Something like an advisor to our leader, which really means that he goes and gets drunk with the other advisors every night and pretends to debate about things that matter. I have two sisters and two brothers, who all live in the same tree as I do, so we stay close. I'm the only one in my family who's a Druid."
"I thought all Faerie had magical affinity."
"We do, but not everyone cares to develop it," she replied. "And we're not all Druids. We have Priests, and we also have Faeries who practice Wizardy. That gives our colony a good mix of magical orders that can deal with a wide range of problems."