Her clothes burned away, leaving her standing there in a widening circle of melted snow and blackening grass, the sheathe of Magelight looking like ghostly fire as it danced around her body, joining with the real flames to form an eerie shimmering aura of dancing light. He watched on in terrified anticipation as his dear sister struggled against the power, struggled to do as he told her to do, her body sagging as the fire become stronger around her.
Then the fire stopped.
Tarrin felt it in the Weave, an explosive release of energy as the boundless power within Jenna was suddenly absorbed back into the Weave, but what startled him was that it was more power than she had originally held. He felt a sudden sense of presence within the Weave, and he clearly felt his beloved sister appear within the strand he was occupying, hurtling away from her body and into the core, into the Heart of the Goddess. She went to float in that black void filled with the sense of the Goddess, the core of the Heart, the Heart of the Weave, the one place where mortal and god existed within the boundaries of its nonexistent space in a harmonious union of love. Jenna went to stand before the Goddess and find benediction.
He felt that exact moment inside his soul, and it caused tears to well up in his eyes. The Goddess reached out and enfolded Jenna's soul with her love, and at the very instant, a blazing halo of glorious golden light surrounded his sister's nude form, taking the form of the cancave four-pointed star that lurked within the center of the shaeram . Blackened skin became smooth and pale and unmarred once again, dark hair that had been burned away quickly and immediately grew back, the tortured pain on Jenna's lovely face was replaced with an expression of peaceful serenity.
The simple silver amulet around her neck changed in that moment of transendence, eight small tines growing out from the center star to join with the triangles that surrounded it, transforming itself into the shaeram that graced the neck of the Goddess' Children, the amulet marking his sister as one of the Weavespinners.
The glow faded away softly, leaving the children to stare in awed silence. Jenna's little body began to sag forward, and she very nearly fell, if Tarrin had not caught her in flows of gentle Air, warmed by Fire to keep the deadly cold of Ungardt winters from finding her. He couldn't touch her in his illusory body, but he could still use Sorcery. He picked her up in that flow of warm, soft Air, then cloaked her nude body in an Illusion of simple cloth.
"Sister," he said thickly, emotionally, full of relief and pride and joy and fear for his little sister. She was again his sister, by more than just blood. She was now a sister of the Weave, joined with him by bonds of power and common ability, by their position as the few who had stood in the presence of the Goddess and found her favor.
Well done, my kitten, the Goddess said to him in a voice of profound relief, of towering pride. Very well done. Take her home, Tarrin. She needs to rest now.
Tarrin looked around. They were in Ungardt, and he had no idea what was where. He could see no houses or buildings where they were. "You!" Tarrin snapped in Ungardt, pointing at the nearest of the kids nearby, a rather tall, wide shouldered lad with red hair and snow-crusted furs. "Show me where she lives!"
The boy didn't move. He just stood there and gaped at Tarrin in mute shock. Then, as one, all the children turned and ran in all directions.
Tarrin snorted and blew out his breath, which was little more than an automatic reaction, given that his projected image didn't breathe. He reached out and wove together a spell of Divine and Mind, a spell of seeking, sending it out like ripples in a pond and having them search for the familiar presences of his mother and father. It was one of the few ways he could use the Mind sphere when not dealing with members of his own race.
He felt a response immediately, about half a longspan west. He also felt a considerable drain on himself, on his real body back in the desert. Using the illusion and holding Jenna in air was taxing, considering he was actually doing it all from thousands of leagues away. His consciousness may be in Ungardt, but the body that powered his magic was still in the desert. Reaching directly into the Weave as he was doing was the only reason he was able to affect things half a world away, and then only because Jenna's powerful disruption of the Weave had guided him exactly to where she was. He already realized that if not for that, he would never have found her. The Weave was not the real world, and its locations didn't correspond to reality in a precise manner. Without someone like Jenna to guide him, he could not have found her. He could not even find the Tower unless someone there showed him the way.
He became aware of something tugging at his ear, his real ear. He was separated from his body, but his pause to sense his body's condition had made him aware of it. He found that he could divide his attention by closing his phantom eyes and yielding a part of himself back into the Weave, enough to become aware of his body. It was Sarraya yanking at his ear, screaming at the top of her lungs for him to wake up. She was very nearly hysterical.
He caused his body's eyes to open, and found himself staring into the sky. When he sent his consciousness into the Weave, it left his real body inert, and he had fallen over. The strand he had used to do what he had done had actually moved with his fall, attached to him by a power great enough to force it to move when he did. "Sarraya, stop that," he said in a distant tone. "Calm down, I'm alright."
"Tarrin!" Sarraya screamed, coming into view over him. "What in the nine Hells happened?"
"Jenna was being Consumed," Tarrin told her in a kind of daze. "I had to help her find the path, or she would have died."
"She survived? She's a Weavespinner now?" Sarraya asked in surprise. Sarraya remembered what it meant when a Sorcerer survived being Consumed.
"Yes. Now leave me be for a little while. I'm dividing my attention between you and Jenna, and Jenna needs me more than you do. Just be patient and guard my body. I'm not aware of it when I'm like this."
"I will, I promise," she said quickly, much of the anxiety flowing out of her expression. "You just take care of your sister."
"I will," he said in a lazy smile. He knew that there had to be reasons that he liked Sarraya. Her compassion and concern for his sister reminded him of many of them. He closed his eyes and returned to the hazy semi-real state of existing within the bounds of a generated illusion.
At first, he forgot what he was doing and tried to walk in the direction that his weave told him to go, but he found himself trundling along without moving a finger, walking in place. That unsettled him a bit, until he remembered that he was not actually there, and that he was going to have to approach the concept of moving from a magical rather than a physical viewpoint. Moving, he realized, was going to be a matter of shifting the illusion, not of walking along. That required working with the flows of the Weave as they were operating, moving them along through space without disrupting their integrity. It took him a little bit to get the idea of shifting the illusion in a manner that kept it together, but he adapted quickly to the concept of it, and was moving along in an eerie kind of floating movement forward, as if he were flying just above the snow.
The sense of surrealness did not dissipate as he moved. There was no sense of cold around him, all he could feel was the heat of the desert on his real body. He could hear and see, but what disturbed him most was that he couldn't smell anything but Sarraya and the desert. He was a being very strongly grounded in his sense of smell, his most acute sense, and it made his movement through the rugged Ungardt hillsides seem like floating in a dreamworld, a place with no smell to it. It also helped remind him that this was nothing but a dream to him, a landscape a thousand leagues away, and that he was literally not there. Everything he was seeing was being given to him by the illusion, carried back to him through the Weave, but done with such smoothness and speed that it was as if he really were standing on that hillside in Ungardt.