It was a revelation he could not accept, and so he fled from it. But there was no fleeing from a dream, no escape from that which came from within.
Pushed beyond his endurance, Tarrin tripped on a rock and tumbled to the ground, body exhausted from lack of sleep and the night's efforts. He lay there for a long moment, panting heavily, then he rolled over on his back. He could still see the face before him, but he was too tired to care now, worn out by his hard running. Panting, he lay there and let the cold air cool the sweat on his body, let the sensation of it drown out the pain inside, let physical feeling overwhelm internal emotion.
Didn't they understand that it wasn't his fault? When he killed, it was almost always because he was in a rage, and he had no control over himself then! It was a Were-cat's nature to suffer the rages, Triana herself had told him that! No matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried, he would never overcome that simple truth. It was a part of what defined his existence.
But even that wasn't an excuse. When he destroyed a portion of the gladitorial arena in Dala Yar Arak, that had been a conscious choice. He had deliberately done that, had intentionally destroyed it knowing full well that innocents were going to die. He had killed hundreds in order to simply irritate Shiika, to pin her down and give him time to get to her Palace unhindered. Those deaths were the ones that blighted him, had darkened his soul, had sent him beyond the point of redemption. It had been an act of evil, and it made him no better than the men he hated for the same behavior.
No matter what affected him, no matter how feral he was or how little others mattered, that simple blaring truth could never be forgiven. He hadn't been able to even forgive himself, though he had buried it inside, drowned it in the gravity and importance of his mission. But now, out here in the desert, there was nothing to stop it from returning, to rise up and remind him of his evil, to show him what he was now.
Maybe that was it. Maybe the dreams were his conscious, using the quiet time of the desert to finally voice its objections, to remind him of what had happened.
But it didn't have to paralyze him! He knew what he'd done, and he did feel remorse, but it couldn't matter now. Nothing mattered but the mission! The safety of Janette depended on him, the future of that little girl was now firmly in his paws, and he would let nothing stand in his way, not even himself.
In this instance, the ends justified the means.
That didn't make him feel much better, but it was a truth. It was a powerful truth. The deaths of a few thousand by his paw meant little in the face of the countless hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, who would die if he failed. But they mattered very little to him, even now, so he had to rationalize his devotion to the mission by seeing it in the terms of one life, one future, a life and future that he very much intended to protect. The rest of the world could sink into the Pit for all cared, it was Janette that mattered to him. After everything that had been done against him, to him, he had no more compassion for the world that had destroyed his future.
He sat up, seeing that the first hints of dawn had begun to appear on the eastern horizon, causing the Skybands at the horizon to take on that pinkish cast they showed just before the sun came up. He couldn't go on with the dreams. They were starting to affect him in very bad ways, even had started making him hallucinate. He simply couldn't face what he had done, could not bear the merciless eyeless gaze that haunted him. There was no hiding from the dream, but there was a way to draw its fangs.
But the price of that may be more than his humanity, maybe even more than his soul. To take the bite out of the dream, he would have to completely reject his humanity, to totally eradicate any feeling of pity or guilt inside. He could do it easily, all it would take would be to find a new balance between him and the Cat, where its survivalist outlook on life would overwhelm his human emotions. That would make him everything he did not want to be, a brutal reactionary being that existed for its own survival, at the cost of anything around it. There would be no mercy in that being, and what was worse, there would be no constraint. It would kill without reservation, without consideration, without hesitation.
He could live with the memory of being a monster, or he could become one.
Neither option seemed very attractive, and it left him feeling helpless. That feeling made him angry, and that anger quickly built into an aimless fury. It wasn't fair! Why did this have to happen to him! He'd been trying to change, trying to reclaim some of his humanity, lose some of his feral harshness. Why did the dreams have to upset that? They were forcing him to abandon his goal of being more like Triana, forcing him to become the one thing that he could not bear to become!
It wasn't fair! When was he going to finally get a break? After everything he'd done, he deserved a chance!
He accepted what he was, but he hated it. He faced the possibility that he would be worse, and it frightened him… but wouldn't he just accept that too? After all, in that state, he wouldn't care what he did. But there would always be the human in him, trapped in the control of the Cat, screaming to the end of his days that what he was doing was wrong. It would never go away, it would become the new face staring back at him, though it would have no fangs.
Maybe he wasn't as well adjusted as he thought. He accepted his condition now. In many ways, he preferred it. He was Were now, and it seemed inconceivable to be anything else. But the Human in him still could not accept it, could not live with it. It did not want to be Were. It wanted its place back, to be the only voice inside him, unrestricted by the animal instincts that influenced his behavior. He'd hated being feral for a long time, but there seemed to be nothing he could do about it. A feral Were-cat was forever feral. Just like being turned, there was no changing that. It was a conditioned reaction to stimulus. It was instinct, and there was no going against instinct.
There was no going back. Once one was turned, the transformation was complete, and there was no going back. If something stripped his Were nature from him, it would kill him. He accepted it because he had no choice. He lived with it because he had no other way to live, and no matter how bad it was, his own nature would not permit him to give up.
After so long, the Human in him had finally begun to stir. He realized that, sitting there and looking at the horizon. It had finally found the strength inside to challenge his Cat instincts for dominion of his mind. That had to be it. His attempts to curtail his feral nature had strengthened it, and only now had it begun to strike back at the instincts. It explained the dreams, it explained a great deal.
But it faced an almost insurmountable challenge. And so, it seemed, did he.
He sat there while the sun rose, watching it through hooded eyes, knees drawn up and chin resting on arms set across knees, tail wrapped around his ankles. He watched the progression of darkness to light with little awareness of it, as night succumbed to day in varying degrees, consumed by his own internal conflict. Even the flittering buzz of Sarraya's wings did not make him look away from the rising sun, nor did her landing on his shoulder make him move.
"It helps to talk about it, Tarrin," she said gently, putting a hand on his cheek. A very tiny hand.
"I've been having a dream," he replied woodenly. "It's the same dream over and over. In the dream, all the people I've killed come back and haunt me. One in particular stands out, and I see her face behind my eyes all the time. It won't let me sleep."
"That's your conscious talking to you, Tarrin," she said compassionately. "Just be patient, and the dream will fade."
"I can't take it anymore, Sarraya!" he said in pleading voice, charged with emotion. "I see that face, and it reminds me of what I've done, what I've become! And it's right! I am a murderer!"
"Life is never easy, Tarrin," she told him in a gentle voice. "Part of life is living with the past. Another part is living for the future. You've been placed in a very difficult position. It makes you do things you don't want to do, but you have to do them because things would be worse for everyone if you don't. I don't really blame you for the things you've done, because if you hadn't, we wouldn't be here now. You have to understand that. The dream will fade, but it has to run its course."