"But… but I'm not worthy of any of this," he said meekly. "I'm a half-crazy Were-cat who'd sooner kill you than shake your hand. I don't deserve to see such wondrous things. Why me?"
"Why not?"
She had asked that question of him every time he asked his own, and he still had yet to find a suitable answer for her. In this crazy, illogical world, it was only fitting that a feral Were-cat be given the responsibility for saving the very people he did not care about.
Fate, he had discovered, had a very strange sense of humor.
"Don't worry at it too long, my dear kitten," she said to him in a silvery voice, a voice full of humor, warmth, and love. "You have other things to consider."
"What?"
"You have faced your power, and have conquered it," she told him. "You have crossed over into a new realm of magical ability. You are now a true Weavespinner, in heart and soul as well as name. But as with any new beginning, there is a period of adjustment, of learning. And so it is with you, my dear child. You are so fond of thinking of things in linear terms, so consider it this way. One path has come to its destination, but another leads you off to the horizon. Your body has changed, as has your connection with the Weave. These are your first obstacles, the first challenges you must face and overcome."
"Changed? You mean I have to learn everything all over again?"
She laughed lightly. You see to the point, as always, she said winsomely. You have crossed into a new realm, Tarrin. In your prior land, you were the master. Now, you are again the Novice. You must relearn everything you learned before, because now, everything is different."
"But, but that other one was using High Sorcery," he reasoned. "That means that I can still use Sorcery the old way."
"You can use Sorcery in the way that other Sorcerers do, but that is but one aspect of your power, and it is also something you must learn again. Your connection to the Weave is different now. Surely you remember Dolanna's lessons."
He realized that he already knew the answer. "Every Sorcerer has his or her own way of touching the Weave," he repeated the lesson. "It's unique for every Sorcerer. It's why no Novice is permitted to read or study Sorcery before their first lessons, because it may contaminate their ability to use their magic."
"It is a personal communion, and it differs from person to person. But now, my Tarrin, you are a different person. So you must learn to touch the Weave anew."
That proposition seemed daunting. Learn it all again? Go through it all again? Suffer the dangers of his power all over again?
"No, my kitten," she said gently. "There is no more danger. There will never be danger of that sort again for you."
"What do you mean?"
"You are sui'kun now, Tarrin. That's a Sha'Kar term for Weavespinner. A Weavespinner cannot be harmed by the power of the Weave."
"I'm immune to Sorcery?"
"No. You are not immune to Sorcery. You will simply never again be threatened by its power. It cannot harm you, no matter how much of it you hold."
"So I can't be Consumed?"
"A Weavespinner cannot be Consumed," she affirmed. "My time grows short, kitten. You're about to wake up now, and you're not going to remember any of this immediately, because I don't want you interrupting your rest with your usual pondering. But you'll recover your memory after you rest, and I want you to think about it when you do remember."
"I will. Mother, who was that Sha'Kar woman?"
The Goddess laughed sweetly. "That is none of your business. But don't worry, you'll see her again someday. I guarantee it."
The sense of her seemed to both retreat and not move, a strange feeling of paradox, and then the web-covered black sky suddenly began to shift, then to spin. He felt a strange sensation behind his eyes, as if the real world was recalling his soul from the nether regions to which it had travelled. He closed his eyes as a sense that he was travelling a million longspans in a breath swept over him… and then there was nothing but darkness.
Light.
It seeped into his vision, interrupting the dark security of sleep, and it stirred him out of a deep, dreamless slumber, that and a strange sound that sounded like someone dragging a chain over stone.
With awakening came memories, images. A Sha'Kar woman, an Ancient. An Ancient that attacked him! They had fought, and he had lost control of his power, finally lost total control… but he hadn't been Consumed. Something else had happened, something strange, something inexplicable.
Something… beautiful.
Groaning, Tarrin returned to full consciousness as his senses seemed to reawaken with the rest of him. He could smell Sarraya somewhere about. He could smell sand and rock and dust, but there was also a latent smell like sulfur, like brimstone. A smell he had only just recently smelled, but the memory of it was very fresh. His body was spent, exhausted. The sun hung low on the horizon, meaning that it was either sunrise or sunset. The stone around him wasn't radiating heat and the wind was just starting to stir, so he knew that it was morning. The only reason he woke up was because he was hungry and thirsty.
That wasn't the only thing he noticed. He could see the Weave now, see it as a ghostly backdrop to reality. He could see the strands crisscrossing through the sky and the land, see them yet not see them, as if they were ghostly after-images that faded from view if there was something solid behind them. He could see them all, but it was as if he were looking upon them with a separate set of eyes. The strands of the Weave didn't interfere with his normal vision in the slightest. Almost as if both images were being imposed over one another, yet both were completely separate and could not interfere with one another. He could see the strands, and he could sense the power within them. Not just the flows and spheres, he could feel the true power within, the pulsating energy that flowed through them, and he could feel the eddies and currents, the bottlenecks and the rapids, the pools and the trickles that made up the energy of the strands. It was an energy that was part of the Weave, created by the seven spheres interacting with one another in ways that the modern Sorcerers could not comprehend.
The fight. His body still shivered over what had happened between him and the Sha'Kar. Magic on a level he didn't think possible had passed between them, and though he didn't remember it at the time, he began to recall the way the Weave shuddered as it struggled to meet the demands on it from the two of them. Well, most of it had come from him, aimed at her. He recalled that the Sha'Kar didn't really attack him with as much power as he used against her, using instead her experience and finesse to counter his attempts to use brute force. But the sense of her had not lied. He knew that she would have been able to meet him power for power, if it had come to that.
The battle was confusing. He was still alive, so why didn't she finish him off? Why did she attack him in the first place? She was Sha'Kar, an Ancient, and she had knowledge that didn't exist in the world anymore. What he wouldn't have given to spend an evening talking with someone like her! She was at least a thousand years old, and she had knowledge of the old powers, of the Weavespinners, knowledge he desperately needed. Such vast knowledge, and she had used it to literally spank him in a magical clash. He had no illusions about who had come out of their confrontation the winner.
Maybe that was it. Maybe she didn't come to kill him, but to test him. Maybe she was just there to take a measure of him, for some reason. She had to know something about him, after all. There was no way that she could have found him, called to him in that weird way, without knowing who he was, what he was doing, and where to find him. It was about the only reason he could think up for her to do such a wild thing.
Or maybe she knew exactly where to find him. She was a Sha'Kar, an Ancient, and that meant that she was a Sorcerer. She had to have an amulet around her neck just like him, and she answered to the Goddess the same way he did.