"Why heal it?" Allia asked. "A lone inu rarely survives long, and I don't think we want something like this as a pet."
"So it at least has a fighting chance," he replied as the wound completely closed, and the last traces of Tarrin's magic killed off the now internalized infection.
"You're getting too sentimental in your old age, brother," Allia teased. "Why were you playing with it, Sarraya?"
"I guess I just wanted to get a close look at a live one," she said. "The ones I've seen up close weren't very whole. Tarrin isn't very neat when he kills things. There were body parts laying everywhere," she said with a little shudder.
"Dead is dead," Tarrin said flatly as he patted the animal's flank, feeling the powerful muscle underneath those scales. Tarrin felt its warmth, and, curious, he sent probing weaves into the animal, weaves usually meant to find sickness or injury. These weaves instead inspected the internal workings of the animal, puzzling out its biology.
Tarrin whistled. "It's not a reptile," he said in appreciation.
"What do you mean?" Allia asked.
"It's not cold-blooded," he explained as he slid his paw along its flank. "It's warm-blooded. It's not a reptile. It's a close cousin of reptiles, but it's not one."
"Maybe it's in the same family as dragons," Sarraya said. "They're warm-blooded too, and it's very apparent that they're related to reptiles. You know, scales, big teeth, claws, bad attitudes, that kind of thing."
"We know that there are relatives of dragons," Allia mused. "Drakes are their relatives, and Dolanna told me that Wyverns are also related to them. I've never seen a Wyvern before, so I don't know about that."
"They're not something you want to see," he snorted, the memory of the fight he'd had with the Wyvern on the riverboat coming up to the front of his mind. "Strange." He stood up. "Alright, I'm done," he told it. "Go on."
It looked at him quizzically.
"You're on your own now, cub," he told it. "Just be careful out there, and don't try to take anything bigger than you are. You should be alright."
With a curious chain of short growls in its throat, the inu turned and started off towards the south.
"Now there's something you should have tried to tame, Allia," Sarraya said with a grin.
"It wouldn't be prudent," she shrugged. "You can't have tame inu and tame sukk and chisa around each other. They're natural enemies."
They continued on southwest at an easy pace, as Tarrin mused over what he'd learned. After looking back on things, he realized that the first time they'd come through the desert, Sarraya had never really had the chance to use that Druidic trick to help him. The fights he'd had with the local wildlife had been fast and furious, where Sarraya's presence would have only complicated an already complex situation. And the times when she would heve been very useful, like when the kajat attacked them down in the Great Canyon, she hadn't been there. That probably would have been the best time for her to calm an attacking predator, but she'd been off scouting.
It showed one of Sarraya's problems when she taught. She was a good teacher most of the time, but that was with things she thought he could use or learn. If she felt it wouldn't work for him or he couldn't use it, she not only wouldn't teach it to him, she also wouldn't even mention it. Tarrin understood the reasoning for it, because with Druidic magic, there was absolutely no room for error. By not even telling him about something, she was making sure that he wouldn't get curious about it and try to use something that either wouldn't work or was beyond his ability. But it still irked him a little bit.
Tarrin mused a little about that, realizing that he was his own warden in that regard. He was a curious one, always trying anything someone did that he saw. That curiosity was coupled to an admittedly strong power and a clever mind, and when Druidic magic was concerned, that could get him into a great deal of trouble. He was alot like Keritanima that way; when he saw someone do something he couldn't do, he just had to figure out how it was done. He couldn't help himself. At first, when he was just learning Druidic magic, he accepted Sarraya's warnings and commands without question, not trying some of the things she did. But he was more experienced now, more confident, and now she had to be careful. From the way they talked, Tarrin was probably as strong as Sarraya now, and that put anything she did in the realm of his possibility. He'd see her do something and try it, and that could get a little tricky, given he may not be capable of it. But, on the other hand, she'd also be willing to teach him, since he was more confident and more experienced.
They made camp early, as a small sandstorm roared over them an hour or so before sunset, taking refuge in a very narrow fissure of rock at the base of a broken rock spire. Tarrin had often wondered about the rock spires. They were everywhere in the desert, from the most barren sandswept sandfields to the most rugged badlands. Some were large, some were small, some tall, some short. But most of them were made of a dark stone that seemed oddly out of place with the sand colored rock most common in the desert. There were some sand-colored rock spires, but those had seemed most prevalent in the southeastern stretches of desert, and they'd shown alot more effects from the scouring wind than the darker ones had.
Curiosity driving him, he reached out and put a paw on the stone, sending flows of Earth and Divine into it. What he discovered made his tail twitch. The stone was igneous, hardened lava, and as Tarrin followed its root down into the ground, he realized that it had come pouring out when someone or something punched a hole in the ground, a hole that went all the way down to the vast sea of magma upon which the land floated.
All these dark rock spires were probably the same, the result of a breach into the magma.
They are the scars left behind by the Blood War, kitten, the Goddess told him, her choral voice echoing in his mind. The rock spires are what's left of magic that the Demons used to pull lava from the ground and kill the defenders. Five thousand years ago, this was a lush grassland. But then the Demons came, punching holes into the mantle and causing the lava to erupt. That covered large areas of this verdant belt with pools of lava. The heat and the fumes killed the grass, changed the weather itself, turning this place into a desert. At one time, this was a hellish wasteland covered with thousands of small hill-sized volcanic cones. But the winds this area is famous for wore them down, eroded them into a sand that still rests in the northeast sections of the desert, where the sand and dunes are black instead of white. The normal rock beneath too was worn away, which made the light sand and dust you find everywhere else here. The rock spires were the cores of those volcanic cones. If there is a testament to the destruction of the Blood War, my kitten, this is it. The Desert of Swirling Sands is the last great scar left behind by a war that raged five thousand years ago.
That sobered him, left him with a grim resolve. The Blood War had been so long ago, but even now ripples of it flowed through the present, showed themselves here in the wound left behind by its raging, echoed in the songs and tales of the valiant Dwarves, who sacrificed everything to save the rest of the world. So much destruction and pain, and all of it had been caused by the Firestaff. Val had used the Firestaff to become a god, then raised an army of Demons to conquer the world. They turned on him, and Val was forced to help the very ones who had been his enemies, as the entire world was forced to unite to fight off the Demonic invasion. It was the Blood War that caused the gods to take the position they had now, where the next who used it would be destroyed. They couldn't allow a god that was not bound by the laws of the pantheon to exist. Even if it meant another catastrophe on level with the Blood War or the Breaking, they couldn't allow it, because Val had proved that such a one could destroy the delicate Balance which the gods strove mightily to maintain.