Honor and Blood

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 Je

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?"

"Je

"She survived? She's a Weavespi

"Yes. Now leave me be for a little while. I'm dividing my attention between you and Je

"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 ma

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.

Floating along those snowy expanses, carrying the unconscious form of his sister behind him, Tarrin crested the hill and found himself looking down on the Ungardt port city of Dusgaard. It was where his grandfather lived, in a large town at the head of a very narrow bay-like feature his mother called a fjord. The city was built of low-beamed houses and lodges scattered randomly along a flat strip by the fjord, bordered by the steep hill over which he had tread. All the buildings were made of gray stone, most of them with steeply sloped tile roofs to allow the snow to slide off of them. As Ungardt towns went, it was rather large, probably about three hundred buildings with about a thousand or so Ungardt dwelling within them. The Ungardt didn't build large cities, they spread their population out over the entirety of the coastline, with only a few sparse settlements inland. Instead of large cities separated by villages every day or so apart, Ungardt was literally one large, open, sparsely housed village that went from the border with Tykarthia right up to the snowpack. You couldn't go ten longspans without coming across a homestead or a small village in Ungardt, at least as long as one stayed near the ocean.

Tarrin's spell of seeking was still active, and it showed him exactly which lodge was the one his parents occupied. They lived in a small house on the inland edge of the city, with considerable land separating them from the nearest house. Probably to satisfy his father's need to have land around him, and they lived away from the others because his father probably didn't feel very comfortable around the outspoken, rather rough-and-tumble Ungardt. He wouldn't have to carry Je

He didn't allow himself time to think about anything other than getting Je

He came down the hillside and approached the house, a neatly kept place with snow piled around the steeply sloped rooftop, nearly burying the eaves under the piled snow. The doorway was cleared of snow, showing him exactly where to take Je

He used a weave of Air to push open the door, and then looked inside. The house was dominated by a large common room, which held a large hearth. The floor was stone, covered in bearskin rugs, upon which rested a large table and chairs for di