Honor and Blood

It was yet another aspect of being a Weavespi

It was something about which nobody had ever said anything. He thought it was one of the abilities of the Weavespi

Clearly, Sorcery wasn't as simple as weaving spells. It had several different disciplines within that broad definition, and it would take many, many years of study to come to an understanding of his own abilities. Weaving spells was just one of the aspects of Sorcery.

But thoughts of the future yielded to thoughts of the present. They were still travelling northwest, and Tarrin was still looking for an ideal place to stop, an ideal battleground that would stack the deck in his favor. Jegojah was coming, and he was just starting to feel… twinges, little variances in the Weave that he thought were being caused by something u

Jegojah was… special. It had killed Faalken, nearly killed his family, and had hounded and tortured him for years, by either deed or fear. It was going to end. This would be the last time he crossed swords with Jegojah, one way or another. Thinking of it made his hackles rise, but it also made him remember the vision that the Goddess had given him about Jegojah. That Faalken had been standing in front of the Doomwalker, his decayed body making it obvious he was a corpse, holding a flaming sword. What did it mean? Was it a warning for him not to get too carried away? Would Faalken's memory interfere somehow, as the vision suggested, or would it cause him to come into danger? Just thinking about that fateful day when Jegojah killed Faalken, killed him because Tarrin had lost control, made him suddenly furious. Jegojah had killed Faalken, but Tarrin had abandoned him to his death just so he could destroy Jegojah. The anger was directed at Jegojah, but some of it was focused on himself. That day had shown him the consequences of his actions. That day, his rage had cost him a friend, and caused him to vow that no one else was going to die if he could help it. Killing Jegojah would bring closure to him, he felt. Destroying the Doomwalker once and for all would avenge Faalken, and would act as atonement for allowing the valiant Knight to die. Jegojah was a physical embodiment of the demons that had plagued Tarrin since becoming Were, and he meant to destroy the Doomwalker, and them, and vanquish those demons back to the nether realms.

They stopped for lunch and to wait out the heat of the day in the shade of a large overhanging rock, then moved on again. The hilly terrain of the desert became progressively more and more rocky, and rugged foothills of respecatable size had begun to show through the heat haze that made looking at distance in the desert an uncertain pasttime. Tarrin and Sarraya found themselves ru

They travelled up one such valley near sunset, looking for a good campsite, when the valley opened up into a vast depression in the land like a great bowl with a flat bottom. The bottom of that wide valley-like feature was dotted with boulders and rocks strewn about the floor of it like children's toys, and rock spires, hundreds of them-

– -not rock spires. Towers!

It was a ruin! The remains of a great city were hidden in those crisscrossing valleys, a city that had completely filled up the depression in which it had been built. The city was buried in sand here and there, and it was obvious that a recent sandstorm had carried away much of the sand that had once buried the city. A city built of the same sandy colored stone that filled most of the desert, but it was a city that was remarkably well preserved. Buildings still stood here and there, and they stood out against the fallen debris that cluttered what had once been wide avenues. The architecture of those buildings were blocky, with many right angles, and as he and Sarraya approached them, he began to realize that the builders of this vast city weren't human.

The doorways to those buildings were only about six spans high.

Tarrin reached the edge of the city, and looked at the nearest building still standing. It was three stories high, but its compact construction made it only as tall as a human's two story building. It was made of sandy colored stones that showed the erosion of the years, but the wearing away did nothing to hide the exacting precision with which the stones had been fitted together. The architects and builders of this place had been engineers of the highest degree. These sprawling ruins put modern cities to shame with the durability and craftsmanship of the buildings.

"Who made this place, Sarraya?" Tarrin asked, looking at one of the buildings.

"I don't know," she replied. "The doorways are small. If I were a gambling Faerie, I'd say it was one of the Lost Races. Maybe Dwarves, or Gnomes."

He'd heard those names before, but they belonged in bedtime stories. The Dwarves and Gnomes had lived a long, long time ago, but had been wiped out during the terrible Blood War. The Gnomes had died out by attrition, but the Dwarves had fought to the very last man, even their women, fighting to protect the world from the dark evil of the Demons. Even now, five thousand years after the fact, the heroism of the Dwarves was honored in song and story from one side of Se