Weavespinner

In a blur, Tarrin moved himself back to the desert, back to the ruins of Mala Myrr, back to the exact place where he'd started when he released Jegojah and Faalken from the Soultraps. He sent his senses into the strands, seeking out the path he had taken so many months ago, hoping that there would be some trace of it remaining in the Weave. Then, rather foolishly, he realized that all he had to do was send himself back to that dark, emotionless room where the Soultraps had been the same way he sent himself to Mala Myrr. He didn't have to know how to get there; he just needed to know where he was going. That was all.

And he was. Just wanting to go there was all it took. He found himself looking out through the strand into that room, but it was a room that, even through the distortion, looked much different than it had before. Tarrin wove a spell that opened a clear window between the Weave and the real world, an undistorted image of what was beyond the strand, and he was quite surprised to find that the room had been emptied of the furniture and the vials and the bottles and the books and strange objects that had been there before. The room was empty. Completely empty.

A little puzzled, Tarrin cast out his senses, looking for another strand that intersected with the building. He found one, which wasn't very easy, given that the Weave was much thi

A little a

There's nobody here, he said to himself, which became a Whisper in the Weave, since he had no body to make sound. Now what?

That is because you look in the wrong place.

Tarrin was startled; that voice was a voice that he had not heard in many months.

It was Spyder.

Follow my thought, her voice commanded. I will guide you to what you seek.

He did so, following the sense of direction from which her voice emanated. It led him back into the major Conduit, back into a Core Conduit, one of the seven of the greatest Conduits that depended on the sui'kun for their existence, and then out through a steadily shrinking series of strands, becoming smaller and weaker and thi

Come out.

Without much thought about it, Tarrin pushed flows out of the strands at that strange location and wove them into a projection of himself. Once the weave was formed, he pushed his consciousness into it, and then opened his spectral eyes.

He was on a snow-choked plain. There was nothing but snow as far as he could see in any direction, but there were mountains on the southern horizon, and directly ahead of him, about a league, the snow suddenly stopped to reveal a strange swath of grassland.

Tarrin's ears laid back slightly when he saw a vast army of Goblinoids and humans camped in that grass, and they weren't bundled up against the bitter cold that he could sense plagued this area. There was a sea of them, specks of dark breaking up the green of the grass, sitting around fires, training with weapons, sleeping or sitting in row upon row upon row of small tents that were erected in that grassy plain. Standing directly beside him was Spyder, and he realized that she too was a projection. She wasn't actually there.

"Gora Umadar," she said in a distant voice, pulling that black cloak around her a little more. "You are Ungardt. You know the name."

He did. It was supposedly a cursed place far to the east and north of Ungardt, in the tundra north of the Petal Lakes. Ungardt legend said that an ancient beast of evil was imprisoned within it, and it was bad luck to venture out of the Ice Mountains that separated the lands of Ungardt from the tundra holding the fell place on the other side.

"That is where they hold Jasana," she told him in that same dead, sing-song voice.

Tarrin tried to push out into that grassy plain, to try to sense Jasana, but it was like there was a wall holding him out. "Why can't I sense anything over there?" he asked.

"Val's icon is there, Tarrin," she answered. "He exerts a force that the Goddess ca

"Why?" he asked.

"Because they would be fighting directly," she answered, her eyes sweeping out over the snowless plain and the army it held. "Should one god triumph over the other, his icon would be destroyed, and all his godly power contained within it would sweep out like a firestorm. It would destroy the entire region. For any other god, it would mean millenia of banishment from the world. For Val, it would mean death."

"Because he's trapped in his icon?"

"Because he is a child of the Firestaff," she corrected. "He has never existed anywhere else but here, Tarrin. That is the difference between him and the other gods. That is why they ca

That filled Tarrin with a kind of grim excitement. "Then I could destroy him," he said in a dreadful voice, his need to avenge himself against those who had abducted his daughter ru