Weavespinner

Now she was confused. She looked around, and saw that everyone seemed as stu

She stood up on wobbly feet, totally drained and exhausted. Not a moment ago, she was fleeing for her very life, now she was back at the Tower, safe and sound, and everything seemed to be over. But what had happened? And where was Tarrin? She looked around, but she neither saw him or caught his scent anywhere. She took a feeble step forward, but nearly toppled over. Jasana continued to cling to her desperately, and her crying was the only sound that was coming from any of the shocked, stu

A touch came on her shoulder. She turned and saw her mother, Triana, who looked down at her daughter with a grim, resolute look on her face. "Mother," she said in confusion and exhaustion. "I have Jasana. See?" She tried to hold up her daughter, but Jasana's claws embedded in her sides made pulling her little girl away a potentially painful experience. "Where is Tarrin? He needs to see her. I have to show him."

Her i

Jesmind stared up at her mother in utter disbelief, but the empty pain within her mother's eyes told her that it had to be true. "No," she said in a bare whisper as the horrible truth crashed down on her. "No, it can't be," she said more forcefully, clutching her daughter tightly to her breast. But it was true, and that truth was more than she could bear. She would have dropped to her knees had Triana's strong paws not caught her, and she closed her eyes in anguish as tears rolled down her cheeks. She gave out a cry of such pain, such loss that it broke the heart of every person who heard it, a cry of one who had just lost everything that had meaning to her.

"NNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

To: Title EoF

Chapter 16

It was a very grim time.

Tarrin's death had terribly affected the entire Tower, from the Keeper down the the lowliest maid or servant. Though not everyone knew him, and fewer liked him, he had been such a integral part of the Tower, such a part of its workings and its power structure, that his loss had affected everyone within it. And as things affected the Tower, so they also affected Suld. The new king of Sulasia, Arren Strongheart, had gone into deepest mourning when he heard the news, and had ordered a day of mourning for the city and the kingdom. Everyone in the Tower was very quiet and somber, all the katzh-dashi wearing mourning black, and very little real business was being done.

It had been three days since the strange and terrible end of the war. They had won. Not many Goblinoids survived the horrific earthquakes, and Val had been utterly destroyed, which had forever removed the threat he had posed, but the cost it had exacted had been more than they had all been willing to pay. All of them except Tarrin, it seemed. All of his friends gathered together and tried to make sense of what happened, but nobody had been close to him when it happened except Jesmind and Jasana, and they were not very helpful. Jesmind had entered a deep black reverie that had struck her not long after she found out what happened. She would not speak unless spoken to, and her responses were often disjointed and made little sense. Jasana was virtually inconsolable, and even speaking her father's name was enough to send her into a crying storm so severe that only Jesmind or Triana could calm her down. But Jesmind was so lost in her grief that the burden of caring for the fragile child fell to her grandmother, and she accepted the burden with haunted eyes. Tarrin had meant a great deal to the Were-cat matriarch, and his loss had struck her just as keenly as it had her family, but she seemed capable of holding herself together. Mist had taken the news better than everyone expected. The destruction she wrought was confined to only two floors, and luckily they managed to clear the warzone of all i

The joy of her children did not make up for the loss of their father. It was a bittersweet thing for Kimmie, Mist, and Triana, as her bond-mother and the Were-cat matriarch helped the grieving mother to care for her wondrous burden.

The Keeper had her own troubles with the loss of her brother, so much so that the ru

The death of Tarrin had had a powerful effect in Suld, but the death of a sui'kun could have a disastrous effect on the Weave. But as the Goddess had told them so long ago, the gods had permitted extra sui'kun to be born to protect the world against another Breaking. The eighth sui'kun had silently been born some month before Tarrin's death, his birth u

Even the gods seemed to mourn. For all three days since the war and Tarrin's death, the skies had been covered by thick clouds, and those clouds reached out to cover the entire world. It cast the world into dark, gloomy shadow, and everything seeemed u

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