8/6/2002 Darkness comes. Warded by the hope of a new dawn, a new day, it arrives, slinking through time and space, stretching its folds deep and across the land. The sun illuminates, the moon is pale light, casting shadows to hide things, secrets, but the darkness conceals entirely. Darkness is a place of things best unseen, and so, it, too, has a purpose. * * * Not daring to wipe the sweat caught on his dark eyelashes, a young man crouched against the sandy waste, watching a small cloud of dust on the horizon that was getting steadily closer. He wore a pale shawl draped over his thin-boned, sun-tanned body. A short spear was lying next to him, the fingers of his right hand gently resting on the polished wooden haft. The sounds of the horsemen arrived first, the creak of leather and saddle, the rhythmic pounding of hooves kicking up sand and dust, and then the cloud dissolved, revealing vague silhouettes against the night. Seven horses, seven men. They rode with the night, the moon casting her pale blue-white glow from the star-filled sky. And then, they were gone. The boy watched them until he couldn’t make out even the dust cloud anymore. He carefully rose from his prone position, then strode over to the trampled and kicked sand that marked their passage. His keen eyes noticed that there were two trails; the most recent one and another, older one that led to where the horsemen had come from. East. The boy started down that trail, his gait a slow jog that he could maintain for long distances. A hour later the trail ended. This was the deep desert, a place where few things survived for very long. The boy stared at a pile of rags lying just beyond the final signs of the trail. The rags were, on closer inspection, a woman. He cupped a hand over the woman’s mouth, feeling a faint warmth and moisture. He began to reach for his water skin when the woman stirred, and opened her eyes. She stared up at the boy standing over her with her dark, cold eyes, and hungered. She reached up to his proffered hand, grasping his wrist with her thin fingers, then pulled him down towards her, with a strength unnatural for such a lithe, weak body, embracing him, and drew all warmth and life from his body until it was only an empty husk. She released her grip on the body, which collapsed and disintegrated on the sand, and stood up, brushing grains of grit from her dress. Strengthened by the new energies flowing through her, she looked in the direction that those who abandoned her had fled to. Her sight burned across miles of sand to the city—the city that was once hers until she had been cast down from the sky, her birthplace, and then left to die here, in the desert like some… human. She would get it all back—the city, and more—she vowed, and began to walk towards her birthright, leaving a trail of footprints of fused sand behind her. * * * And finally, the night fled, yielding to the sun’s first rays of a new dawn, a new day. previous - next