Original Submissions by LM
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The Bones of the Desert
Added on Aug 7, 2006An event of the arcane salvaged from the personal journals of Warlord D------ Tor.
It was moonrise when I first saw the girl. Jihae on this desert is always red, and on a battlefield the color phases over from red into the truly sanguine. As I pen this, I remember when the need for numbers was the main strategy of the war leaders of the day, when the Templarate would press children and aged alike into service for the Highlord – long may He reign.
It was moonrise, as I said, when I first saw the girl. The latest skirmish was over with the passing of the day and she stood there, a forgotten spoil among bodies. My Scorpions, with a discipline grown lax and shameful with the sorrow of loss, straggled behind, breaking rank to crouch by their fallen comrades. I would attend to them in a moment; first, the girl. She had a message for me. Similar slips of paper saying much the same as this one would arrive in the hands of others over the next few hours, for the commanding Blues would trust nothing to the way of the mind. Not this time. Not this war.
She looked small and soft amid the shadows and the jagged pikes and broken arrows which stuck haphazardly up in all directions among the dunes. This was an illusion; the tribal was as wind hardened as any desert dweller, and only her youth and surroundings gave the lie to her appearance. How she was forced into service, I never thought to ask. Likely she was the closest non-soldier to hand near the increasingly barren encampment, two leagues off. Barefoot, she crouched in the bloody sand by a fallen Scorpion, naked curiosity on a naked face.
“You’ll die for that,” I said, snatching the folded parchment from her grip with my free hand. The rustle of paper sounded loud in the hot moonlight. I had my orders, then, and sand sprayed as I wheeled towards my broken unit, shouting to the nearest soldiers. The girl was still here, I was preventing her from running.
“That was a stupid thing you just said.”
Indeed, the dune shadows seemed to hold a deeper intelligence, a base cunning and hunger, and did we not lose as many men to the sands and the heat as to the northern forces? If there was a third army in this war, the earth we fought on was candidate enough. The ground shifted and trembled beneath my feet, causing cries of consternation to rise behind me. The child struggled like a bird in my grip, still intent on lunatic backtalk.
“It will come for you too, if you are weak!” Enough of this. Lack of sleep and water made me paranoid. I raised my sword to cut her down, but with unnatural, frightened strength she wrenched free of my imbalanced grip, running for the dunes she worshipped and controlled.
“The sands take you then, you little desert monster!” I yelled, and then I had other things to worry about.
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When I saw her next, in the arena stands, the war had been over for five years. I had not forgotten her, for her pronouncement had been eerie enough to stick in my mind – though the thoughts I spared her were few indeed. I’d assumed her long taken by the desert, as she had said that day. She was very much alive, grown tall and slim and pampered. Her dark hair hung in long, neat braids. But a suede collar wrapped her neck, the clasp a familiar wyvern, and her eyes were still as blue as the day I stared into them on the battlefield, ready to snuff their feral hauteur. Today, she wasn’t mine to kill. But I remembered her secret.
I took her chin, turned her face from side to side. She did not stop me, though we both knew I insulted the Lord Borsail by touching his slave without invitation. Still, he had other things to occupy his mind, and she was there to entertain. Besides, I was about to do him a favor.
“I remember you,” I said, and released my grip on her face. The late afternoon sunlight filtered through the haze of dust in the still air.
“Yes.”
“How did you...”
“War prize.” She lifted her shoulders helplessly. The halting sirihish she spoke sounded like music. “It matters not my people did not fight, still, I was brought back to city. It was this, or...” She touched her collar, motioned to the sands below. "I was lucky to catch his eye." The roar of the crowd nearly drowned out her words.
“It suits you,” I said, turning my attention back to the fight. Her next words were bleak, sarcasm bordering on dangerous, as the gladiator’s battle against the captured anakore staged below us drew to bloody completion, the arena sand a wash of mottled reds.
“I am not the only desert monster tamed by city walls.” I turned back to study her, my voice dropping low. Her young Lord laughed melodically two seats over, oblivious to our conversation.
"Your position is a dangerous one. If they haven't found out yet, they will soon. The sand can't save you here, girl." And then she was as frightened as I'd ever seen her, even with a sword at her throat in the middle of a war.
"You will tell."
"It would be a crime not to."
"That is not yes." With an impatient motion of my hand, I affirmed what she didn't want to hear.
"Give me one week, please," she pleaded in my mind.
"And let you harm the Lord Borsail?" I answered in kind. Then, aloud, "No." She was too lovely altogether, with refined looks which would produce an expensive line of slaves. I hated to do it for reasons other than the waste, and the certain anger and embarrassment of the Lord C-------. But duty and honor are creeds by which my family lives their life, and by my duty and honor would she die. She was white with fear beneath brown skin, a leather leash round her ankle and attached to the balcony rail preventing her from running as I could see she wished to.
"I will take one hundred of your people with me," was her whispered pronouncement, even as I discreetly called for the attentions of the necessary authorities.
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She is gone now, and I am old. But I do not forget the way she died, the way her master's face drained of blood with his rage, the way she followed, passively, until the very ground beneath our feet betrayed us, throwing us by tens from our feet. The road split into two, three parts, buildings crumbled on the heads of the soldiers. She fed the hungry earth with the blood of an entire unit who had gone mad with the fear of that wild desert which was unable to be shut out of the city completely. Perhaps the sands would have remained passive if I hadn't threatened their child. Perhaps I should have said nothing. Perhaps many things.
She died, eventually, or so it was said. Never to my blade, or the blades of the soldiers, or to the power of the Highlord which took the sight from her wild eyes, but to the city street, the earth which she begged to end her. There was nothing left afterward but a drift of sand, a chasm, and a ruin. No body. Perhaps she is beneath us still.
No, she wasn't weak. She did not take quite one hundred, though it was close. But she didn't kill me. To this day I wonder why. To this day I have slept with less ease in my bed, for deny as I might, I know the sand outside blows against the walls of Allanak. Patient, gradual, inexorable, ever hungry, the desert waits with the wind to take us back into itself. In the end it is the desert we return to. I have seen it done, I have heard it said. The desert comes for all of us. Even me.
- From the personal journals of Warlord D------ Tor
Ocandra, the 142nd day of the Descending Sun, Year 47 of the 21st AgeIt was moonrise when I first saw the girl. Jihae onthis desert is always red, and on a battlefield the color phases over from red
into the truly sanguine. As I pen this, I remember when the need for
numbers was the main strategy of the war leaders of the day, when...
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