[ What Do You Have To Say? | Ni'Srilan: The Desert ]
Posted by Herne, Daenu on March 9, 2009, 3:59 am
203.129.49.102
Shadows across the sand.
The moon hung high and cold in the dark sky, sending light spilling blue and silver across the rolling dunes and leaving the sand aglitter, limned in starlight. Here and there soft shadows pooled like water, deep and still, at the foothills and ran with the tumbling sand down the slopes. There was no wind; the air was clear and cool and heavy with the immense weight of the sky, which burned, darkly glorious, with stars. The black brilliance of it dwarfed the silent blue-shadowed desert - the earth itself was but an audience, an awestruck witness to the majesty of the sky. The world was vast and shining, and empty save for they.
They ran with the fleet grace of wild things, swift shadows across the sand. They were two, dark smears against the silvered landscape - one greater, one smaller. As they ran sand flew up, glittering, from their racing hooves and hung in the air for half a heartbeat after they had passed, fading beneath the moon. The soft desert sand muffled their hoof beats and rendered them almost silent, quiet save for the small one’s ragged panting. They passed unseen, unheard through the empty desert, and the sand fell in on their tracks and covered all sign of their passing.
As the minutes dragged out the great shadow, a tall grey stallion, began to pull away from the other and streak ahead across the gleaming, trackless waste. Moonlight splashed along his dappled hide and washed him pearl and silver, a subtle, deceptive hue that changed with the moment, and ran long fingers through his mane streaming tail. His face was pale and shadowed by turns, a study in black and white. The thin light of the moon and stars stripped the colour from his eyes and left them a queer, murky grey-green. His expression was impossible to read in the darkness and shifting light but there was a kind of explosive, relentless energy to the drumming of his hooves across the desert that seemed to thrum throughout the length and breadth of his body. He ran on, through the dark.
Left in his wake the small shadow toiled on through the dunes, doggedly following in the stallion’s fast-fading hoof prints. Her small hooves sank deep into the softest sand and long, weak legs struggled to free them; still, through the valleys and the rifts between the deepest dunes she moved quickly, darting like a minnow through the shallows. Indeed at times she would seem to be almost underwater, drowning in pools of soft blue moon-shadow. Beneath the inconstant moon and cover of night she was dark and soft, the colour of good soil after rain, and her eyes were round and sweet. Their gaze remained stubbornly fixed on the fast-receding figure of the grey horse.
She caught him sometime after the stars had begun to fade from the sky, when the moon was hanging low in the west. There was a greyish tinge to the desert - it had lost that wonder, that silver-blue-dark clarity of the midnight world and they stood together atop a high dune facing the edge of the world, he staring at the horizon and she, slightly back and to the left, staring at him.
When at last he looked away from the shining line of the horizon and noticed her he looked mildly surprised, as though he had not expected to see her there. He said nothing, though, just turned away and stalked down the long sweep of the dune, the last of its kind - from here on in the ground grew hard and rocky, a barren wilderness. The foal glanced, just once, at the rising sun that was just beginning to break, and followed.
On the edge of Ni’Srilan they paused.
“Daenu,” Herne said, without looking at her.
“I know,” she said, “I won’t say anything.”
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