Short story written in March 2016 for ThinkerX's Top Scribe I Challenge.
5000 words
"They call Dhar Jinan an offal pit," Lord Haroun wrote. "But in this judgment, they do not consider that refuse makes the most fertile soil, and from it may arise a fragrant garden. The poorest of men are most eager to work, if they are given fair chance. How many skilled craftsmen and wisewomen have been lost to the cruel drought of scarcity, that withers the fruit on the vine?
"I will begin to govern with good planting, care, and cultivation."
Through the pale gauze of the taraquin curtains, Veralim Imane sín Ahamid observed the transformation of Dhar Jinan. The rocky hills that cradled the city were now clothed in a skirt of farmland, green with spring and dotted with grazing goats and brightly-garbed shepherds. Sturdy flat-stone huts stood in place of the tents where hollow-eyed nomads had stared from the charred circles of their campfires. Where the slave market had once squatted, offensive to the Empress's eye, there grew olive and date trees in dark green banks, and the gibbet had been replaced by a tall white stone to Gameel, god of the forsaken. A fitting tribute. He had not told her of this.
For near two years she had read every letter Lord Haroun of Dhar Jinan wrote to the Empress, for no missive could go before Her Splendor without having passed the tests of a Veralim—a truthseer. In her own hand, Imane had written back to him with the will of the Empress, and the further courtesies and pleasantries that She could not be bothered with. If she had written a few lines with more spirit than necessary, more in reply than acknowledgement, could Holy Niryah blame her? There was no other governor who wrote his own letters, and quoted the poets and the prophets in them…
In recent months, their correspondence had become more personal, to the point where she sent out two papyrus sleeves, one sealed with the imperial blazon, and the other with the mark of a provincial Veralim.
And now… Imane smoothed her sheer veil, tapping her lips beneath it, as she tried to convince herself that she wasn't blushing. It would serve her wholly right if the man was five-and-sixty and squint-eyed, or if his request for a Veralim was for dull and honest business alone. It had been some time since she had ventured into the field, out of the jasmine-scented writing rooms. Perhaps it would be best to be dealt a thorough disappointment, and walk away wiser and more serene. She still felt too young for her office, sometimes.
The taraquin creaked through the arch of the city gates. Here the changes had not come so swiftly, for the skeleton of the old Karpathan fortress still informed the streets. But those forbidding walls danced with sun-bleached laundry, the stones spangled with the red flowers of the alyssum vines that crept from terrace pots. Girls stood in doorways with babes on their hips, but their faces were well-fed and their gazes curious, not furtive. It was far different from the cool marble galleries and pruned gardens of the Imperata, but Imane liked this sight better, for it reminded her greatly of the ghezet where she had grown up.
At the foot of the highest hill was the governor's estate. She had seen palaces of blue tile with golden domes and high-spiked gates, palaces that gleamed like pearls as the oyster of their city decayed around them. This was no such costly place. It was built of the same fort stone as the city walls, two-storied, and plain of façade, the only ornamentation the glint of blue glass in the small windows and the hint of lush verdure that spilled over the walls of the inner garden.
Imane stepped down from the taraquin, straightening her blue-violet robes—not nervously, of course. The door before her was set in a curl of pale, carved stone, beckoning the eye. She knew that he had few servants, but was still unprepared when the door opened at her knock to reveal the lord himself.
The fates were against her—he was no more than thirty, and not at all squint-eyed. Dark, curling hair fell to his shoulders, and framed an olive-brown face with a long nose and a broad brow. He was beardless, strangely, but most striking were his eyes: a bright leaf-green, almost golden. This color echoed in his clothing: a caftan of green embroidered barraca over a cream-colored tunic, drawn together by a bronze silk sash.
She had expected an erudite beard and a keffiyah, but now his Athic bloodname made sense. Glad to have formality to fall back upon, Imane placed a hand over her heart and bowed. The taraquin-driver intoned, "My Lord Haroun abir Diryannos, the Lady Veralim Imane of the Imperata.”
"I had hoped you it would be you."
Her stomach turned over at the sound of his warm tenor voice.
"You are welcome, Lady Imane," he continued. "Please come in, and share dinner with me. Your servants may take your things to the inn at the corner."
Her tender balked, but she shooed him on. More than her sacred position as a cleric protected her, in any house.
She followed Lord Haroun inside. The antechamber was an arch of earth-brown brick with a shrine to the Wandering God in an alabaster-tiled alcove, and up a tall riser, the dining chamber was laid out with maroon and blue cushions around a burnished table. The stone walls were covered not with plaster murals, but with living ivy, thick as a curtain. The leaves trailed into a fountain that ran in a channel around the edge of the room, trickling from a stone salamander's mouth.
As they sat, he poured qafah from a fluted brass pot, and gave the first cup to her. It was made as she liked it, and the taste of cardamom and cinnamon stirred memories. Reluctantly, she broke the silence. "You summoned me here on business, my lord. A wizard in Dhar Jinan?"
Lord Haroun made a quick, dismissive gesture. "I am afraid that's come to nothing. He was no more than a common charlatan, and when the watch went looking for him this morning, he was not to be found.” He cleared his throat. “The pretense for your visit is thinner than I might have hoped.”
"Oh. You have no work for me, then, my lord," she said, a little anxiously. "How can I impose upon your hospitality?"
"You must take a meal with me," he said firmly. "I won't turn you out onto the road so soon. And is it not worth the time to speak together, after so long without words?"
"Not without words," she said. "Only without speech. But the voice is the emissary of the soul, as Abir-an-Khezarid says. Without that meeting, how can we know one another?"
"Indeed." Lord Haroun smiled. There was kindness written on his face, in the long lines of his brows, the pleasant frame of his mouth.
She inhaled. "So, how is the business of Dhar Jinan?"
"Good!" He steepled his fingers, gazing across the table. "There is always more to be done. But you have heard enough of that in my letters. How goes your work, and how go your days?"
Before long his manservant Barasef brought in dishes from the kitchen, brass salvers lined with fresh grape leaves. On them was a modest feast, flavored richly with the cumin, baharat, pepper, and turmeric of provincial cuisine, all in portions small enough to eat below her veil. Over dinner, it seemed that she talked too much, and Lord Haroun too little. She might have thought him shy, but whenever she looked up, he was watching her with those mesmerizing eyes.
At last the table was whisked clean again, and without distraction her conversation faltered. Imane gazed down at her hands, folded in her robed lap. "I wonder," she said, "if I might walk through your garden? You have spoken of it so often as your heart's prize. I could not leave without seeing it."
"Yes, of course," Lord Haroun said at once, and rose, offering a hand to help her up. She took it gingerly.
He led her down a gallery where the inner wall was carved into a lattice of stonework, overgrown on the other side with climbing vines, through which could be seen tantalizing glimpses of sunlit green. An arch in the wall, and the garden was before her.
Outside these walls lay a thousand leagues of arid wilderness: within was a sanctuary. Leafy vines cascaded over every stone, wrapped around every gallery pillar. The courtyards were carpeted with grass as thick as silk knots, and moss spotted with a hundred white florets. In the verdant sprawl, flowers glowed like burning incense, pouring their fragrance into the breeze.
In the center of the garden stood a magnificent cypress tree, fit for a hamadryad's home. The scent of the deep green leaves enveloped her as she padded towards it. A stone pool lay between its roots, filled with clear water. The inner surface of the basin was painted blue and brown and white by minerals and time.
Once, Dhar Jinan had been an oasis, a crossroads where bandits and soldiers gathered. Now, this pool fed the garden and the fountain inside, and the other wellsprings of the oasis watered the pasture and the date groves outside the city. All under Lord Haroun's guidance.
In the glassy reflection of the water, Imane saw a dark wound in the trunk of the cypress tree. It wept sap into the water, sap so pale and clear a green that it seemed almost luminous. She reached out to touch it, trying to discern what had injured the tree.
Lord Haroun's shadow fell over her. "That is no more than an effect of the season," he said, and she felt his eyes on her again. "Will you walk with me?"
"It is good, as the poet says, to walk in the garden when you are in it, and hear the sweet mourning of the dove." Her gaze drifted towards the cypress branches, but at his silence, she looked up to see only confusion in his face. "Surely Almida is not too far a reach," she said, coloring. "You've quoted him before."
"Sometimes there is more than can be said with poetry," Lord Haroun replied.
She did not know what to say to that, and contrived to gaze at the flowers again. They strolled for some time among the leaves, as the golden sun set. The nooks of the garden seemed to outmeasure the footprint of the house itself, and it was easy to become lost in that verdant beauty, but she was always mindful of the lord's presence at her shoulder.
At last, he asked her, "What in this garden pleases you best, my lady?"
A daunting question. Her eyes settled on the dark-leafed climbers on the stonework wall, dotted with the promise of pink-tipped buds. "I am very fond of desert roses. Only it is too early for them. I will have to think…"
"No matter." He crossed over to the wall and plucked a flower-bud. Before her eyes, the sepals unfurled and the rose bloomed, a small splendor of scarlet-hearted pink. It smelled of bewitching summer nights. Imane laughed aloud.
"At last I see the green gift you've hinted at!" Not only in letters—he had sent an orchid flower to the Empress, and though it was the most delicate of plants, it had thrived over the long journey to the capital and bloomed for a full year.
He held out the rose to her, but as she took it—perhaps the perfume was too strong—she felt dizzy, and had to reach towards the wall for support.
He was at her side, his hand beneath her elbow through layers of silk. "You are weary after your travel. Do you wish to lie down in a private room, until the evening's refreshment?"
"I—I do, I think," Imane managed to say. She was tired, she would admit, and felt a little sick. Nerves, and too much food to keep her busy in her nervousness.
He brought her to a chamber that looked onto the garden, one where pale curtains swam in the breeze, opposite a bed layered with carpets and cushions. Imane hesitated in the archway, not wanting to seem overeager to leave him. "Thank you," she said, looking down at the rose.
Lord Haroun braced his arm against the arch. This uncomfortable scrutiny again. "Make it plain, truthseer," he said. "What do you feel for me?"
Her gaze flew upwards. Why did this question make her quail, when she had asked it so many times herself? "I—I cannot say, my lord. It would be improper to form attachments in the course of my duties…"
He laughed, low in his throat. "I have read all your letters, and mine. What man could mistake the affection in them?"
"I did not realize that you saw so much in them," she stammered, backing into the room as he stepped towards her. "You never suggested…" She doubted, suddenly, if she had felt anything at all. Her warmth was vanishing like summer mist in the face of his brusqueness.
"I should have," he murmured. His closeness felt like palpable heat. "I should have told you that I wanted you."
His hand rose and stroked her cheek; her heart stopped, and she turned to stone. He pulled her veil down as though it was nothing more than an inconvenience and kissed her deeply.
She could not breathe, and panic gave her the strength to stagger from of his grasp. "My lord!" she cried, fumbling for the ties of her veil. Even when she was covered again, she could look at him no longer than a glance.
He seemed hurt. "Am I not pleasing to you?"
"My lord, that is not—" She groped for words. He was in the wrong, truly he was—but she had been so imprudently warm towards him. "I cannot be so careless..."
Imane retreated to the window, gazing down on the garden below. "I had a lover, once, who deceived me so greatly that I did not know my own mind," she said quietly. He was the reason she had chosen to become a truthseer. "I must know a man fully, now, before I can give him anything."
As she thought she had known Lord Haroun.
She looked up, eyes wide and pleading. His face was unreadable, but he drew back into the archway. "I apologize," he said, stiffly. "Take your rest." He pulled the curtain closed and was gone.
Imane sat down on the bed, easing her trembling knees. Her weariness deepened sevenfold. Somehow, Lord Haroun was not the sensitive, eloquent man he had represented himself to be. Yet she had passed his every word through the tests of truth...
Maybe it would be wisest to leave now, plead exhaustion and join her tender at the inn. But she was not sure he would release her from the bond of hospitality so easily. And suddenly that walk through the city seemed much too far. She laid down on the pillows, just for a moment, just long enough to settle her stomach, her spinning head, her unhappy heart…
Sleep pressed down on her like a smothering weight. Imane staved it off for a few moments as she tried to think—long enough for her eyes to focus on the rose, lying where she had dropped it.
It was constricted into a bud again, and the unborn petals curled and flaked like ash. That was not right. The orchid he had sent the Empress lived for so long...
But she could not hold on to that thought, nor fight unconsciousness any longer. It robbed her of her senses and cast her into dreams.
Dark and vivid images passed through her mind. Bloody hands dipped into the fountain that flowed from the salamander's mouth. Deep in the wet dark earth, the roots of the cypress tree slowly strangled her. She lay in a hot, dusty room where flies buzzed overhead, so numb that she could not feel the wound.
She tried to flee that vision, and in her struggle won back some control. In the darkness behind closed eyes, she spoke a prayer.
Guide me, O Holy Niryah. Lead me into the light.
5000 words
In the Shade of the Cypress Tree
"They call Dhar Jinan an offal pit," Lord Haroun wrote. "But in this judgment, they do not consider that refuse makes the most fertile soil, and from it may arise a fragrant garden. The poorest of men are most eager to work, if they are given fair chance. How many skilled craftsmen and wisewomen have been lost to the cruel drought of scarcity, that withers the fruit on the vine?
"I will begin to govern with good planting, care, and cultivation."
—
Through the pale gauze of the taraquin curtains, Veralim Imane sín Ahamid observed the transformation of Dhar Jinan. The rocky hills that cradled the city were now clothed in a skirt of farmland, green with spring and dotted with grazing goats and brightly-garbed shepherds. Sturdy flat-stone huts stood in place of the tents where hollow-eyed nomads had stared from the charred circles of their campfires. Where the slave market had once squatted, offensive to the Empress's eye, there grew olive and date trees in dark green banks, and the gibbet had been replaced by a tall white stone to Gameel, god of the forsaken. A fitting tribute. He had not told her of this.
For near two years she had read every letter Lord Haroun of Dhar Jinan wrote to the Empress, for no missive could go before Her Splendor without having passed the tests of a Veralim—a truthseer. In her own hand, Imane had written back to him with the will of the Empress, and the further courtesies and pleasantries that She could not be bothered with. If she had written a few lines with more spirit than necessary, more in reply than acknowledgement, could Holy Niryah blame her? There was no other governor who wrote his own letters, and quoted the poets and the prophets in them…
In recent months, their correspondence had become more personal, to the point where she sent out two papyrus sleeves, one sealed with the imperial blazon, and the other with the mark of a provincial Veralim.
And now… Imane smoothed her sheer veil, tapping her lips beneath it, as she tried to convince herself that she wasn't blushing. It would serve her wholly right if the man was five-and-sixty and squint-eyed, or if his request for a Veralim was for dull and honest business alone. It had been some time since she had ventured into the field, out of the jasmine-scented writing rooms. Perhaps it would be best to be dealt a thorough disappointment, and walk away wiser and more serene. She still felt too young for her office, sometimes.
The taraquin creaked through the arch of the city gates. Here the changes had not come so swiftly, for the skeleton of the old Karpathan fortress still informed the streets. But those forbidding walls danced with sun-bleached laundry, the stones spangled with the red flowers of the alyssum vines that crept from terrace pots. Girls stood in doorways with babes on their hips, but their faces were well-fed and their gazes curious, not furtive. It was far different from the cool marble galleries and pruned gardens of the Imperata, but Imane liked this sight better, for it reminded her greatly of the ghezet where she had grown up.
At the foot of the highest hill was the governor's estate. She had seen palaces of blue tile with golden domes and high-spiked gates, palaces that gleamed like pearls as the oyster of their city decayed around them. This was no such costly place. It was built of the same fort stone as the city walls, two-storied, and plain of façade, the only ornamentation the glint of blue glass in the small windows and the hint of lush verdure that spilled over the walls of the inner garden.
Imane stepped down from the taraquin, straightening her blue-violet robes—not nervously, of course. The door before her was set in a curl of pale, carved stone, beckoning the eye. She knew that he had few servants, but was still unprepared when the door opened at her knock to reveal the lord himself.
The fates were against her—he was no more than thirty, and not at all squint-eyed. Dark, curling hair fell to his shoulders, and framed an olive-brown face with a long nose and a broad brow. He was beardless, strangely, but most striking were his eyes: a bright leaf-green, almost golden. This color echoed in his clothing: a caftan of green embroidered barraca over a cream-colored tunic, drawn together by a bronze silk sash.
She had expected an erudite beard and a keffiyah, but now his Athic bloodname made sense. Glad to have formality to fall back upon, Imane placed a hand over her heart and bowed. The taraquin-driver intoned, "My Lord Haroun abir Diryannos, the Lady Veralim Imane of the Imperata.”
"I had hoped you it would be you."
Her stomach turned over at the sound of his warm tenor voice.
"You are welcome, Lady Imane," he continued. "Please come in, and share dinner with me. Your servants may take your things to the inn at the corner."
Her tender balked, but she shooed him on. More than her sacred position as a cleric protected her, in any house.
She followed Lord Haroun inside. The antechamber was an arch of earth-brown brick with a shrine to the Wandering God in an alabaster-tiled alcove, and up a tall riser, the dining chamber was laid out with maroon and blue cushions around a burnished table. The stone walls were covered not with plaster murals, but with living ivy, thick as a curtain. The leaves trailed into a fountain that ran in a channel around the edge of the room, trickling from a stone salamander's mouth.
As they sat, he poured qafah from a fluted brass pot, and gave the first cup to her. It was made as she liked it, and the taste of cardamom and cinnamon stirred memories. Reluctantly, she broke the silence. "You summoned me here on business, my lord. A wizard in Dhar Jinan?"
Lord Haroun made a quick, dismissive gesture. "I am afraid that's come to nothing. He was no more than a common charlatan, and when the watch went looking for him this morning, he was not to be found.” He cleared his throat. “The pretense for your visit is thinner than I might have hoped.”
"Oh. You have no work for me, then, my lord," she said, a little anxiously. "How can I impose upon your hospitality?"
"You must take a meal with me," he said firmly. "I won't turn you out onto the road so soon. And is it not worth the time to speak together, after so long without words?"
"Not without words," she said. "Only without speech. But the voice is the emissary of the soul, as Abir-an-Khezarid says. Without that meeting, how can we know one another?"
"Indeed." Lord Haroun smiled. There was kindness written on his face, in the long lines of his brows, the pleasant frame of his mouth.
She inhaled. "So, how is the business of Dhar Jinan?"
"Good!" He steepled his fingers, gazing across the table. "There is always more to be done. But you have heard enough of that in my letters. How goes your work, and how go your days?"
Before long his manservant Barasef brought in dishes from the kitchen, brass salvers lined with fresh grape leaves. On them was a modest feast, flavored richly with the cumin, baharat, pepper, and turmeric of provincial cuisine, all in portions small enough to eat below her veil. Over dinner, it seemed that she talked too much, and Lord Haroun too little. She might have thought him shy, but whenever she looked up, he was watching her with those mesmerizing eyes.
At last the table was whisked clean again, and without distraction her conversation faltered. Imane gazed down at her hands, folded in her robed lap. "I wonder," she said, "if I might walk through your garden? You have spoken of it so often as your heart's prize. I could not leave without seeing it."
"Yes, of course," Lord Haroun said at once, and rose, offering a hand to help her up. She took it gingerly.
He led her down a gallery where the inner wall was carved into a lattice of stonework, overgrown on the other side with climbing vines, through which could be seen tantalizing glimpses of sunlit green. An arch in the wall, and the garden was before her.
Outside these walls lay a thousand leagues of arid wilderness: within was a sanctuary. Leafy vines cascaded over every stone, wrapped around every gallery pillar. The courtyards were carpeted with grass as thick as silk knots, and moss spotted with a hundred white florets. In the verdant sprawl, flowers glowed like burning incense, pouring their fragrance into the breeze.
In the center of the garden stood a magnificent cypress tree, fit for a hamadryad's home. The scent of the deep green leaves enveloped her as she padded towards it. A stone pool lay between its roots, filled with clear water. The inner surface of the basin was painted blue and brown and white by minerals and time.
Once, Dhar Jinan had been an oasis, a crossroads where bandits and soldiers gathered. Now, this pool fed the garden and the fountain inside, and the other wellsprings of the oasis watered the pasture and the date groves outside the city. All under Lord Haroun's guidance.
In the glassy reflection of the water, Imane saw a dark wound in the trunk of the cypress tree. It wept sap into the water, sap so pale and clear a green that it seemed almost luminous. She reached out to touch it, trying to discern what had injured the tree.
Lord Haroun's shadow fell over her. "That is no more than an effect of the season," he said, and she felt his eyes on her again. "Will you walk with me?"
"It is good, as the poet says, to walk in the garden when you are in it, and hear the sweet mourning of the dove." Her gaze drifted towards the cypress branches, but at his silence, she looked up to see only confusion in his face. "Surely Almida is not too far a reach," she said, coloring. "You've quoted him before."
"Sometimes there is more than can be said with poetry," Lord Haroun replied.
She did not know what to say to that, and contrived to gaze at the flowers again. They strolled for some time among the leaves, as the golden sun set. The nooks of the garden seemed to outmeasure the footprint of the house itself, and it was easy to become lost in that verdant beauty, but she was always mindful of the lord's presence at her shoulder.
At last, he asked her, "What in this garden pleases you best, my lady?"
A daunting question. Her eyes settled on the dark-leafed climbers on the stonework wall, dotted with the promise of pink-tipped buds. "I am very fond of desert roses. Only it is too early for them. I will have to think…"
"No matter." He crossed over to the wall and plucked a flower-bud. Before her eyes, the sepals unfurled and the rose bloomed, a small splendor of scarlet-hearted pink. It smelled of bewitching summer nights. Imane laughed aloud.
"At last I see the green gift you've hinted at!" Not only in letters—he had sent an orchid flower to the Empress, and though it was the most delicate of plants, it had thrived over the long journey to the capital and bloomed for a full year.
He held out the rose to her, but as she took it—perhaps the perfume was too strong—she felt dizzy, and had to reach towards the wall for support.
He was at her side, his hand beneath her elbow through layers of silk. "You are weary after your travel. Do you wish to lie down in a private room, until the evening's refreshment?"
"I—I do, I think," Imane managed to say. She was tired, she would admit, and felt a little sick. Nerves, and too much food to keep her busy in her nervousness.
—
He brought her to a chamber that looked onto the garden, one where pale curtains swam in the breeze, opposite a bed layered with carpets and cushions. Imane hesitated in the archway, not wanting to seem overeager to leave him. "Thank you," she said, looking down at the rose.
Lord Haroun braced his arm against the arch. This uncomfortable scrutiny again. "Make it plain, truthseer," he said. "What do you feel for me?"
Her gaze flew upwards. Why did this question make her quail, when she had asked it so many times herself? "I—I cannot say, my lord. It would be improper to form attachments in the course of my duties…"
He laughed, low in his throat. "I have read all your letters, and mine. What man could mistake the affection in them?"
"I did not realize that you saw so much in them," she stammered, backing into the room as he stepped towards her. "You never suggested…" She doubted, suddenly, if she had felt anything at all. Her warmth was vanishing like summer mist in the face of his brusqueness.
"I should have," he murmured. His closeness felt like palpable heat. "I should have told you that I wanted you."
His hand rose and stroked her cheek; her heart stopped, and she turned to stone. He pulled her veil down as though it was nothing more than an inconvenience and kissed her deeply.
She could not breathe, and panic gave her the strength to stagger from of his grasp. "My lord!" she cried, fumbling for the ties of her veil. Even when she was covered again, she could look at him no longer than a glance.
He seemed hurt. "Am I not pleasing to you?"
"My lord, that is not—" She groped for words. He was in the wrong, truly he was—but she had been so imprudently warm towards him. "I cannot be so careless..."
Imane retreated to the window, gazing down on the garden below. "I had a lover, once, who deceived me so greatly that I did not know my own mind," she said quietly. He was the reason she had chosen to become a truthseer. "I must know a man fully, now, before I can give him anything."
As she thought she had known Lord Haroun.
She looked up, eyes wide and pleading. His face was unreadable, but he drew back into the archway. "I apologize," he said, stiffly. "Take your rest." He pulled the curtain closed and was gone.
Imane sat down on the bed, easing her trembling knees. Her weariness deepened sevenfold. Somehow, Lord Haroun was not the sensitive, eloquent man he had represented himself to be. Yet she had passed his every word through the tests of truth...
Maybe it would be wisest to leave now, plead exhaustion and join her tender at the inn. But she was not sure he would release her from the bond of hospitality so easily. And suddenly that walk through the city seemed much too far. She laid down on the pillows, just for a moment, just long enough to settle her stomach, her spinning head, her unhappy heart…
Sleep pressed down on her like a smothering weight. Imane staved it off for a few moments as she tried to think—long enough for her eyes to focus on the rose, lying where she had dropped it.
It was constricted into a bud again, and the unborn petals curled and flaked like ash. That was not right. The orchid he had sent the Empress lived for so long...
But she could not hold on to that thought, nor fight unconsciousness any longer. It robbed her of her senses and cast her into dreams.
—
Dark and vivid images passed through her mind. Bloody hands dipped into the fountain that flowed from the salamander's mouth. Deep in the wet dark earth, the roots of the cypress tree slowly strangled her. She lay in a hot, dusty room where flies buzzed overhead, so numb that she could not feel the wound.
She tried to flee that vision, and in her struggle won back some control. In the darkness behind closed eyes, she spoke a prayer.
Guide me, O Holy Niryah. Lead me into the light.
—
(Continued in Part Two)
(Continued in Part Two)
