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Description
Wait for me. He had whispered in her ear at that last embrace, before he rode off, competing with the winds. She had watched his departure, lingering long after the dust waves that had risen with the gallop of his steed settled perhaps too quickly into the calm expanse of the desert, revealing the languidly curving lines of the horizon.

She would guard that line with her jade eyes.

Passion and patience in one flesh; a womanly devotion of an intensity equalling or surmounting the dizzying heat of high-noon, (when many a wary traveller could collapse in a haze of his own hallucinations) tempered by a strange otherworldly calm that could only be compared to that oasis of paradise promised to the enlightened – that was her charisma that drew the men by droves to catch a glimpse of the magic that lay within her gaze.

Her skin was fair as the sands, glowing just as golden in the comforting warmth of the sunset, touched by a flush glorious as the blooming roses of the dusky sky. And her hair, inciting temptation just by its caress, was a shade impossibly darker than the night, framing her form in cascading waves, emitting a fragrance that mystified and bewitched as one drew close, amazed.

Song and dance were her skills, boosted in no small part by a talent that further enchanted those already in lust of her beauty. And yet she kept the ravenous beasts at bay with an aura of remoteness, signalling an ambiguous mix of scornful purity and a veiled danger. She was a fascinating combination of contradictions which somehow incited a remarkably vicious kind of jealousy and suspicion among the woman-folk who did not know her well enough but judged her simply because she lived.

She was born during an eclipse, when the sun was blotted out by the shadow of the moon, with her startling and unusual green eyes wide open to the view of sand dunes outside the window of her mother's bedroom. At her first cry the alchemist had bode ill for her life. Her destiny would be forever bound with the dunes that surrounded the oasis city; her temperament shaped by light and darkness. From her childhood she realized how proximity to her self drew out the extremes of goodness and evil in people, that with her continued presence, friends and family grew imbalanced, and sometimes chaotic situations would arise over her, surrounding her with an increasingly deep-rooted sense that she must either withdraw completely, or learn the mastery of mediation in order to restore peace.

In her youthful naiveté, she chose the former, as it seemed the easier route, and she was tired of the loud noise of conflict. Quietly and unconsciously fulfilling the alchemist’s prophecy, she moved into the remote outskirts of the city, living alone in a sturdy hut where nearly all the windows opened to views of the dunes.

Of all the men who clamoured for her attention since her adolescent years, honourable and despicable, never anywhere in between, she truly knew only a few, but then never let them close enough to open her heart. The spurned mocked her as aloof and cold, but never stopped obsessing about changing her mind and capturing her heart (and body, of course) eventually. The elite few who did share some form of friendship with her suffered always that fear of the uncertain future, where the warmth of any relationship could fade into naught and her capricious moods could cause them to fall out of favour. It was precisely her ability to keep them at arm’s length that caused the mistaken notion of her wavering judgements and ruthlessness in destroying the stability of friendships. No one knew who she really was, and her inner thoughts were a mystery.

Before he first came to the city, his arrival memorably dramatised by that lone act of thundering down the highest dune on his seemingly tireless black stallion, she did not know yet what the lust she aroused in others felt like, or how desire could burn the insides in an unbearable fever of hope and hopelessness. Hers was the first house he came to for aid and refuge, as it conveniently stood where he thought was the entrance point into the city. Sometimes she speculated that he had actually been purposely aiming (by some predestined decision made by a higher power), to reach her on purpose, (having had all other possible points of destination blotted out from his vision by the gods) on that fateful day.

He was completely beyond what she had always known as male and manly, accustomed as she was to the life in the bustling city (even though her living quarters were withdrawn from the centres of activity, she nevertheless worked where the desolation of the desert could be temporarily forgotten). In physique he was taller, more muscular than most of the men she knew, and every part of his body exhibited a world-weariness that could only mark the body of a restless traveller, enhanced by scars of war initially horrific to look at, for they made her contemplate the brutality of the violence, the utterly intentional and complete cruelty that forced death upon man by man.

His story was one of constant conflict, far more intense than anything she had wanted to escape from, and her fascination with the extremes of good and evil in man was glutted by his accounts of those whom he had met, persons both great and lowly, in whom he had seen both unimaginable goodness and mind-defying evil, sometimes even both aspects in one body. He had told her that he was a nomad, one of an illustrious tribe of wanderers, who had become embroiled in the wars not of his own choice, but by the bidding of a man his family was indebted to. And that he had escaped from a battle occurring nearby, riding seemingly an endless distance to find life away from that horror of constant bloodshed and death.

She found herself nurturing a trust for this stranger that she had never managed to summon for any other person in her short life. Mostly it was because his silver gaze, when meeting hers, was not marked by that familiar and dangerous light of desire, lust, or ingratiation which she always saw in the eyes of other men, but shadowed with the brooding darkness of pain. His grey eyes were haunted by a wrenching sadness, his heart tainted by the horror of memories, and from the deepest reaches of her heart she desired to heal his wounds, remove the pain from his gaze, and bring the glow of joy into his eyes.

She would never know if she succeeded in doing so, for the letter that reached him by some perverse chance, as if the gods now meant to torment her, presented itself as an obstacle to their shared future.

He had to leave. But it would only be for a while, he promised, begging the cessation of her silent tears, which intensified the pain in his eyes. The wait would not be long and he would return with a bounty that would secure their comfortable future together in that beautiful oasis city. With his words he constructed a hope in her that became a fortress of patience, unbreakable even after weeks became months, and then years.

This hope made her hear his voice murmuring with the wind, as though even the elements aided in feeding the fire of her love, carrying his messages directly into her heart, even though she stood alone, braving the very same elements as she waited.

I will return riding faster than the North Wind, he claimed, at dawn when you will see that even the sun is chasing me towards you.

We shall embrace in our dreams until I return and feel the warmth of your breast and the beat of your heart again, my one true love, my beautiful darling…wait for me.

The sandstorms did not wear her patience down. Nor did the screaming winds extinguish the fire of her devotion, her steadfast belief that his return was imminent.

The smooth curve of the horizon remained tranquil from sunrise to sunset, again and again.

Another day, his voice whispered to her as the breeze chilled her flushed cheek, just wait for me another day…

She began to wander further and further away from the oasis city in order to be able to see his arrival sooner, arduously climbing the highest dunes so as to be able to gain a better vantage point to receive him, to welcome him back.

One night, after lingering far too late after sunset, exhausted beyond her own sense of self-awareness (she had, tragically, forgotten how long since she had slept well or eaten well), she looked up to the stars to find her bearings and saw to her weary dismay that the sky was overcast. And she could not see the lights of the city in any direction. Suddenly a small voice which she had previously ignored in her stubborn passion and steely patience shouted a warning to her that struck fear in her heart. She was lost. With the rising panic also came the realisation that she had pursued a foolish love that had directed her into committing such nonsensical actions, causing her to place her own life in danger.

Just as suddenly as she heard and understood her own voice of ration (for that was what that small voice was), a sandstorm rose around her. It was as though the elements, which she previously imagined to have been her allies in love, had chosen a most hard-hitting method of revealing their true allegiances (only to themselves, unfortunately) and mocking her fantasy.

She could not escape. Within the next few moments, as she felt sure that death was hovering overhead, smugly waiting for just the right time to seize her, she thought of relinquishing all hopes that he would come back at all. She knew that she could not do so, no matter how hard she tried. To kill her own hope was a struggle harder than her current struggle against death. And then, before she lost consciousness, she thought of breaking her own heart as she wondered if he did indeed truly love her in the first place. Was my trust in the goodness of that man misplaced? She asked herself. Or did I blind myself to the evil in him, because I loved him too much?

By dawn the sandstorm had blown over, and there was no trace of the beauty from the oasis, who now lay buried within the highest dune.

As the sun rose steadily, the calm of the horizon was disrupted by the dust that rose behind the thundering hooves of a magnificent black stallion, its rider escaping once again from wars of cruelty, deceit, bloodshed, and horrific death. He had lived a life where it seemed that endless cycles of violence and tragedy were normalcy.

Survival of the fittest, he often muttered to himself when he fought in the wars where he saw the weak, usually the kind, the good, and the compassionate, die helplessly under the callous hands of the strong, who were usually evil, ruthless, power-hungry butchers. He had seen how women and children were systematically slaughtered to quell revolt, how men were tortured to serve a particular purpose, how mercenaries and spies were employed to aid in the orchestration of mass murder, only to be brutally murdered by their own employers themselves. He had seen families who seemed to revel in the perverse pleasure of killing each other, sons killing fathers, mothers killing daughters, brothers killing brothers, and so on, an endless tale of horrors. Men without power were pawns to those who possessed it, and their lives were unworthy of any consideration other than the enlargement of armies, or for the manipulation of power.

That life of tragic cycles would have simply continued inexorably, until the day he found the oasis city and saw a place where he could physically remove himself from those cycles of pain and sorrow. And beyond his expectations, he had found someone who was willing to try to heal the wounds he had sustained from being and staying alive, who wanted to be a steadfast source of joy and love. It was as though the gods, having heard his prayers for a quick and painless death, were trying to ease his suffering by offering him this refuge, a place and a person to retreat to.

He would have gladly accepted this fateful opportunity to completely withdraw from that life that tormented him, had he not been in possession of a particular status and a peculiar nature. Firstly, he was really a tribal chief, a probable king of the Nomads, a man on whose shoulders lay the responsibility for ensuring the survival of his tribe. Secondly, his tribe consisted of a people whose services were especially desired by men in power during war. They were the most skilled assassins known in that part of the world. He himself had killed his first victim at the mere age of eleven. And thirdly, he could not deny his own hunger for power, that inclination towards leadership and ultimate control that marked his character and made men follow him. These factors, combined with some other reasons of less importance, made his addiction to the tragedy of his own life complete and utterly unshakeable, even in the face of true love.

This was why he had to leave her in the first place.

And as he realised the fatalism of his own life, his stallion crested the highest dune.

Description
Wait for me. He had whispered in her ear at that last embrace, before he rode off, competing with the winds. She had watched his departure, lingering long after the dust waves that had risen with the gallop of his steed settled perhaps too quickly into the calm expanse of the desert, revealing the languidly curving lines of the horizon.

She would guard that line with her jade eyes.

Passion and patience in one flesh; a womanly devotion of an intensity equalling or surmounting the dizzying heat of high-noon, (when many a wary traveller could collapse in a haze of his own hallucinations) tempered by a strange otherworldly calm that could only be compared to that oasis of paradise promised to the enlightened – that was her charisma that drew the men by droves to catch a glimpse of the magic that lay within her gaze.

Her skin was fair as the sands, glowing just as golden in the comforting warmth of the sunset, touched by a flush glorious as the blooming roses of the dusky sky. And her hair, inciting temptation just by its caress, was a shade impossibly darker than the night, framing her form in cascading waves, emitting a fragrance that mystified and bewitched as one drew close, amazed.

Song and dance were her skills, boosted in no small part by a talent that further enchanted those already in lust of her beauty. And yet she kept the ravenous beasts at bay with an aura of remoteness, signalling an ambiguous mix of scornful purity and a veiled danger. She was a fascinating combination of contradictions which somehow incited a remarkably vicious kind of jealousy and suspicion among the woman-folk who did not know her well enough but judged her simply because she lived.

She was born during an eclipse, when the sun was blotted out by the shadow of the moon, with her startling and unusual green eyes wide open to the view of sand dunes outside the window of her mother's bedroom. At her first cry the alchemist had bode ill for her life. Her destiny would be forever bound with the dunes that surrounded the oasis city; her temperament shaped by light and darkness. From her childhood she realized how proximity to her self drew out the extremes of goodness and evil in people, that with her continued presence, friends and family grew imbalanced, and sometimes chaotic situations would arise over her, surrounding her with an increasingly deep-rooted sense that she must either withdraw completely, or learn the mastery of mediation in order to restore peace.

In her youthful naiveté, she chose the former, as it seemed the easier route, and she was tired of the loud noise of conflict. Quietly and unconsciously fulfilling the alchemist’s prophecy, she moved into the remote outskirts of the city, living alone in a sturdy hut where nearly all the windows opened to views of the dunes.

Of all the men who clamoured for her attention since her adolescent years, honourable and despicable, never anywhere in between, she truly knew only a few, but then never let them close enough to open her heart. The spurned mocked her as aloof and cold, but never stopped obsessing about changing her mind and capturing her heart (and body, of course) eventually. The elite few who did share some form of friendship with her suffered always that fear of the uncertain future, where the warmth of any relationship could fade into naught and her capricious moods could cause them to fall out of favour. It was precisely her ability to keep them at arm’s length that caused the mistaken notion of her wavering judgements and ruthlessness in destroying the stability of friendships. No one knew who she really was, and her inner thoughts were a mystery.

Before he first came to the city, his arrival memorably dramatised by that lone act of thundering down the highest dune on his seemingly tireless black stallion, she did not know yet what the lust she aroused in others felt like, or how desire could burn the insides in an unbearable fever of hope and hopelessness. Hers was the first house he came to for aid and refuge, as it conveniently stood where he thought was the entrance point into the city. Sometimes she speculated that he had actually been purposely aiming (by some predestined decision made by a higher power), to reach her on purpose, (having had all other possible points of destination blotted out from his vision by the gods) on that fateful day.

He was completely beyond what she had always known as male and manly, accustomed as she was to the life in the bustling city (even though her living quarters were withdrawn from the centres of activity, she nevertheless worked where the desolation of the desert could be temporarily forgotten). In physique he was taller, more muscular than most of the men she knew, and every part of his body exhibited a world-weariness that could only mark the body of a restless traveller, enhanced by scars of war initially horrific to look at, for they made her contemplate the brutality of the violence, the utterly intentional and complete cruelty that forced death upon man by man.

His story was one of constant conflict, far more intense than anything she had wanted to escape from, and her fascination with the extremes of good and evil in man was glutted by his accounts of those whom he had met, persons both great and lowly, in whom he had seen both unimaginable goodness and mind-defying evil, sometimes even both aspects in one body. He had told her that he was a nomad, one of an illustrious tribe of wanderers, who had become embroiled in the wars not of his own choice, but by the bidding of a man his family was indebted to. And that he had escaped from a battle occurring nearby, riding seemingly an endless distance to find life away from that horror of constant bloodshed and death.

She found herself nurturing a trust for this stranger that she had never managed to summon for any other person in her short life. Mostly it was because his silver gaze, when meeting hers, was not marked by that familiar and dangerous light of desire, lust, or ingratiation which she always saw in the eyes of other men, but shadowed with the brooding darkness of pain. His grey eyes were haunted by a wrenching sadness, his heart tainted by the horror of memories, and from the deepest reaches of her heart she desired to heal his wounds, remove the pain from his gaze, and bring the glow of joy into his eyes.

She would never know if she succeeded in doing so, for the letter that reached him by some perverse chance, as if the gods now meant to torment her, presented itself as an obstacle to their shared future.

He had to leave. But it would only be for a while, he promised, begging the cessation of her silent tears, which intensified the pain in his eyes. The wait would not be long and he would return with a bounty that would secure their comfortable future together in that beautiful oasis city. With his words he constructed a hope in her that became a fortress of patience, unbreakable even after weeks became months, and then years.

This hope made her hear his voice murmuring with the wind, as though even the elements aided in feeding the fire of her love, carrying his messages directly into her heart, even though she stood alone, braving the very same elements as she waited.

I will return riding faster than the North Wind, he claimed, at dawn when you will see that even the sun is chasing me towards you.

We shall embrace in our dreams until I return and feel the warmth of your breast and the beat of your heart again, my one true love, my beautiful darling…wait for me.

The sandstorms did not wear her patience down. Nor did the screaming winds extinguish the fire of her devotion, her steadfast belief that his return was imminent.

The smooth curve of the horizon remained tranquil from sunrise to sunset, again and again.

Another day, his voice whispered to her as the breeze chilled her flushed cheek, just wait for me another day…

She began to wander further and further away from the oasis city in order to be able to see his arrival sooner, arduously climbing the highest dunes so as to be able to gain a better vantage point to receive him, to welcome him back.

One night, after lingering far too late after sunset, exhausted beyond her own sense of self-awareness (she had, tragically, forgotten how long since she had slept well or eaten well), she looked up to the stars to find her bearings and saw to her weary dismay that the sky was overcast. And she could not see the lights of the city in any direction. Suddenly a small voice which she had previously ignored in her stubborn passion and steely patience shouted a warning to her that struck fear in her heart. She was lost. With the rising panic also came the realisation that she had pursued a foolish love that had directed her into committing such nonsensical actions, causing her to place her own life in danger.

Just as suddenly as she heard and understood her own voice of ration (for that was what that small voice was), a sandstorm rose around her. It was as though the elements, which she previously imagined to have been her allies in love, had chosen a most hard-hitting method of revealing their true allegiances (only to themselves, unfortunately) and mocking her fantasy.

She could not escape. Within the next few moments, as she felt sure that death was hovering overhead, smugly waiting for just the right time to seize her, she thought of relinquishing all hopes that he would come back at all. She knew that she could not do so, no matter how hard she tried. To kill her own hope was a struggle harder than her current struggle against death. And then, before she lost consciousness, she thought of breaking her own heart as she wondered if he did indeed truly love her in the first place. Was my trust in the goodness of that man misplaced? She asked herself. Or did I blind myself to the evil in him, because I loved him too much?

By dawn the sandstorm had blown over, and there was no trace of the beauty from the oasis, who now lay buried within the highest dune.

As the sun rose steadily, the calm of the horizon was disrupted by the dust that rose behind the thundering hooves of a magnificent black stallion, its rider escaping once again from wars of cruelty, deceit, bloodshed, and horrific death. He had lived a life where it seemed that endless cycles of violence and tragedy were normalcy.

Survival of the fittest, he often muttered to himself when he fought in the wars where he saw the weak, usually the kind, the good, and the compassionate, die helplessly under the callous hands of the strong, who were usually evil, ruthless, power-hungry butchers. He had seen how women and children were systematically slaughtered to quell revolt, how men were tortured to serve a particular purpose, how mercenaries and spies were employed to aid in the orchestration of mass murder, only to be brutally murdered by their own employers themselves. He had seen families who seemed to revel in the perverse pleasure of killing each other, sons killing fathers, mothers killing daughters, brothers killing brothers, and so on, an endless tale of horrors. Men without power were pawns to those who possessed it, and their lives were unworthy of any consideration other than the enlargement of armies, or for the manipulation of power.

That life of tragic cycles would have simply continued inexorably, until the day he found the oasis city and saw a place where he could physically remove himself from those cycles of pain and sorrow. And beyond his expectations, he had found someone who was willing to try to heal the wounds he had sustained from being and staying alive, who wanted to be a steadfast source of joy and love. It was as though the gods, having heard his prayers for a quick and painless death, were trying to ease his suffering by offering him this refuge, a place and a person to retreat to.

He would have gladly accepted this fateful opportunity to completely withdraw from that life that tormented him, had he not been in possession of a particular status and a peculiar nature. Firstly, he was really a tribal chief, a probable king of the Nomads, a man on whose shoulders lay the responsibility for ensuring the survival of his tribe. Secondly, his tribe consisted of a people whose services were especially desired by men in power during war. They were the most skilled assassins known in that part of the world. He himself had killed his first victim at the mere age of eleven. And thirdly, he could not deny his own hunger for power, that inclination towards leadership and ultimate control that marked his character and made men follow him. These factors, combined with some other reasons of less importance, made his addiction to the tragedy of his own life complete and utterly unshakeable, even in the face of true love.

This was why he had to leave her in the first place.

And as he realised the fatalism of his own life, his stallion crested the highest dune.