TS: 4th day of Spring; 510 AV
In a land where the wind has names, and the lonely earth has never touched, nor felt, or kissed the leaves that fall from their arborly paradise like fingertips across the hummus of a lover's sweet terra, there was still a love moving across the naked earth, laid open to the imminent forces of destiny.
Everspring was a memory in Eyktol, who, for all its barren desolation and expanse of emptiness, could not shake the last few living rituals of the region; one of them winding its way across the silted fathoms in celebration of the season. Like a loose threadbare extended from the seamless surface of a grand golden tapestry, the chaktawe people of Kalanue emerged over the cascade sand as a soft, living trickle of life; one of the few ghostly remenants that mirrored a pale shadow of existence in these parts.
And still, the cold blister of desert winter had not bent their slender and lean backs, nor had it taken from them what only the spirit of Mitsuki could take-- hope-- hope for the water of life, the thirst for knowledge, and to swim in creation's essence. The dawn had unfurreled her winter-kept wings, and spread them to unshoulder the frosty hands of a desert in hibernation, then gracefully Her life giving rays floated across the silted fathoms, and out into the rocky red monolith country, where the last of the lost springs bubbled forth. The omens in the clouds, the rush in the wind, the gourd shaped cacti, all a soft whisper to the rambling herd of cattle and their benashira masters, or those hidden herds of bowback, who still wander these lands free, each keenly aware of a hidden song, a drum that urged them to beat determined steps through the gamut, into this blistering hot dance, till the sweet release of liquid ecstasy had drowned them in a thousand drinks from the crystalline springs of the red northern mountains.
Spring was calling to them, piercing the cumulus kingdoms and airy palaces that existed, as if in a dream, and showered the acacia and cypress in a million scintillate ways. The Kalanue were no exception to the call of the song, and with hide tents, yucca boles, and fiber lashed pack bound up for sojourn, the scant tribe made from the eastern coast to the rocky central north, where it seemed the winds of Zulrav was the first to find them.
The sky had breathed His first challenge to the people, and as the howl of the seasons roared a death throttle to harken its successor they braced the deafening roar, and hugged themselves to keep from being swallowed into a sandstorm abyss. Zulrav beat upon them that first night of exodus, where they found themselves between the wings of a stormy impass, and their backs to the rocks, where the vultures wheeled, the serpents hissed, and to die in this broken eden was the song of an old unrest. The sands were so that prayer and chant was needed, anything to keep the lashing winds and whipping sands from ripping away the tears that might swell at their worn cheeks. They hugged each other, till the fire in Tzualtacan, Wattacca, and Wooanodpopso matched the fire of the southern dunes, and in their defiance they tested Zulravs hand.
They were like dreamcatchers; their three forms rose up to the jagged cliffs south of the coastal fringe, where valleys sent dune up into the sky, like a towering column, and before the dancing monolith they bore testament of the undying chaktawe spirit, and their love for this land. There was great distance and respect placed between the two, but it seemed as if the stormy hand would not be so easily satisfied by the simple swaying of three desert nomads. The winds of the realm gave mighty burst, and beneath their skirted wings the paragons of midnight, their skin painted in black, their locks as tendrils of animate midnight streaking back like a comets tail; each a whirling effigy of the darkness, dancing amidst the winds in the irridate light of day.
They whirled as the vulture swooped low, and cascaded phantom forms against the bearing of the wind, weathering fierce and unflinching abuses, yet never did their ceaseless movements or rituals break. Never did intricate isolations, with bodies that moved like vines, arms like leaves, caressing that wild air, coaxing the lashing gales toward their bosom, move with such effortless veneration for a force that wasn't beholden to them this very moment.
But their dance had just begun.
