Soldiers of the Sylvan Isles

 The Soldiers of the Sylvan Isles

It had been forty days since a regiment of soldiers had come upon Alarastia. They were stout and tall. 

At first imposing, their spirit finally revealed itself to be one of revelry; and it seemed to the townsfolk… drawn out from their houses to the cobblestone street beneath the sun that disintegrated into the horizon and began to spill the hidden riches of the firmament… as if all the world were immersed in color.  

The troupe swayed and sang insouciantly, and their regalia mirrored the iridescence of the forest that surrounded the town, where the heaving plumage of kehrads and nekphias dotted the emerald trees with bright, blood streaked oranges; and rose like the crushed dyes that ran through the fingers of the seamstresses, or which dotted — hazy and dreamlike to a wandering eye — the unfathomable gardens of Silanam the king.

The soldiers’ cloaks rippled in sheer, grand torrents that followed them, glistening the way diaphanous and otherworldly waterfalls diffracted the sunlight. Those who watched them pass from wooden shutters as dust swirled beneath their ornate, metal clad boots were stricken by the impression that the mundane courted the ethereal where their feet met the earth.

And women whose heads were ringed in flowers watched silently from their attics, throwing petals over them from baskets, in recognition of their passing, disquieted voices not daring to arise and be seen as a question of that peace that accompanied these stoic, roving guards; if that peace were merely a facade, none dared to reveal it with the contents of her heart.

Still, multicolored showers spiraled from their hands and alighted gently also upon the throngs of bystanders who — in simple, woven clothes — marveled at the fine steel armor, engraved with lions, and serpents that seemed to weave their way around that shining metal… almost alive, as if they might begin to mirror the sinuous motions of veiled women winding between the troops, entrancing as they drew serpentine trails of light, flowing cloth behind them, through a haze of colored smoke that swirled and dissipated amidst their serene motions. 

Translucent maroon, violet and indigo followed the dancers, streaming from around their wrists in sheer fabrics that seemed as if they might be calling to the Seraphim, hailing them from an earthly vessel.

And sashes that fell from shoulder to opposite hip rose and fell lightly as they gracefully spun and swayed, their soft, but tightly fitted shirts, laden with gold that shook rhythmically around their necks in time with the bangles at their wrists, as their thin, delicate nails… painted in subdued tones… dove at the ends of long, slender fingers into wide mouthed pots of similarly earthen colors that they carried; and from within those cavernous bodies, which seemed like they should be much too heavy to lift, they elicited those thick, silken clouds, whose mercurial forms spilled forth in carpets that plumed up at their waists, and swirled at their ankles, in a delirium into which the entire joyous procession seemed subsumed. 

Even the soldiers’ weapons were dulled by the haze — colored pink, as it was, like the sky at sunset; or in very nearly purple waves, shimmering, as if bearing the ephemeral light of stars clinging to the last remnants of the night — that filled their minds with revelry.

Isalia cupped her hands and flung a perfumed cloud toward the twilight as her feet followed the open spaces in the procession, and her heart rose in aspiration to meet the countless lights that courted the world in the coming darkness. She imagined that infinity were a diadem for every one of those burning, stellar bodies; and in so being, for each of them, as well, who were bound to the earth by flesh… and in just the next moment her heart fell, the undulations of her her passion charting the magnificent dunes of her desert home, which suddenly felt as if it had been torn from her. 

She tried not to think of what was lost. Of the tranquil world this effusive band had taken from her when it passed — and courted and enchanted her, the way that, surely, so many in the gathered crowds now were similarly entranced — so that she joined them in search of the grandness they intimated.

She already knew home, she had told herself. And although its name was “most beloved” to her heart, she had believed that what she knew of home could never change; but that what lay beyond the walls that formed the sphere of her understanding – and the boundaries of the world as she knew it – presented something beyond her capacity to ignore: the unknown.

She reasoned that she did not know the distant ephemera that time had ordained so briefly to be accessible to those upon whom it would inevitably lay a veil of age; and she had to act before the indolence of familiar joys subsumed the allure of the excitements of youth. 

But Isalia did not know the degree of love left in her land… nor, she now understood… the degree of her loss that would accompany her, a courtesan to the supernal.

Veils of alternate memories, perfumed with all the little moments of stillness and tranquility she could have drawn close into her, among mirth and harmony, fell over her grasping mind. 

Yet, still, she was here in that unimaginable domain that had called to her, once… the palatial reality of mystery that could well be endless. The possibility of her regret had been stanched out like a flame.

“So-lahn he-dra as-ko-haaria.”

She had been lost in her heart; and in that time a song had broken out. Her own voice had joined it, trancelike; and as it met her ears, it called her back from that place, where her melancholy touched the waters of her memory, her lips mouthing sorrowful shapes.

“The fires that met the land,” they sang, “were as port to the gods...”

“Es mo-hai-ra, kosta-karaia”

“… were as wine that ran in rivulets…”

“An-ko-he-dra, as toriah”

“… and carried us, in crimson vessels…”

“Asa haia”

“to the heavens.”

They had been forty days in Alarastia. A fortieth night fell upon them.

Isalia wept, because she knew that, tomorrow, war was coming.