Tales of Telleria - Passion in the Desert

© 2000 Sean C. Henderson
All rights reserved.

Vashon swung the golden tassel of his creamy white turban until it came to rest hanging cockily from his left temple.
"Vashon!" the noble father of the Sunspot family hissed across the ivory table laden with dry, sweet-smelling incense burners.
Vashon, premier firstborn son of the Sunspot family, delighted in openly expressing his lack of appreciation toward the welcomed guest astride the table, a silent mediator between father and son.
"My permission to leave this mollycoddling, sire?" Vashon sneered openly, his words dripping with venom. "I've had my share of being placed by others. I can do it myself now."
He shot up viciously, storming arrogantly from the dark and spacious room, which yawned open from the ceiling yet kept a deathly silence in the presence of honored Shadow families; a silence so strong that every word uttered could easily be discerned.
Vashon's father cast down his eyes as his eldest son, future keeper of the family, stalked away in a rage over their guest's proposition.
"We of the Consulate," the aged Shadow continued, "have held within our sights the plights of our people of centuries past. At one time, we shared this desert with the venemous Scorpos, but the way of the Sultan was another matter altogether. It was His will that they be exterminated for our safety, so in honor of His eminence, we did so, giving praise to the sun. You remember these times, do you not, Sunspot? Soon thereafter, our lot was cast against the humans to the north, over the pointed edges of the painted mountains; we battled long and hard with them and their allies, the elves, the dwarves, the stone giants; even the dragons themselves came from their frozen tundra to aid in the War of Humans and Shadows. We, not because of our violent actions, but because of our coarse black skin, so different from the flesh of the humans, because of our affinity with nature's most destructive force, the fires, and due to our culture being so foreign to them, are hunted down and cast out and slaughtered with even colder indignity than when we made our hasty retreat in the sunless days at the end of the war."
A slow and increasingly impatient voice grew in the Consul.
"But I did not come here to give a history lesson. It is people like Vashon that we, the Consulate, wish to make the defenders of our clan. Your son upon whose shoulders we seek to set the coat of arms. Vashon is a young man, still able-bodied and willing to give our people purpose again. Of three sons, it is the eldest who possesses the least maturity, Sunspot. I wish we could have had that trailblazer attitude of his among the Desert Knights."
Inhaling in slight offense, the head of the Sunspot family motioned for the servant awaiting at the door. Hastily, she picked up the incense bowls and whisked them out, their trail of white smoke rising and fading away.
"You are a guest in my home," Vashon's father explained his abrupt end of the assembly, "and I would feel it wise that you keep your manners in mind. Only the scorpion visits the salamander's nest to sting its children ... you are welcome here again, provided you lower your tail."
And so the assembly was over; the appeal to have Vashon step up to take the position of a Consulate was over.

"A Desert Knight's lot is an honorable position. I know I they've already proven I'm not fit for it, but shouldn't a father want his son to endeavor towards the best of his abilities? How can you ask me to be a Consulate?" Vashon raged to his father, who crossed his thickly robed legs impatiently. His obsidian face changed little while Vashon ranted further. "Three centuries is old enough for me to make my own decisions, isn't it, father?"
Vashon's father, resolute in his paternal position, waved his hand dismissively.
"Semantics will never work in the Sunspot household and you know it. It IS your choice, Vashon. I was merely giving you an opportunity to offer prestige for the family. I am sorry if you find my caring actions offensive. I would wager to say you've changed ... now you long to bite the nipple of your mother, and not drink from it. But enough of this," he raised his voice, removing the hanging ruby earrings in the shapes of tearing droplets. Vashon sat down obsequious to his father's demands. "It's time for you to do something. I've tried to encourage you toward making something of yourself, as well as spreading the Sunspot names Both are my concerns, and neither are my priorities, son. Listen to the voice of wisdom."
Several moments passed, until Vashon's sensitive voice asked, "What does it say?"
"Earning quenches yearning."

All this and more Vashon remembered in snippets of thought; while the days passed by, the painted mountains and golden sands alive with sparkling splendor and subdued starry blue, it seemed to Vashon that every night stretched for weeks while he added a new perspective to his future ... it seemed every diamond in the nighttime canopy was a different path he could take. Locked away in either his rum-red room or the jutting black balcony, the eldest Sunspot child spat when thinking of his younger brothers' success as Desert Knights. Yet his blood boiled more at the knowledge of what people had always said about him: "Too brazen and set in his ways, too stubborn and idealistic ... more a romantic than a man. No wonder he's still single. Awful that the eldest son should bring the most shame to the Sunspot family name."
Vashon lifted his head high above the other small houses of his village and released a cursing roar and gesture. But upon releasing his anger, there was one star he saw glowing brightly on the dark northern horizon; to the north ... where the humans dwelled. That bright star shone for several moments in Vashon's pearly black eyes, until, finally, he threw off his loose green jacket and readied for bed. The night slipped by so quickly, it was morning before he knew what had happened. He had hardly had time to think fully.
He had made his choice.
"San Szuri's a spectacular city ... and maybe I can make some changes as a Consulate," Vashon convinced himself as the sun rose and the dim northern star, which had watched over him the night before, faded gracelessly from the rosy sky.
"Sir! Sir!" the shadow servant called, banging on Vashon's massive bedroom door of creamy bleached cactus strip. "Come quick, Master Vashon, your brothers have returned with two... two..."
Impatiently, Vashon threw on a sand-soiled earthen brown tunic and cactus-colored leggings.
"Two what?" he asked, stalking alongside the onyx-skinned serving girl.
"Two humans, effendi! It is true! They were caught in a sandstorm, and my other sires brought them here, and have now taken leave for San Szuri to appeal the Consulate on the crisis!"
A whirling dust devil could not have spun around as fast Vashon did.
"Two WHAT?" he demanded, his voice mixed with confusion ... and fear.
"Humans, Master Vashon. Come, I will show you," the short serving woman spoke hurriedly, pulling him hastily along behind her. "Father is gone," she said, "and only you are left here. You have little choice," she muttered hotly while Vashon ran in hot pursuit, jerking wide a door into the sanded atrium.
Vashon dug his sandaled feet into the gritty floor just as his fingers wrenched nervously at the strings tying his tunic at the top. A man, swarthy in complexion, dark-skinned and dripping with sweat, breathed slowly and lightly as his brown body was stretched across the couch. All he lacked was a death shroud, else he'd have been a corpse, ready for burial. Clammy skin clung damply to the human's wearied muscles. Vashon straddled his feet cautiously, reaching for the dark hilt of the male's sword, but then pulled back fearfully, unable to do so with the knowledge that he might lose an arm in the process.
"Is it safe?" he asked, fearfully. Vashon watched the thick eyelids for signs of movement.
"Two humans were caught in the sandstorm, Master," warned the shadow woman from behind Vashon.
"Where's the other one?" Vashon demanded quickly, clenching his fists and darting his animalistic eyes around the room. A hot, lusty breeze blew the white curtains aside, and Vashon caught glimpses of fleeting strands of dark hair from behind the masking curtains. They were long and sinewy, moving absently through the warm air like grasping fingers ... and Vashon thought, betraying the person to whom they belonged. Anxiously, the Sunspot tore aside the curtain and snagged the hair in his palms, pulling quickly yet gently while placing his hooked arm around the human's neck.
"What were you doing in the Ignis? Who are..." he trailed off, his black eyes adjusting to the human in his arms. Her long and shivering arms wrapped clinging to his waist in supplication, yet Vashon still held her fast by the neck. Giving way to exhaustion and fear, the woman's knees buckled from their braced position, and she stumbled forward out of the window's breeze and nearly atop Vashon. He swayed back and caught her deftly up in his own bundled arms, placing her on the floor. Her skin was as tightly drawn and moist as the male's ... and on further inspection, both were scarred by the savage cuts and pocks of the swirling sandstorm, blinding in flaming fury, known to sap the energy from any unused to the Ignis' climate. Her brown eyes were large and deep, drawing Vashon's own occasional glance.
"Who are you?" he finally asked.
"Water..." begged the human girl, clawing with her bony fingers like a vole digging for a stream. "Save me."
"Give me that!" Vashon snatched a copper pitcher from the shadow servant. She had been pouring a stream of the clear, aguave sweetwater into the man's mouth until Vashon deliberately directed it to the ailing woman. But just as he lifted the coppery pitcher to her dry, cracked lips, she lunged hungrily for the water, and Vashon, overtaken, let loose the pitcher. The sugary cactus water splashed thickly on the warm obsidian floor.
"By the Sun, she is like a dog lapping," Vashon swallowed hard, stepping back from the human woman licking lustfully with her small tongue on the wet floor. "She'll want more," he said, mostly to himself. After moments of peering at the pitiful sight, he ordered the servant to fetch more and more, as much as she needed. Even when sated, Vashon still gorged her on the sweetly contained water, as much as she wanted.
Finally, tanned skin swollen and eyes closed shut in slumber, the woman was no longer a concern of Vashon's. With the help of the servant woman, the Sunspot son moved the man into a room on the top floor, locking him in and alone, leaving only the servant to tend to his needs.
"Make sure that, should he awaken, you warn my brothers and father, if they have returned. Until then, keep the beast in submission."

Searing heat hindered the healing of the couple, yet it was the woman, Sara, who first and foremost pulled from out her weeklong stupor. In that time, Vashon had placed his house in order and, at the pleasure of his father, made the Sunpot name well spoken of throughout the village. Within a matter of hours they were known throughout the village as the one family brave and gracious enough to take humans as supplicants in their household. By the week's end, news had reached as far as San Szuri, the distant capital city.
"I am very proud of my eldest son," father Sunspot spoke his praise to the twin Desert Knight siblings, Vashon's younger brothers. "Now let us hope that soon they will be well enough to leave us be."
Under the watchful and wondering eyes of the serving woman, Vashon could not hide his growing infatuation with the human woman. Chance meetings outside her suite-like room, invitations for cucumber salad and sirra lunches, gifts given under guise of xenia; all displayed the increasingly lightening heart of Vashon Sunspot, eldest son ... ready for marriage.
The playful nature of Vashon did not go long unnoticed; it was the serving woman who first spoke to him about it.
"Master Vashon? Our young guest, Sara, continues in wonderment about the land of the Ignis and all of our splendor. How foreign it must be to a human," she noted, clearing the breakfast table, "our homeland. She has only been enraptured by its destructive nature, and has yet to see the beauty around here ... in the land where I fear her husband may never awaken to bear witness."
Vashon aided his servant by folding the saffron silk tablecloth.
"How is the husband of Sara? I have not attended his bedside in weeks," he asked distantly, his words and his mind wandering two different hemispheres.
"Our guest, the wife, is beside him day after day, hoping and praying that her beloved may gain more color to his lips. His body is deathly warm to the touch, and his blood still runs much too warm in his veins. Still, though, he lives," said the serving woman, her own hand brushing briskly over her Master's. "Keep this in mind, effendi, when you show her the painted mountains ringing the Ignis. Those, above all others, she finds fascinating in the stories we tell one another. Provisions await you downstairs, enough to fit the needs of two travelers for two days." She smiled warmly, moving hastily from Vashon's balcony overlooking the Sun Shrine.
Turning his full, dark eyes from the bright orange chapel, Vashon risked a smirk to the serving woman.
"I thank you, shea. Your perception is uncanny, and I only hope that your discretion is equally notable. Silence is a virtuous stratagem, easily and not uncommonly imposed upon a servant from her master." With that, Vashon dismissed the woman.
When her departure left Vashon secluded on the balcony, he grinned broadly and, with gusto, donned his bright green leggings and forest colored traveling vest, belted tightly across his waist with a golden belt. Then, padding quickly and softly, Vashon slid down the stairs to check the provisions given for his long and eagerly awaited conquest.

"Why have you summoned me?" asked Sara, entering the atrium of the Sunspot household. The serving woman had dressed her in a light and arid yellow silk dress, tight-waisted and busted yet easy and free in movement. "Where are we going?" she asked nervously, her dark hair tangled in the threads that stretched from the billowy sleeved arms to the bottom of her back, at the tailbone. In clumsy dignity, she attempted to unwrap her thick hair from around the strands.
Vashon crossed the room from his leaning position in the doorway. Gently, his black hands merged with her billowing black hair and unsnagged it from her cool, comforting desert traveling clothes.
"We are to visit the painted mountains of the Ignis, a sight you have longed for."
Sara's lips parted.
"Master Vashon, in all respect, I thank you for treating me as your guest. Yet there is only one sight I truly desire, and that is to see my husband well again. Can you do this for me?"
Furtively throwing together the desert fruit cakes, sandwiches, and flasks of water and wine, Vashon shook his head.
"Unfortunately, I am not in command of his life. It is the Ignis which has taken him to sickness, and the Ignis will decide what is to become of him. Let us both hope for the best," he said soothingly, stroking her hand. Her cold, golden wedding ring caused him to pull his hand back sharply, unaccustomed to such a frigid piece of jewelry.
Sara said nothing of his reaction and only took his hand, smiling.
"Master Vashon, you have done much for my husband and I. Though I desire his return from suffering, I cannot turn down your offer. You are so eager, like a child!" she laughed, taking his hand and moving toward the door's wide entrance. The thick sunlight outside disappeared in the atrium, especially at the sides of the great double doors, in black close-cropped corners.
"If you wish not to go," Vashon responded remorsefully, "then by all means, refuse my offer. But as eager as I am to journey, you are twice so! Such is what I have gathered from my serving woman, and by my own account 'til now."
"I am quieted, Vashon. Let's go and see the sights, and I will recount all the pleasures to my husband when he awakes."
And so it was that the shadow Vashon and the human woman Sara left to pursue destiny's walkway, a pathway of sand eternally shifting as the winds of chance and change blow, undetected, across its trailworn surface.

A long, winding trail of pitted footsteps waved along behind Vashon and Sara, the painted mountains visible distantly from the city and growing rapidly nearer on the horizon. Carefully, Vashon avoided the sandtraps and sandstorms of the Ignis Desert. Sara eventually grew accustomed to the desert-sand-colored silk dress she wore, and reacted with mute surprise when the few distant breezes from out of the mountains cooled her, caught in the folds of the traveling dress. Laughing and exchanging more stories of their homelands, Sara and Vashon crossed a day's journey to the mountains, and by dusk, the two had ascended their sloping passes.
Vashon took her to a flat plateau overlooking the expansive desert to the south. It was a soft, comfortable rock, and a layer of whisking sand covered it gently and slid over the steep edge of the cliff, only a few feet from where Vashon set up the dinner mat. He set out the bottled wine and cakes.
"Tell me, Sara, what you think of them. Are they not beautiful?" he asked, lifting a light, warm cake flaked with shredded pink cacti bud. "The mountains, and the view?"
Awe overtook her as the sun blazed orange to her right, then fell unnoticeably away. She bit into the cake, unable to turn away.
"I don't think I'll ever see anything this extraordinary again, Vashon. I want it to last a lifetime!"
She pointed toward something distant but brilliant in the sunlight leaving the desert.
"What is that?" she asked, pointing far to southeast. Vashon stood at her side, his gaze fighting to leave the rigid pointing arm and focus on the horizon's sparkle.
"That is the capital, San Szuri. You can see the sun reflecting off of its streets from here," he answered.
"The City of Gold!" she exclaimed, remembering the serving woman's stories.
"The same," Vashon nodded, removing his cream-colored sandals. Cheerfully, Vashon finished off Sara's small meal, focused upon another extraordinary sight: Sara, posed with poise against the sun, her exotic pale skin like milk. An instinct overtook him, and he warily wondered about her frailty, and how elated he would feel at the prospect of protecting her from disaster.
"To be her protectorate and friend," he murmured. "I love you, Sara."
Quickly, she furrowed her thin brow and cocked her head aside.
"What?" she asked. "Did you speak to me, Vashon?"
"No, Sara, no," he smiled, chagrined. "Just talking to myself."
Sara watched him for a moment or two, and then turned back to the setting sun, his image burned there in her eyes. She knew that, though he only looked a year or two older than her, he was almost three centuries her senior.
"Old enough to be my great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather," she mused.
"What?" Vashon asked, his black eyes locked on her lips. "Did you speak to me, Sara?"
"No, Vashon, no," she smiled, chagrined. "Just talking to myself."
After dinner, the night encompassed them, wrapping them in darkness. The sky was an antithesis to the sapphire sands; a black-and-blue sea with twinkling crests scattered about in waving patterns. Vashon pointed many of them out to Sara: the scorpion, the spear and sword, and the water bearers, among many others. Their conversation, when the waxing way of the moon began, moved from past myth to present truth, and they learned much about one another. Each was able to see beyond the words of the other, and learned the emotions of their hearts although they were not spoken. Heartstrings entwined, and emotions were shared between them ... but not openly. That was as venture that took all of the night.
Many, many words later, the sun had trekked across Margaia and rose from the immediate left, burning out the stars of night.
"What would family say, if they knew where you were, and who you were with?" Vashon asked solemnly, leaning on one elbow over Sara, who was lying on her back and getting the last glimpses of the stars as they disappeared.
"They would care about as much as they did when I was wed," she responded pointedly and almost too quickly. "Our marriage was sudden and unexpected, a thief of love striking our hearts from the dark world we left behind when he approached my father, asking for his daughter's hand in marriage. I thought for sure one of my younger, prettier sisters would be the one he sought. But it was me, and for that, I love him."
An ebony-skinned snake crossed over and covered Sara's mouth lightly, its heat almost pulling the breath from Sara.
"Sara, there is something I must tell you," Vashon said, continuing to hold his hand over her mouth, to shush her. "It pertains to your husband," he commented darkly, full dark eyes staring.
Sara waited patiently for him to go on, her body still and suddenly cold.
"No one is expecting your husband to survive now," he says, bluntly. "Sara, you must understand this: the lifeblood inside him has boiled and damaged his vitals, most of which will not last long to support him. And should he come through, his greatest asset, his mind, will be spoiled from the pressure and pyrogen of his suffering. An invalid, Sara...."
Against the blazing sun on the west horizon, Sara placed her own hand over Vashon's lips. Her tearing eyes watched the sky, turned away from Vashon. Her face was burning hot and her palms sweating. It was ten times worse than her recuperation from the sandstorm, she thought, and for a brief moment, she hated Vashon intensely. Then reason caught her, and she realized that he was but the messenger of an awful fate. His words came fast, almost as fast as the fading of the last star in the dawn sky. To this Sara had turned, and cried quietly as it flickered out against the bright blue above.
"Sara?" Vashon asked, begging for her attention as he kissed away her tears. "I am sorry."
Sara lay upon her back, and stretching out her arms and baring her chest.
Her slender legs shifted one over the other.
"So am I."
She turned her lips to meet his, and soon, alone upon the plateau of the painted mountains, warmed by the fresh sunlight, Vashon and Sara consummated their friendship in a furious feast of the flesh. So it was that another Shadow seed was planted, gorged on lust and watered with love. Yet neither of them were concerned with this; not was Sara concerned when the cold gold of her wedding ring slipped between the crop of two adjacent rocks. In a throe of pleasing passion, she drew her hand to her lover's rocking side; the ring was drawn from her finger in the grip of the rocks, and like a timeless wheel, rolled to the edge of the steep cliff. A distant observer could have sworn that the ring was one of the falling stars of the dawn sky, sparkling with short, glittering clangs down the colorful cliff face, until it crashed into the sand as gold as its rim, a breeze blowing gently and obscuring it underneath the desert, beneath the surface palette. Covered slowly and methodically, the ring shone faintly in morning sun below the flickering orange-and-yellow wall, lancing cruelly up in tall, sharp spires that swayed, disappearing into a more gray colored alcove above. Splashes of crimson painted the wall, dripping down into the sand, thick red clay flowing like a stream of salty, gummy wine.
"So soon," Vashon said after an hour's silence Released from his lover's grip, he rose to his feet to face the morning after. "It is time to return."
Sara said nothing, but fixed her hair and traveled, side by side with Vashon, back down onto the desert floor. Yet behind them, to the north, blazed that singular star blocked by the mountain's spires when atop them, bright and glorious against the huge and massive sun, hanging onto its brief life as long as it could stay suspended.
It was the North Star. Still it shone, waiting in the fringes of dawning darkness ... unseen by the lovers as they padded back toward home.

Only one sight halted their journey back home.
"This is an oasis," Vashon explained, pointing at the fifty feet of lush greenery surrounding a large pool of warm, white water. "Its the most a Shadow ever sees of the land outside the desert."
Sara ran her fingers along the rough trunk of a palm.
"It is like home," she said. "The Glittercoast Port has trees like these ... palm trees."
Nostalgia wrenched her from Vashon's hold and she walked to the edge of the pool.
"But there are no waves here, and this water isn't as cold as the sea."
Vashon looked at their reflection in the clear, mirrored surface; a ebony Shadow and a pale human woman, a couple worthy of shame. A lump formed in his throat at this sudden realization, and he barely got out his next words.
"We know of the sea. Over the mountains to the south is an ocean; from their summit, we can see the merchant ships of the Pisceans sailing, and the sea birds, the gulls, shrieking and diving into the water. The Shadows have always liked the seashore."
Sara leaned over, also viewing their reflection.
"Why is that?"
"No humans," he said, no humor in his voice.
A wave of heat apart from the desert sun rushed through Sara when she saw their reflection.
"What if he is still alive?" she asked abruptly, turning to look up at Vashon.
The Sunspot said nothing, but only lowered his head.
"He cannot be for long. No one but a Shadow can survive a sandstorm," he said, with harsh finality.
"I survived," Sara whispered, roughly. "What am I then?"
"He protected you." Vashon reached out to take her hand.
Sara pulled it away from his warm onyx grasp.
"He loved me!" she shouted incredulously, the morning's reality finally dawning on her. "Do you?"
Vashon hesitated.
"I must, or we would not have...." he trailed off, confused. Crossing his arms over his black breast, Vashon lifted his head up. "I didn't do that alone. You were more than willing, Sara."
Her pale face showed simmering rage.
"Is that what your tour was all about, Vashon? To make a living man's wife your own?"
"No," he answered tersely. "To give the lovely wife of a dying man a taste of the life he never gave her!"
Sara stalked from the pond, toward Vashon, her finger as pointed as her words.
"You know nothing of my marriage, and of my husband! And you know little of me! How can you care?"
Vashon caught her wrist in his hand and pushed it to her sides, grabbing her around her curving waist and pinning her to his body.
"Because I do, and that should be enough of an answer for you! I am your savior, Sara!"
"You are my seducer," she hissed, moving only her lips. "I owe you my life, but not my virtue."
Vashon released Sara, pushing her away from him, diverting his anger.
"I know that! I took it from you! Will you hold it against me, even though you love me?" Vashon tore a sun-baked olive-green palm frond from a tree and fanned himself off.
Silence descended, and Sara could not argue. Her tongue quivered as she bit back a response, but she was an honest woman and, most importantly, she was honest with herself.
There was nothing she could say that would cleanse her of her own actions.
For upward of an hour neither spoke to the other, though both tried to speak countless times, only to find themselves unable to communicate. Finally, they had found a barrier they could not cross, each staying cold and distant from the other, Vashon walking amidst the palms hanging with vines and Sara circling the water's edge.
A shadow fell over Vashon and broke his solitary thoughts. Turning back to look, he saw a massive scaled serpent, glistening with oil and colored blue with thick purple pockmarks, winding through the small forest of tropical trees and heading directly at Sara.
Vashon gave little thought to his action and ran, his weak legs barely supporting his athletic sprint. Rushing by her, he slung his arm around her waist and pulled her away from the pond, dragging her into the cover of palms on the opposite side. Sara complied, albeit reluctantly, holding tight to Vashon's waist as they ran from the python whose mallet-shaped head jutted from adjacent patch of trees. Its mouth opened wide as it came to the pond, and Vashon and Sara realized that it could swallow one man whole.
Luckily, it did not see them. Instead, the sidewinding snake dipped its snout through the water's surface and began to drink.
"Should we try to escape now?" Sara whispered to Vashon, her hot breath tickling his ear.
"No, not at all ... it would see us for sure if we moved. We'll wait," he answered decisively, glaring at the snake.
After several minutes, it was still drinking from the pond, which had lowered significantly. They could see the level of saturated sand, drying out in the midday sun. Two hours passed, and the pond was gone. The python was swollen, sickly, like a mottled wineskin.
"My god," Sara panicked, "what has it done? It's going to burst!"
Yet before she had even gotten those words beyond the barrier of her teeth, a slit opened on the snake's underbelly, and in a rush of water mixed with sweet, sticky blood, it ruptured and spilled itself into the empty hole which had once been the pond. A painful hiss sounded as the python writhed and collapsed into its own pool, the tongue licking uselessly at the air. Finally, it stopped moving altogether.
Vashon and Sara started back for home, saying nothing until they were out of sight of the oasis.
"Do desert snakes do that often?" Sara asked cautiously, begging for him to say that the action was commonplace and undeserving of attention.
"I don’t know," was all he could say.
Come morning, the first of the lush greenery would start to crumble and fade away, dying.

Together, Vashon and Sara stood before the closed double doors of the Sunspot home. To hide their budding as well as confusing relationship, Vashon unfurled his own ebony fingers from hers and gripped the twisting handle of the doors, turning and pushing them open.
"At least we're back in time," he whispered to her, before he fully opened the door. "They won't suspect a thing."
Striding into the shadowy home, he called for the maidservant.
"Vashon has returned. Ready my verandah for a short lunch," he ordered, squinting in the darkness as he closed the door behind him.
Sara's breath stopped suddenly when Vashon closed and latched the door. Apprehensively, Vashon turned to face the open atrium.
Lying prone and prostrate on the obsidian floor were the Shadows of the Sunspot household, blood-soaked and still, long dead in the dark. Two of the youngest serving girls crossed each other, stabbed clean through their small black bellies.
Sara shrieked, pointing to the ascending stairwell, straight ahead. Vashon's stomach sank as though loaded with ice. His younger brothers, the Desert Knights, in their sandy gold armor, clung to one another in a dying embrace, a lance driven through their motionless chests, bound together forever. Gasping for breath, Sara moved forward while Vashon could not. She had seen the lolling face of Vashon's father, the head of the Sunspot family, visible alone. His body was wrapped in the red shroud of the long carpet leading to the stairwell. Bending low, she began to unroll his wrappings; yet as the body moved, the head stayed in place. Her fingers touched the pooling blood, and she jerked her hand back.
"It is so cold!"
Vashon gripped his chest in welling fear.
"Who has done this?" he demanded of the silence around him, suddenly spinning maddeningly like a top.
Tears streaming, Sara dashed for the stairs, praying with faith that her husband was unharmed. To have betrayed his love and never be able to confess to him would be more than she could handle.
"Vashon, come with me!" she begged, choking on her tears.
Something shone, a brief slit of light, hidden within the pitch-black corner to the right of the doors. Vashon stood directly between Sara and her view of the suddenly moving man. Terror filled her features. She knew the hidden man as she had never known him before.
"No! Vashon!" she cried. But it was too late.
A frigid sliver of steel went through Vashon's back, chest, and heartheld hand. Steam hissed out of the hole in his chest. He bared his teeth and groaned, heart sundered in twain. Hot blood coalesced into icy fragments over the frosty blue blade that slipped from his back as from a sheath. Vashon wrenched, gasping like a landed fish, his eyes closed tightly shut.
Sara clasped her throat and fell to her knees, vomiting and retching on the red carpet.
"Die, Shadow," came the husky words of a familiar face, thick-lipped and brown-skinned. Still the eyes were feverish. Still the hair was long and stringy, greasy in appearance. Still the muscles rippled beneath the black straps, weathered skin seared and scraped by hot sand.
"Still, I am her husband," Vashon’s murderer crowed, pushing forcefully on Vashon's shoulder until the Shadow sank to his knees.
"Sriar," Vashon cursed, struggling up out of the grasp to grab his attacker by the throat. His gray eyes flamed orange as the inner fire in his heart released itself in a flood of fury, coursing out of his fingers and into the human's flesh. Vashon knew the man must die, and knew he could throw the last of his body heat into killing him. This human had shown no respect for his property and people, and Vashon cursed his nemesis with every final breath. Yet he also wanted to give a final farewell to Sara. His heart was divided, but he made his choice.
In the end, both were slain. Vashon's fire faded away just as the human's stamina dissipated. When he gave way, his hair burst into smoking flames and he frothed thick at the mouth, his blood boiling over. Both collapsed into a bloody, burning pile. Screaming, Sara ran to her husband, shaking him by the collar.
"I never knew who you were! I never dreamed you were a Hunter," she cried, daring not to touch his flesh.
While Sara howled in anguish over the loss of her husband, a small militia of Desert Knights, escorted by the shadow serving girl, burst through the hallway doors. Their edged sabers glinted cruelly as they circled the room, searching about and clearing the bodies of the dead.
Some stopped to stare compassionlessly at the human woman and her dead mate. Sara's sobbing was only outdone by the wail of the shadow servant, who knelt beside Vashon, screaming his name and resting his head upon her breast. Her hands held him in an embrace that melted his frozen chest wound, a steaming trickle of blood beginning down the path to his navel.
"I went for help, to stop you before you came, but I was too late! Too late," her lament pierced the souls of the young and able-bodied Desert Knights. Most forcibly turned a casual face back to their duties; yet others shed a tear or two, and the entire company was solemn at the removal of the youngest Sunspot brothers.
With sparkling silver spades, they buried the spear conjoining their comrades on the north edge of the estate, its gory tip aimed dangerously towards the north. After this short ceremony, curses against the human scourge were upon their black lips when they returned again to rove the Ignis.
A towering clock in the atrium strike five, the evening toll. A tall, spectral shadow, bespectacled and adorned in the black, red and gold robes of a San Szuri Consulate, appeared at the doors of the Sunspot mansion. He turned his starry white eyes from the serving woman and Vashon to Sara and her husband. The latter caught him by surprise, and he hesitated only briefly before delivering his message.
"Woman," he addressed the serving girl. "You are to tell Vashon Sunspot that his ascension to the Consulate has been officially turned down, for what other reason but notoriety? The Counsel have spoken their piece, and now leave the dead to their peace. Issur, bisen aht."
And then he was gone, as quickly and majestically as he had come.

For nine months, the Sunspot name went unspoken in the Ignis. Sara and the serving woman lived in that hollow house of misery, their delicate footsteps the only to tread the halls. Soon after the massacre, Sara's belly became swollen with a child, and it pained her more to remain in bed, the weight being too much for her. Unaccustomed to the heat of desert life, Sara's health declined, and she was no longer able to make a trip out into the stretches of searing sand. All that had stopped her before was not knowing what the rest of Telleria had to offer her. When the time came for her delivery, the serving girl was at her side, a good midwife experienced in the process as well as the pain.
It was a boy. A copper-skinned child with full, bronze hair, a blight to social history, both women knew upon seeing him.
"The blood of human and Shadow runs in him," the serving woman whispered. "I can see it."
"And even though I am only human ... I can feel it," Sara said, coughing sporadically as she held the child to her breast, mourning at a long-anticipated reality.
"Promise me you will raise him as Vashon was raised. I want him to have the same gifts and riches he had. Teach him virtue and purity, and caution him against the mistake his parents made ... I can be his mother only so much longer."
The baby whined. Sara placed her nipple in its mouth and it quieted, suckling. His mother's milk was sweet, and lulled the baby into comforting dreams of her warm womb.
"I can do that, Sara. What shall you call him? Tell me, for even now your fire flickers." Strength was all that held together the serving woman as she carried on her last conversation with the only full-blooded human she would ever know.
"Sanwa, I have decided. In your tongue, I believe that means 'of a passion.'"
Smiling through welling tears, the serving woman held tight to Sara's hand.
"May the God humans know take you," she said, comfortingly. The baby suckled until the milk flowed no longer. Looking up, he couldn't see himself in his mother's eyes, now closed.
Carefully, the serving woman took the baby from Sara's limp arms and opened her own bosom to the half-Shadow baby boy, Sanwa Sunspot. She placed her nipple in its mouth and it quieted, suckling. Her milk was sweet and lulled him into comforting dreams of a warm womb.

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