Chapter Text
Nomad fell to his knees, burning sand crunching against his skin. Dawn had yet to start, and he was already exhausted.
He had been walking in the desert for so long. It had been days since he left the last caravanserai—a Pearl of the Desert, they called it, waterlogged and iridescent—and was sure beyond all doubt that he was utterly lost. He’d followed that bright star, Reikwald’s Sun, unerringly, each step bringing him closer to… to what?
Nomad wasn’t sure. His journey had physically begun when he’d left home, leagues away, a ghost in his mind, but spiritually? A man had arrived in the village, when all of Nomad’s worries were how best to torment his sister. His robes were coloured like blood, and his face was sealed behind an intricate veil, golden lace in sunbursts and swirls. A Reikwaldic scholar.
That face had turned to him, when he called for predawn service at the nearby church, his eyes blazing lightning-blue in the grey light. He sang, in iambic heptameter, one syllable pair for every ray of the Sun in classical imagery. Each syllable held weight and power, each caesura grasped at his heart like a knife-edge on taut string, every rhymed couplet obscuring a hundred more ways to praise in endless fractaloid curls. And when that final note sounded, bell-clear and tree-strong, the sun’s light burst through the window behind him, the dawn’s purity fracturing through the stained glass and making dancing motes in the air, limning the world in colour and memory. Reikwald had come down as a man, and had spoken to Nomad, and he would never be the same again.