From An Era in Anddemar

As Sir Jaide drew near the strangely runed Castle door he heard the muffled tinkling of a fountain. Glancing across the lawns, he dismounted from Argan and removed his gloves. The stallion’s familiar trappings of black and silver gleamed in the sun. Embroidered above the dark knight’s personal badge of arms with a white, winged and rampant Unicorn eclipsing five crescent moons - the seal of Starwing borne by the knightly Order over which Sir Jaide presided - the saddle cloth needed only minor dusting to free it from the remnants of that morning’s ride.

He strode into the Castle, passing through halls and chambers weaving in coralline pallor, over white onyx floors strewn with carpet worked in patterns and devices startling and cryptic to behold. Scarcely detectable presences, the Alfar, passed him by. Invisible aides and envoys of the Vidar - the Seven Guardian Powers of Anddemar - and found throughout the galaxy, the Alfar went about their elusive affairs with devotion, dignity and quiet humility. 

The sound of his riding boots echoed as Sir Jaide passed through a hall lined at its outwardly curving walls with gossamer curtains of a moonstone hue, sprinkled with leafy themes woven in serrain and in blue as pale as the inner corner of two converging walls of cavern ice. A circular pool of lilies adorned the centre of the hall, the tessellated floor around it patterned in delicate shades of rose and aqua.

Leaving the hall and making his way along a winding corridor, the dark knight came at last to a shallow curve of broad, white stairs, and passing down them - after strangely seeming not to descend at all - came at last to the partially ajar doors of pale wood, beyond which glowed a rich amber light. Coming quietly into the spacious chamber, the dark knight saw that Starwing lay still sleeping. 

He watched awhile with mesmerised devotion the soft rise and fall of her breathing, her languid arms lying in slumber, the rivers of ebony hair meandering across the silken covers. Then making his way to a corner of the chamber, he came to a small, oval table on which lay crystal dishes of figs, grapes, fruits tinctured in cinnamon, and strawberries in liqueur, of which he took several. The early rays of Dameron, falling upon the closed drapes of maroon velvet, lit them to a sanguine warmth that reminded Sir Jaide of the deep, rich wine they had savoured that past night in candlelight before retiring to their chamber. Hearing the faint rustle of her stirring, he turned to watch her again.

‘I felt you go, although I yet walked in the Dreaming,’ she murmured.

‘I went to see the mist sprites,’ he said, unfastening a knee-length coat of green brocade and leather, and wandering over to another table upon which quill, ink and papers lay feverishly scattered, the papers half covered with scrawled drafts of letters and verse.

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Starwing smiled, her eyes opening slightly. ‘They are always glad to have you there. Yet how few others they will suffer to witness their ritual melting into dawn. Since the Seventh Era they have done so without fail each new day.’ The dying fall of her voice was as a warm wind rocked by waves on a gilded shore.

Sir Jaide picked up with distracted randomness various pieces of paper, only to put them down again elsewhere, half unaware of what he did. He seemed puzzled, agitated, yet almost exuberant as well. ‘When they are most steeped in the throes of their chosen shapes, so that it has all become a fine exactitude,’ he said, ‘then the light unmakes them, as if all their efforts were but futile sentimentality.’     

‘And yet,’ she responded, ‘could less impassioned longing birth such an enduring daily rite, even in beings more abiding in form than they? No, my lord, is it not they, rather, who mock futility by triumphing over it each day?’ She reclined upon one arm, watchful yet languorous, her rich mane of hair falling all about her with scented softness. 

Sir Jaide seemed restless, yet clearly not anxious to leave. For he knew that when he left the mist would close upon her realm and she could drift ever further, as the day advanced, into the realm of the Dreaming, there to appear to those who could plummet the uttermost depths of soul through visions, ecstatic trance, or their own abyssal dreams, and from afar glimpse her walking, perhaps, in a haze of light under forgotten stars. And so he came to her with a searching, pressing gentleness and she bestirred herself to bid him a slow, enduring, and almost silent farewell.

When finally he had left her, she glimpsed at the corner of her vision something lying on the silken covers. He had brought down from the mountain a spray of violet jasmine for her hair.