Teri McLaren
appeared one by one in the deepening sky. Though the sun had set an hour ago, heat lightning still flashed in the west and the dunes still reflected the day's warmth on his face and hands. Soon the warm air would turn into a cold and constant breeze that would sweep over the site relentlessly until dawn.
Cheyne mounted the topmost dune as the blue dusk turned to complete darkness. He stood looking at the fading horizon for a moment, the peaceful view soothing the pain of Javin's disinterest. Some of the old palace's outer columns, invisible only a few weeks ago, ringed the site like silent sentries. Their basalt heads were chipped and cracked, or missing altogether. Still, they looked regal to Cheyne as they cut even darker silhouettes against the flashing sky. Behind him, the broken shell of a round watchtower, probably the tallest part of the ruin, rose in stark elegance.
He took out the totem from his tunic and held it to the sky, watching the colors in its edges dance with the lightning. He thought of the totem's glyphs and imagined that it was his name, his true name, carved there, sign of the beloved king of a great and mighty people, holding a just court amid those tall columns, his ancestors' faces carved in the stones behind him and looking on with approval.
He laughed aloud at the fantasy, sure that of all the pasts that might be his, this was not one of them. His voice echoed peculiarly in the columns just as the totem's edge caught a strong flash of lightning and the rainbow shot upward into the sky, the tight beam of colors softening to form the image of a woman's hand, her first two fingers oddly crooked at the first joint. Hie vision was gone almost before Cheyne saw it. Cheyne turned the prism in every direction, trying to make the image appear again, but the lightning moved off after a couple of minutes, and the sky was truly dark. He shook his head in disbelief, thinking the desert played tricks upon his eyes, that the lightning had deceived him. He put the totem back in his pack and moved on toward the vault.