Flowers in the Desert
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
Midnight in the citadel of magic, when the brilliant stars of a desert night were drowned out by lights blazing in the streets below.
It was the way she learned the city; the merciless sun over Khadein was too much for a fair-skinned daughter of Talys. The fight for the oasis of scholars had left her burned across the face and neck, and though healers had soothed the burns, Caeda was content to avoid that harsh sun for the rest of her stay in this strange paradise.
And paradise it seemed, despite the taint left upon the city by the Dark Pontifex. At night, in this time of celebration, it was the colored starbursts exploding above the minarets that held one's attention, not the broken windows or the menacing graffiti smeared upon so many walls. So much light, everywhere, that it was easy to discount the darkness.
Paradise. Caeda and her retinue stayed in the pontifical palace- once Master Wendell's, then Gharnef's, and now Wendell's again. That kind and learned man rewarded his allies with hospitality, and it was not his fault that Khadein's idea of hospitality was something unaccountably strange to the Princess of Talys.
What to make of this city that did not sleep, a center of learning where the scholars did not merely pore over manuscripts through the night- in solitary cells, by the flickering light of candles- but made night itself a second day? Fueled by a dark and bitter drink, they passed each night in rounds of visiting and storytelling and merrymaking. Caeda had never realized that great bishops and sages made such lively company- did prudent men not retire with the sun and rise again at dawn? Not in Khadein.
Caeda would think that it was simply the joy of being free from Gharnef's reign that set them all afire, except that the very fabric of the city indicated that Khadein valued pleasure as much as it valued its libraries. Magic was its lifeblood, and magic made almost anything possible.
If the night was too warm for Caeda, she might spend some time in a room with glass walls, a room where the air was crisp and chill and flakes of snow floated down from the domed ceiling. If she got too chilled, she might then go to a second room, one whose air was thick with perfumed steam, with blood-warm waterfalls coursing from floor to ceiling. She might spend all night alternating between cold and warm if she chose. Or, she could simply wander through Master Wendell's great atrium, marveling at the magic lights that glowed without heat, at the exotic trees and flowers that bloomed indoors, at the colorful birds that flitted in between the shining columns. Bubbles of colored glass floated in the air, and glass flowers larger than cabbages dangled from the ceiling above Wendell's throne.
There was nothing impossible in Khadein, it seemed. A dish of sherbet placed out on the hot pavement might not melt; magic held it together. Jets of water danced in front of the bishops' palaces; magic animated them, made them fantasies of light and color. Flowers from northern Aurelis and southern Macedon might bloom together in the sages' glass-walled gardens, with butterflies from Altea fluttering over them in confusion. Somewhere in a Khadein menagerie- or zoological garden, as the scholars called them- a lion was probably sleeping next to a lamb.
After five nights of Khadein, Caeda no longer wanted to skate upon the miraculous frozen pond or go up the glass "elevators" to the tops of the minarets. She was tired of the sherbet, tired of the magical snow and the magical lights and the way every breath of air tasted of some foreign perfume. It was, in the strangest way, a relief to her when the call came to take arms again and start the campaign for liberation anew.
She simply could not lay aside the feeling that, if the Oasis of Magic had been less concerned with novelty and pleasure, less taken by its self-indulgent cleverness, it would not have been such easy prey for Gharnef and his followers. But that, perhaps, was just the view of the naive child of a provincial land, a place where no one had flowers out of season or ice in the summer, a place where priests lived to the rhythm of the sun and talked more of herb-lore than of chimeras and dynamos.
Then again, perhaps it wasn't.
The End
Author's Note: Musings about "dragon technology" and its magical equivalents always takes me to weird places. So do enforced stays in cities I don't care for.
The title is derived from the song "In a Big Country" by, er, Big Country, whose refrain has been stuck in my head for years now. This is not the 'fic I intended to write based on that germ of an idea, but it'll have to do for now.