"Desert Spirit"

"Desert Spirit"

By Indigo Lafayette

Author's Note: I'm back with a new "picfic"....this time, based on the pic "Gerudo Spirit" by Min Rho. Min is another extremely talented Zelda fan artist, as well as another of my favorite artists. The pic, described by the artist as "just playing with poses", portrays a Gerudo-featured woman, seemingly caught in the midst of some form of dance. To me, it looked that the spirit was dancing by the sunset (and, I was listening to Sting's Brand New Day album at the time.), and I decided to try my hand at the short story. Read on, and enjoy.

You can see the pic, as well as the rest of Min's fabulous artwork, at the following address: http://jove.prohosting.com/~sessler (look for Min's Area...for she shares it with Adele Sessler, another cool artist)

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And as she turns
This way she moves in the logic of all my dreams
This fire burns
I realize that nothing's as it seems....

~Sting (featuring Cheb Mami), "Desert Rose"

|~*~|

The sun began its fiery descent into the western skies, as it had for many centuries, over the Haunted Wasteland. The arid wind picked up errant grains of sand, sending them airborne like hurtling diamonds of miniature proportions. The sky changed in brilliant procession, the hot sapphire blue of the daylight hours fading into scintillating gemtones of topaz, ruby, and garnet. Though the Wasteland was treacherous to those who ventured into it, it was a beautiful landscape; A veritable hidden treasure of the world.

As the colors shifted and the sand whirled, a lone figure appeared in the maelstrom of mica and hue. She walked amongst the dunes, standing tall. She was colored in the fiery orange way of the sun, with golden tones shimmering over her lithe body. She seemed to move in time with the heat shimmer rising from the scorching earth, dancing lightly from dune to dune. She looked quite like a Gerudo, the race of Amazons who lived clustered on the edge of the Wasteland, and was built in a similar fashion. The only tell-tale difference was her skin, and the serene way she carried herself.

As she stepped fleetingly from dune to dune, solar-flare colored hair streaming out behind her like the tail of a phoenix, the slippery hiss of the sand blasting against the sparse population of rocks and the whistling howl of the wind mixed and swirled itself together to become a seraphic chorus of the Wasteland, to which the sand spirit danced. The winds began to rise, and the tempo of her mystic music hastened, as did she. She danced faster and faster, as the music swelled and grew in complexity, harmonies spinning themselves like bewitched threads of an enchanter's tapestry, until she herself was a whirlwind of sand, air, and dizzying grace.

As she danced, others like herself began to appear, swirling their way into being from the airborne sands and the dunes. They were her sisters in the sunset dance, each with a dance to perform, a story to tell. They danced, forming intricate patterns with their combined number. The original dancer was now one of many, their sandy limbs joining and separating as the angels' wind song played on.

The sun began to sink below the horizon, the fiery color of the dancers became tinged with sapphires and amethysts...night was approaching. One by one, the dancers began to come undone, their bodies of whipped-up sand returning to their former states. They joined with the air and melted into the dunes. The arid wind began to die down, and with it the desert chorus. The tempo of the dancer's song began to diminish from its previous frenzied pace. The sand's sound began to fade, and the seraph's chorus began to diminish in its huge number of voices, returning to the lonely solo it usually sang.

And still she danced...

A wolfos howled in the distance, signaling the coming of the hot, vibrant sun's pallid sister. The stars began to shine with the diamond-like beauty their earthbound cousins, the billions of grains of desert sand, had just recently possessed.

And still she danced...

The wind music had long since faded, along with the vibrant rays of the sun, although a few bands of bruised coral and blood-red clouds still remained. Until those remaining flushes of sky-color faded like the last breaths of an elderly woman, she would continue to dance.

Slowly, as the rest of the dancers had, she sank into the sand below her, her outstretched arms becoming one with the winds once more. The final bands of color faded, and the dune dancer was no more. All was has it hand been before the sandstorm had begun.

|~*~|

I hope you enjoyed the fic. If you have a picture that you'd like to see as a short story, please send it to me (or the link to where it's posted) at IndigoPoet@aol.com.