Theme 46: It Doesn't Stop
Characters/Settings: Stefan, FE10
Disclaimers: Ah, Stefan, if only you were mine 3 Nintendo simply doesn't…appreciate you the way I do ;)
Violent sands whipped around the swordmaster's body, ingraining themselves in his clothes. Grains of it stuck painfully in his scalp and eyelashes. But then, Stefan supposed, that was the beautiful thing about the desert. She enveloped all of her victims in her gritty, vicious caress. She was out for blood (and she didn't give a damn what kind of mongrel blood you had, so long as it stained the earth ruby red).
Today, she was particularly brutal, creating an insurmountable, inescapable sheet of sand. But Stefan didn't care. This curtain of sand wrapping around him only comforted him, reminding him that she, unlike beorc and laguz and all the other petty, useless living things out there, administered a type of unstoppable justice to all.
In exchange for her reassuringly cruel stability, Stefan liked to quench her bloodthirsty desires. She protected him and his Branded colony from the outside, and so in exchange, he slaughtered ill-intentioned would-be conquerors who dared to disturb her sands with their clumsy feet.
He didn't have any enemy blood to offer this time, so he took a small knife and slashed open his palm. Crouching to the ground and curling his hand into a tight fist, he squeezed several scarlet drops onto the ground. She drank greedily, his offering disappearing within seconds. Unappeased, she continued to blast him with grains of sand, demanding more.
"Tomorrow," he promised to her quietly. "Tomorrow, your thirst shall be quenched." He gazed into the distance. Flashes of Ashera's army's golden armor glinted, drawing closer, the gaudiness (thankfully) hidden by the persistent sandstorm. Stefan snorted, knowing that the flimsy armor adorning the bodies of the fallen would wear away in months, years, centuries. If anything, his beloved desert was patient.
He rose swiftly and slid down the sand dune. Without gazing back at his future adversaries, he disappeared into the wind.