Across The Sands
~First Moon
~*~ A mirage comes up, it never ends –'City of Angels" The Distillers
~*~
The thick, creamy yellow pieces of paper that made up the half-finished volumes that Irulan was working on ruffled in the draft as Irulan returned to her room. The room was neat and well kept, with beautiful, simple pictures adorning the walls and layers of thin sheets and thick sheets designed against the erratic temperatures of the desert piled on the bed. Sheer curtains let in the light of the newly risen first moon. On a whim Irulan decided to leave the electric lights off, and spend the night with only a single candle. She selected one from the bedside table and struck a match. The flame flared in the darkness, and then calmed to a deadly yellow as it rested on the wick of the candle. Irulan blew out the match and settled it into a glass pan, leaving a whiff of fragrant smoke in the air.
Words of ink scrawled on the thick papers had soaked into the parchment like water into a dry sponge. Irulan moved the thinner practice sheets aside from the thicker, bound volume as she sat at her desk and drew a pen out of a holder. She tapped the dry nub against the paper before dipping it in the inkwell, thinking for a moment, and then resting the pen back in the well. I knew Muad'dib so well, she thought, and yet I can't remember anything that he ever said to me…
That wasn't entirely true, of course, but all the words that she could recall at the moment were words of feeling, not words of wisdom or philosophy. Words not fit for the world to see, words that had Irulan kept locked in her heart away from exposure to the tainted world. They were words of hints, clues, opposites, and total hope. Words that were nothing, but everything to Irulan at the same time.
Defeated, she shifted the heavy book aside and slid her inkwell across the smooth brown surface of her desk as she rummaged through her stack of notepaper, looking for a phrase that she had forgotten to record. When she found nothing, she drew her diary out of the secret shelf in the bottom drawer and looked through its contents. Here, she thought. Here's something I can write down.
God created Arrakis to train the faithful, she wrote. Wax dripped down the outside of the candle as she wrote, and the flame flickered and went out. Taking it as a sign to go to sleep, Irulan took off her clothes and slid into her nightgown. She pushed the heavier blankets to the bottom of the bed as to allow for the unusually warm desert night. The first moon waned as another rose, but the light still remained sufficient enough to shine through her eyelids. She watched the patterns dance on the insides of her eyes as she subconsciously went through her Bene Gesserit muscle exercises. I can move one toe without disturbing the other, I can tick a muscle on the back of my pinkie finger at will, and yet my heart, the most important muscle, is weak. I cannot control my heart at will. How ironic.
How dreadfully ironic.
~*~
