Voronica Whitney-Robinson - Sands of the Soul

Shamur's feet were so numb with cold by the time she returned that she hardly noticed as she crossed from the stone floor to the luxurious carpeting of her private bedroom. But she was not so distracted that she didn't observe that her fire was dying. She moved over to the ornately carved fireplace and added a log to the smoldering embers. A few moments of fanning and the wood was crackling cheerfully again.

Certain the fire was stoked, Shamur padded around her canopied bed to her wooden armoire. She let her hand slide down the left side of the chest, her delicate fingers searching the various carved figures. Using a combination known only to her, Shamur pressed several of the indentations in the designs at once. With a tiny click, a panel swung open.

She reached into the shallow compartment and withdrew the only item that was inside. Shamur held the note carefully in her hand, as if it was some precious artifact. The faintest trace of her daughter's perfume still lingered on the parchment.

She settled herself onto the settee near the fireplace and looked over the note with her keen gray eyes. There were only a few lines scrawled on it, and Shamur had read them so many times, she knew them by heart. Still, she read them aloud once more.

" 'Whatever good is in me exists because of you,'" she quoted. " 'Ai armiel telere maenen hir. Cale.' "

As she had for so many months, Shamur once again sent up a silent prayer that she had discovered the note before her daughter had.

That night of Thazienne's grievous wounds, Shamur couldn't sleep. She had needed to see her daughter's chest rise and fall one more time to reassure herself that Tazi still lived, regardless of what the priests told her. Only then would she be able to rest. Since she didn't want to have to explain herself to anyone, let alone the servants, Shamur had quietly slipped into Thazienne's bedroom after she saw Cale depart that night.

Walking over to her daughter's bedside, Shamur was amazed to discover the sudden, romantic confession Cale had left behind, written on her daughter's personal stationary.

Shamur was slightly in shock from the culmination of events that evening, and the note was too much for her. She slid it into a fold of her robe and, when she returned to her chambers later on, she hid the missive in the hollow panel in her wardrobe. She felt she needed some time to decide what was best for her daughter.

Now, a year later, she saw that some sort of divide existed between her daughter and Erevis Cale. Obviously, he had never spoken of his feelings for her except in that note.

Perhaps he has grown tired of waiting for a sign from Thazienne, the woman who "holds his heart forever," she thought, before coming to a decision.

Shamur looked a final time at the Elvish words of love written to her daughter from a family servant and threw the note into the fire. As the flames licked up the paper, Shamur felt certain she had done the right thing.

She loved her daughter fiercely and would do anything to ensure Thazienne's happiness. She wouldn't have her daughter trapped in a painful union if it could be avoided. Being linked to a common servant just wasn't right for her daughter, though it had taken this sad encounter between Tazi and Cale to cement her decision. Shamur had struggled for months with what was best and took this night as a sign. With the letter destroyed, she felt certain Thazienne's long-term contentment was ensured.

A soft knock on the door startled Shamur from her concerns.

"Come in," she said.

Thamalon Uskevren, wearing a maroon and gold robe, walked in.

"I'm not disturbing you, am I?" he asked.

For the first time that evening, Shamur smiled. With her ash-blonde hair loose about her face, she looked more her daughter's age. That fact was not lost to her husband's appreciative gaze.

"Come sit with me," she invited, patting the cushion next to her.

A year before, Shamur would never have extended an offer that intimate to her husband, but many things had changed over the past months, mostly for the better. She didn't have to hide behind a mask with him any longer. When all was said and done, there was no one else with whom she would rather share a moment like this.

Thamalon sat down beside her and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. Shamur settled against him and let a small sigh escape her lips.

"What keeps you awake, wife?" Thamalon asked kindly.

"I'm just thinking of our children," she finally replied. "There are so many things that could go awry for them."

The Old Owl, as he was known to many, kissed his wife on her head and replied, "With you guarding them, nothing horrible could ever happen."

"I hope you're right," she answered and hugged him close.

"How utterly perfect," Ciredor chuckled aloud as he watched Tazi step out of Cale's bedroom.

There were very few unanswered questions in his life, but the room Ciredor was in happened to contain many of them. Sometime during the Age of Skyfire, the chamber had been hewn out of the desert mountains while the djinn, Calim and Memnon, raged against each other. The walls were carved with an ancient script that defied all his efforts at translation, but beyond that, Ciredor had very few clues as to who else might have occupied it before him.

He had let his anger get the best of him many years before when he discovered the sanctum and killed its former guardians too quickly. Realizing that he had lost an opportunity for knowledge, the necromancer wrote off the mistake as one of many lessons of life and vowed never to make that mistake again.

At various points in the natural recesses of the room, glow lights winked in the darkness, but their illumination was outshone by the radiance of a multifaceted, amethyst no bigger than a man's fist. It rested on a natural rock pedestal, the focal point of the room. The eerie, purple light it emitted flickered oddly off of the jagged walls and the hollow caverns of Ciredor's cheeks. Behind him, the chamber connected to a passageway that was lined with ten figures of various sizes, all at least as large as an elf. The amethyst's brilliance played affectionately on those figures, caressing them.

But it was Ciredor who was enraptured. With an almost loving look, he reached out to the stone again and grazed it with his thin fingers. It blazed more intensely at his touch. He gazed deeply into the stone and began to laugh once again at what he saw within.

"My dear, dear Thazienne," he said to the gem, "how can it be that so much time has passed and you are still the same?"

But there was no one else to answer him. Not that he needed an answer, either. He knew well enough that Tazi had simply survived this long in her life due to luck and her family's fortune. He wondered just how many times her parents had had to pay to have her resurrected, she seemed to be so careless.

Obviously, her parents weren't all that cautious, either. They had, after all, made the mistake of letting him come into their home to "heal" their stricken whelp once. He felt he was soon to find out just how many other mistakes they had made with their daughter.

"How completely foolish and trusting you are, little girl," he persisted, staring into the gem. "Didn't you learn anything from our last encounter? So you think you are going to bring the battle to a… how did you so quaintly put it?" He paused for a moment before continuing, "a time and place of your choosing?"

He threw back his head and laughed again.

"Since when has any of this ever been your choosing? Do you think the boy-mage found your elf lover by his skills alone?" he asked the stone. "Oh, Tazi-" he shook his head-"how I wish you could see me as I see you right now. It would be rather exquisite to enjoy in person the pain that all of this would cause you… but that will come soon enough."