A Shade of Paradise

Chapter 2: Refuge

Fire.

Billowing clouds of acrid darkness blotted the placid, purple horizon. Screams echoed down the stone hallways where the knights stepped out of the long fingers of shadow, blood dripping from grotesquely massive swords. Shattered wood. Screams intensify. A flurry of movement and a crimson splash against dark, laughing walls.

And fire.

A colossal wave of scorching, searing heat, a turbulent wave of yellow and orange fury. Someone is whimpering under a once ornate, smoking bed.

Why is he hiding, why is he whimpering like an animal? Doesn't he know? Does he care? Why can't-

Abruptly, the boy frantically crawls out from under the bed. Sweat plasters his ruffled hair to his temples, and ashes mix with a stream of tears on his face. He runs down the hallway, but trips, his face inches away from searing heat. A knight, his visor a grim face of judgment looms above, lifting his massive sword...

Cyan awoke in gasps of breath, cold sweat seeping out of his pores. He wrestled with the dark monstrosity, fighting against the murky waters between sleep and the solid shore of awakening. The waters poured its weight down on him, filling his nostrils and mouth, but this was a familiar fight with a time honoured if not respected foe. Gradually the images warped and melted like heated candle wax, dripping downwards and leaving a blank white slate in its midst. A sphere of a thousand shades of crimson and livid orange slowly imploded...then shattered in a multitude of twisted and jagged shards. Cyan breathed once more.

He had won.

It was the usual dream where it seemed not the images themselves but more the formless shades of grief and terror that floated around and permeated the dream that held Cyan in it's thrall. Sighing, and trying to calm his shuddering frame, he leaped out of his canopy bed and padded over to the balcony. Cyan gripped the stone banister with white knuckles, exhaling calmly and forcing himself to relax. Traces of the dream always lingered, as if the broken shards floated in the air, probing for weak links in his mind. It was one of the deeper, yet certainly not deepest reasons for Cyan's philosophy of calming the mind.

It is a tumoltous, entity all to itself and I must have control. Inhale. Control. Exhale. Control. If I don't have control of my mind, then how can I face the uncontrollable variables in life?

Like Fire, a demented voice whispered in his ear.

Cyan shuddered, never again. Control. Inhale. Control.

Cyan forced his deep green eyes out towards the terrace. The view was breathless. Soaring above the city, Armithion's Tower stared down at even the grey, daunting walls of the city. Armed guards walked the battlements where bastillas and catapults were tied down and supported by sinew ropes and complex wooden frame work. Every corner of the wall was dominated by three circular towers jutting out at three different angles, supported below by the black stone outcropping of the cliff face itself. Each turret was proudly topped with the pennants of the three major houses of the city; the red falcon of house Giles on a field of sable, the golden crescent of house Orithmont on a field of azure and the white lily on a field of red,the sigil of house Kadre. The very center of the city contained a massive, circular stone courtyard of perhaps twenty span in diameter, with four gilded fountains, framed by marble statues of the Patriarchs of the city. Ivory benches lined the outskirts of the yard and wooden outcropings where the stone walls met served as shade or protection from the rain. The one thing the city designers could not control was the ivy. It spread everywhere and anywhere like a virus, crawling up the otherwise pristine stone walls in twisted black and dark green brambles.