a mélange one could not be sure

• Posted by james leong February 22 - Filed in Arts & Culture - 22 views

  When seen near at hand the creature’s form took on a different substance. It was the size of a young sea eagle and muscled accordingly, with a predatory beak and eyes that scanned the world with far-reaching acuity. It wore leather gloves of a sort over its talons, with sharpened steel barbs at the tip of each toe that early training had taught it the use of. There was a tube fastened to its ankle into which rolled notes could be inserted. It was a messenger bird, a pigeon in name, perhaps, but a creature with a fierceness to match its dedication in flight. It almost never fell prey to other avian predators. Thus it was the bird of choice for the most urgent of dispatches, like the one sent late on the night Thasren Mein struck King Leodan. The pigeon stepped off its keeper’s arm in the district of Acacia reserved for foreign dignitaries. Its wings beat down the salt-tinged air and lifted it into the night sky. armani outlet online armani jackets armani wallets armani dress shirtsIt flew at first through the cascade of snowflakes, the world grayed and soft edged. Somewhere over the mainland west of Alecia the skies cleared. The bird kept on through the dark hours, its wings seldom pausing to glide. It reached another keeper at a seaside village along the coast outside Aos at dawn the next morning. It glided in with a glimmering vermilion sky at its back. The message fastened to its leg was removed and attached— unread—to another bird. This one flew the stretch to lower Aushenia that day, rising and falling with the contours of the slab-broken prairie lands. Another carried on through the Gradthic Gap and arrived at Cathgergen about an hour before sunrise two days after the journey began. This time the message was slipped from its container and hurried through the chill corridors of the place and delivered to the expansive quarters which temporarily housed Hanish Mein’s younger brother, Maeander, and his entourage. Maeander woke to the awareness that his name had been called. The caller remained outside his door, softly singing the coded prayer that both asks forgiveness for interruption and promises that the disturbance speaks to a matter of importance. He rose naked from the warmth of his nest and stood looking down on the puzzle of bodies and pillows and fur blankets amid which he slept. His bed was in fact the greater portion of the padded floor. It was heated from below by the vent system that distributed the earth’s steam through the fortress. Bits and pieces of smooth-limbed women peeked out here and there, a spray of flaxen hair, a length of leg, an arm wrapped over the naked back of another, fingers entwined in the soft mat of white fox fur. Five, six, seven of them: looking on such a mélange one could not be sure. When Maeander took lovers he took them in quantity, and he wished them to look so similar that one faded into the next without a singular identity.