Nicholas Cristo Creative

Dark shadows dashed across the grove, the firelight sending them flitting across the furrowed grey bark of the stalwart Salindrian Sentries, their wide, crisp leaves drinking in the inky dusk and swaying as if in tune with the figure dancing beneath them. Red flame crackled and popped as the fire pit grew brighter and hotter with each moment, each exhalation and hum of melody. Vanatiel muttered rhythmically to himself as he shuffled across the mossy loam, the light of the fire seeming to rise and fall with his liturgy, growing more intense as his hum grew to a chant. All around him the shadows were thick, pressed densely between the trunks of the Sentries, Greatheart Oaks, and Arkwoods of the Geluswood.

Vanatiel was slender and slight of frame, a common body type for the Sal'Indra peoples. His pale skin sheathed a lean physique, toned from a life in the wild, his time spent hunting and foraging and sleeping beneath the stars. He did not have the vibrant, golden warmth to his flesh as was common amongst his people, as he did not take part in the practice of sunning to absorb the healing rays of the sun, but instead embraced the darkness, leaving him wan beneath the light of the moon.

He wore a robe of hempen fabric, its deep green weave ragged and worn from years of wear, which waved and flapped about as he danced the bal'aran, the black dance. His lithe body bounded more frenetically around the fire as he chanted louder, his long yellow hair tumbling over his shoulders. The swelling shadows that stretched out from behind the fire-illuminated trees began to thicken and take form at the edges of the wood. Like some illusion seen only in the corner of the eye, they extended out and around, just beneath the light, seen yet unseen.

Vanatiel was alone in his forest camp, but any witnesses to his dance that night would have claimed to have seen others there with him, a band of ethereal coryphee with dextrous limbs and forms of smoke. The dark dancing figures bowed and swayed harmoniously with their Sal'Indra luminary, bending and arching over and over around the blaze, all the while his chanting and trilling growing louder. When the dark dance of the pale-skinned forester and his shadow-skinned companions had reached its crescendo, Vanatiel made one final guttural howl, bringing an end to his ritual. He stood motionless beside the fire, his chest heaving, his shoulders rising and falling with his winded breath, suddenly starkly alone once more. The shadow dancers were gone, returned to their haven in the corner of the eye, leaving only the dimmer shades of dancing firelight.

Once the fire pit had burned down to embers, the nightfall was at its peak—the ebon hour growing near—and Vanatiel began the short trek from the forested uplands down into the Great Valley of the Geluswood. The earthen soil was cold and hard from the chill of the night, but his bare feet were hot and damp, melting the loam to a gummy moss-caked clay with each footfall. The trees spoke to him that night, feeding him the shadows that they cast from the light of the third moon, a waning crescent, and the only one of three visible in the night sky. The first and second moons had fallen below the horizon, leaving a black cloudless expanse above a shadowy void. Vanatiel passed through the shadows and soaked them in, and he smiled.