Silent and cross legged she sat, the sun warmed stone feeling good on her bare legs. Sound and sight obscured the tangible facts of her reality. Purple tinted mountains spotted with white cottages and houses jutted out of the distant grounds, pushing their way skywards. Brilliant, translucent, forrest-covered hills with ancient ruins stood on the opposite shore. And the river: the river churned and burbled; raged and wept; signed and sang as it rushed on its enduring path creating alternate spots of white capped rapids and glass smooth pools.
“My God,” she breathed. Feeling faint and a little unsure, Chadia stared in awe at her surroundings. Over and over her eyes returned to the river, watching the straw-like grass sway and dance in the flowing water. She knew that once outside the castle walls she would be thrown face first into the cold rough wall of reality, but here… here she was on another plane.
The grass, the river, the castle wall, all of these things had stood since a moment in time too far distant for her to comprehend. The mountains and trees, the ruins, none of these things had changed; permanent structures, ancient structures full of history and beauty surrounded by a cramped, boisterous, busy modern society. The contrast astounded her. It rendered her speechless, even thoughtless. Only emotion pumped through her ever absorbing body.
Reason had no place in her fascination of aesthetics.
From somewhere in the distance she heard bird-like squawking. Course and erratic, it had no home in her thoughts of serenity. She shook her head slightly to clear the grating noise from her ears.
“I wonder how it would haven been, in that time long ago, when this castle was first built.” Closing her eyes to the blemishes of modern life, Chadia pictured the river, mostly unchanged, flowing placidly along its course, not impeded by the annoyances of garbage and waste. The distant purple crests stood nude in the background; no houses, no roads, no industry. The ruins, well, the ruins would have always been there; since a time before time; a home for the ancient rites and entertainments, still, in this dark medieval hour, standing empty and unused.
The dream came to her in full force now as she watched her young chevalier, sitting erect on his horse, gallop over the bridge, through the gates, coming to a stop below where she sat. She smiled down upon him as he waved at her the white scarf she had given him for luck in jousting competitions. In a hurried flash he spurred his horse forward through the gates to the inner sanctum of the castle.
“My dream world, my castle.” Chadia looked down and saw the massive forms of the swans floating, hovering in the straw-like grass of the river. “Each morning I will go to feed them the moment I awake.”
Chadia shifted her weight on the sun warmed smooth marble feeling the deeper cold of the stone, the center core, a virgin to the sun’s heat. Gathering her skirts in her hands she rose to her knees and peered through the slits in the inner defensive wall. Such a tiny crack.
One eye pressed to the opening she saw directly across from her the guards of the estate dressed in tunics of studded leather. A young guard noticed the spy and, having seen her flirtatious exchange with the horsed rider, smiled at her, the princess of the castle.
“Days,months, years, I could sit on this wall and watch my world, our world, fall.” The words dreamily drifted off her lips, floating their way through the wall to the guard.
Growing tired all too soon of her obedient observer Chadia returned her attention to the country once more, the afternoon sun fading all around her, the purple peaks disappearing in the distance as night consumed them.
hocscripsit 