Flight of fancy (486 words).

You are standing on the parapet of a castle just after nightfall. The battlements are of antique Crusader design, and they look out upon dark purple skies, a landscape of black jungle, and the chocolate brown of the river. The castle overlooks a city situated in the river's midst, on a long sandbar of an island. A cool evening breeze is blowing down from the distant mountains, lifting the miasma of the rainforest's oppressive humidity and driving away the everpresent mosquitos, if only for a brief while. You do not know this place, but nevertheless it is familiar to you!

There is a woman here dressed in grey, tall and proud and sad. She stares off to the west, where the sun has just disappeared beyond the horizon, at the Evening Star - bright and clear and shining unwaveringly on a night such as this. At first you think your wife has come back to you from the snowy slopes of Sikandra, but as she turns to face you, you realize that she is someone else altogether, someone you do not know but somehow recognize nonetheless.

Deep in the jungle the body of a Crusader knight moulders. Here in the tropics a man can lie dead for a very long time before nothing is left of him but rust and bone, but this man is not dead; nor is he alive. Deep in the jungle, entangled by ten years' growth of vines and creepers, his heart beats like a metronome.

"Why do we fight?" the Grey Lady asks you on the parapet. "For whose glory did we bring our seed to these fields? And who shall reap what we have sown?" She does not expect an answer.

The cool breeze actually turns chill for a moment, and your mind is an eagle, flying high in those distant mountains. Already it is dark there, but the giant moon Diala has risen over the barrier peaks to the east to gleam upon pristine snowfall and ice-blue glaciers - it is as the poets describe Sikandra, where the Gods live and your wife waits. A cloud of trouble obscures the brilliance as your conscious mind interrupts your reverie with memories of what Lord Noh's acolytes said when you interrogated them, what the avatar of your wife said as well when you were between life and death, fighting that... that thing! Sikandra itself is in danger, they said. Even now a nameless evil stalked the souls of your ancestors in the hereafter, unravelling a bloodline of twelve hundred years. But why? Something deep within your being tells you that this Grey Lady may have the answers, if you have the courage to face her questions.

Deep in the jungle the body of a Crusader lady moulders. Here in the tropics a woman can lie dead for a very long time before nothing is left of her but tears and bone.