Rippling Sands

Note : this very short story was part of a creative writing assignment and was inspired by a specific piece of music that, sadly, I can't seem to find.
What I can suggest to you instead is to listen to this somewhat resembling piece of music composed by Klaus Badelt and Lisa Gerrard for the Original Sound Track of the movie Gladiator. The track is called Sorrow and can be listened to on the Youtube platform.

Fred

 

    An overflowing crowd started to gravitate around the juniper coloured tent. Inside was a girl, not past the age of candor, whose disharmonious moans were bleeding out of the makeshift shelter. Whilst her body had laid down roots in a squeaking bunk, her hand was held by a wretched mother praying for hopelessness to lose the battle against innocence. Not a single soul had not been feeling the stings of the scorching sun, nor the fiery sand ambushed between the toes, yet, it seemed the only feeling their hearts had room for was despair. The girl would need a miracle.

A rift carved itself in the crowd, leaving a breach for an old man to seep through. Draped by a scarlet silk tunic, ornamented with golden runic scriptures or arabesques and held together with a perfectly braided cord, everyone recognized the maverick they had known as “The Hermit”, although noone had ever really known him. Whilst a beard as white as his bun concealed his chin, one could not miss his cerulean eyes attesting of his resolve and determination, nor the wisdom time had chiseled over his burnished amber skin.
As if it was an extension of his arm, he was hauled by a hardwood walking stick, choked by two slithering ropes whose colours matched the tunic’s so tightly it was as if the man was waving a miniature of himself much like a puppeteer.

When the assembly came to realize he had finally reached the girl, his left palm was already smothering her forehead whilst his lips seemed to crackle words out of this world. Her whole body chose to answer by performing a series of spasms, off-beating the clamours of her mother.
After a while, the song ended. The girl woke up, her complexion gleaming from dreary ash to radiant bronze, and then everything else stopped, as if time itself had not allowed anything nor anyone to even age, if it were not for the hissing winds which had seemingly deemed themselves beyond the laws of nature.
The petrified state of the crowd suggested that they had not only just witnessed something they had never laid eyes upon, but instead that they had unbeknownstly glanced at the gorgon’s mirror of the soul.

Time eventually resumed its course and then, when the last tear had reached the burning ground, the task to douse the sandhills was taken over by the empyrean domain. This place’s thirst had not been quenched for days, as if its will to live had been wiped out, yet it chose this very moment to start and remember how wetness feels.

The girl turned her head over, and everyone could decipher the single word that had washed up on her swirling lips : “Water”.

Fred