The characters in this sketch are the sole property of Square-Enix and are only borrowed for the purposes of my exploration of individual impressions. They will be returned unscathed after their short adventure.
This is a short riff on a phrase which The RyRy used in a recent story.
"Desert of Tomorrow"
Each of the four heard the phrase differently, staining it through the glass of his/her own experience.
To Gippal, it was yellow, making him think of the endless soft dunes of his childhood. He turned the words over and over like objects, fondling them, tasting them as he longed to caress and lick the skin of his paramour. The future stretched before him gilded by sunlight, coloured and flavoured by expectation and desire.
To Baralai's senses the morrow was reddish, thick with duties to be done and demands clamouring to be met. Breaks in his routine were rare, always carrying with them the heavy chains of guilt for that he was leaving unfinished. His pleasure was bound to the earth by the conviction of his unworthiness and he bled for those who were abandoned by him. Tomorrow, tomorrow, so many promises to keep to so many disparate people.
Nooj saw it all, but in darkness. He saw all the colours and none of them. While the light spectrum blends to create the pure brilliance of white, so does the range of pigments merge to form darkness. Darkness had become his natural home. As the Al Bhed nestled into their native sands, he embraced the darkness and settled into its world, making it his own. To him, the future was a desert of empty dimness and cold. He sat under a starless dome in which no moons rode and he strained to distinguish any objects around him. He was alone, uncomforted, despairing, consumed by dismal thoughts. The morning would be identical to the night and the day now present. It was all a bitter abyss.
The dreaming Paine saw green, the fresh, tender, fragrant green of budding foliage. She touched the individual words with battle-hardened fingertips against the softly furred surface of the still furled edges of the phrase. In her hopeful mind the desert would tomorrow be a meadow with purling streams, a kaleidoscope of flowers and trees with leaves fluttering in a gentle breeze. She believed in perfectibility in spite of her experiences and invested her energies to that end. She was optimism and vitality and the pure white light of courage.
Thursday, March 20, 2008