A long life
Holy City of Gra'akast - Desert Of Skulls
Alish Woluar also know as Sister Locust, sat in chair, in the balcony of her private quarters in the central temple, looking over her city, past the rust coloured stone buildings and their dome shaped roofs, into the Great Desert beyond its mighty spiked walls. The orange sun was setting beyond the horizon, casting its fading light across the sands of her ancestral homeland. Despite the heat of the day, temperatures in the desert would fall drastically.
She pulled her tattered, red and yellow shawl over her legs. Her fingers tracing its faded pattern, bringing her smile to her lips. This shawl had been the only thing she had brought with her that night when the call came to her in her dreams and she walked out from her family tent to wander off into scorching dunes. She had been eleven or twelve, she could no longer remember. This old shawl was the only connection to her own singular life.
She had always found that amusing. That she could close her eyes and recall events that had happened to all the other Prophetesses before her, in a unbroken line stretching back almost two thousand years. And yet this old, tattered shawl would be a reminder of her. Her own unique passage through the ages.
She knew she was not long for this world. The sands of her own life were running low and soon she would return to the dust that all life sprung from. Soon, after she died the call would once again go out on the hot winds of the desert and would reach young women like she had once been. The call would go out to her possible successors, chosen by the Twin Gods, Viher and Yther. Driven to take the Pilgrimage of Bones, with an irresistible pull towards The Holy City.
The fading light caught the surface of the river Kak'tak river, to her right before flooding into the Great Oasis. She thought how its eternal journey from the glacial peaks of the mountains of Fang towards the margins of the Holy city of Gra'akast, mirrored the life of the Wanderer Prophetesses and her own.
She was the 26th incarnation of a long line of women who had served the Ozainae for generations. And soon the mantle would pass to the 27th...
~Or maybe my shawl...~ she thought smiling into the setting sun.