[Quenthalus]

The two of them crossed a thresh hold of mist, and from the wooded copse in which he danced, shadowed effigies of forest spirits spiraled as well. These elves, unlike the ancient elves, were borne up from the earth and held close to the tree. Their wild ways kept them near to places most coittish and civilized elves could ever never dream to fare, and yet the two cultures shared such a distinct attribute of surrender in the presence of beauty, that in these most auspicious moments you could scarcely tell them apart. What difference can there be in sublime wisdom and vile multitude that only perception could want to posses? Together, the shadows of a Syl'rosyan noble and a Syl'rosyan barbari reflected feelings for life through an intricate code called dance. And all of that color exchanging between the two of them was just a shifting phantom of the external for the eyes. When their steps crossed each other the two of them looked like black symbols painted against an emerald wall.

Her sleek arms unshouldered the illusion of a peacock's plume, masked and mirrored by a thin arm that floated on the wind; a daughter's muscles tight like a fist as she feigned the texture of feathers through her fluttery-fluid motions. Whipping her arms in sudden upward -reversing downward- movements, accompanied by a whirling helios of footwork, the wilder elf kept her lithesome frame spinning like a windmill. Quenthalus came alight with smiles and laughed as he danced a step back. He wasn't seeing, nor hearing things of the phantom form. She was as real as the mist. Straightening with an august tightness; a flagpole to raise up the scion of stars with his knife-like leg switches, popping up, literally, atop his tip-toes as if his upper body weighed no more than twenty pounds. His shoulders leveled like a table, smoothed over by the passage of numerous natural and unrehearsed wind-steps of the dancing ether. Blown from the west to the east, he twirled and quickly shifted his legs mid-air once, twice before touching, turning, and coming back to face from whence he had initially turned. His was a flurry of speed and time to match her exotic enveloping of space and matter. Her dreamcatcher of motions seemed to fold like a web around the skyborne swarms of sun, moon, cloud, and star, netting rapture for safe-keeping: refining. Barbari or noble, he felt at home in the forest amidst the crackle of brush and splinter of wood beneath his step; the midnight caw and thicket chorus lent up by crickets and critter. Wild or civilized, she danced with a fierceness that derived from venerations of king and queen, for her movements saw the royalty in every aspect of life. She danced as if she expected things to be this way, knowing that they have always carried on this way, even before there was a memory of it. Somehow, they both knew it, and both of them were not so different. Even more, neither of them seemed to be entirely surprised by this notion. Everything was unconditional inside this circle.