***Please lock/delete this post. After I was done typing, I clicked submit and it didn't go for a long time, so I pressed refresh and posted another one. Sorry.
The autumn leaves (oh no, already sounding like Felagund, but fall is my favorite season so &^^) laid scattered througout the abandoned city. The storm the night before came quick and left quick, as it always has. Flapping here and there are those wet leaves disturbed by bone-chilling wind.
It would be another moon before he could enter the city again; to see her again. It had been his monthly ritual to climb out of the walls of Khalidar and make his way to the Abandoned City under the moonlit shadow. And everytime after he leaves the city, just before sunrise, he'd remenisce the day he discovered its secret.
Every full moon, the city would emit a shadow gate near the center of the its western wall; (which punctuation to use here, a ;?) now behind a thick growth of trees and vines.
Not much is known about the shadow gates. He had learned this in the Great Library where peasants were not allowed, but he had known a friend who gave him access to the records. Scholars originally thought shadow gates were sorcery set up by powerful mages to create a gate to the illusional world, Pandemonium. They later discovered that one could pass through the gate into the city, but how that was done remain unknown. He recollects an old, tattered, scroll on which it inscribed that shadow gates were the effects of casting a Phasing Wall along an earth energy current. Phase Walls were simply the portion of the wall a spell was casted on. It could then act as a temorary opening for a wall, often for the sake of convenience, and escape either in or out of the city during times of crisis. The wall remains as long as the small, smokey, marble in which resulted from conjuring the spell, and the shadow gate remains as long as the Phasing Wall endures.
"Hey!" A gate guard yelled out to him.
He picked up his feet and dashed through the cool desert sand. The gate guard yelled something behind his back and then began chasing him. Following him was another guard. During these times of war, no one was allowed to leave the city without first being approved by the guards. If suspicious to the guards, one could be jailed, interrogated, or even killed if suspicion turned into conviction.
Without the heavy armor, he easily outran the guards. They had stopped chasing him some quarter of a mile. About another two miles, he would be at the Abandoned City. He would weave through the mysteries in the shadow gate and appear on the other side, then make his way to the painted room.
Though excited, he took caution weaving through the city toward his destination. He wanted no one else to be there. This was a secret- his secret. The excitement built with each step he took. After what had seemed to have been a day's of walk within 30 minutes, he slowly looked into a house, checked both sides, then stepped inside.
It had always felt like someone was here. Each time he comes here, he could always feel it. But it was the time that he tripped and fell through a cracked wall into a hidden room when he found out that there was someone else there... at the same time not there.
The room was a grand painting of luscious flowers and brilliant grasses laid upon small hills. Atop each hill was a bed of flowers. At the center of the room was one of the hills. He walked onto the hill and instantaneously the room lit up from top and bottom, meeting at the unlit areas at the center. The flowers and grasses press through the ground and warm sunlight showered from above as a person began to fade into shape.
"Celest!"
Um... too sleepy now so this is how it goes.
The "He" later devlopes into Yohan, a peasant. What's happened is that the room, when a person steps to the center, it goes into a realm with a certain signature. This "Celest" is actually the princess of Khalidar, who accidentally bumped into Yohan when she was experimenting her the new spells she had been taught.
When they had first met, she had told him he was a princess, but was afraid to unveil a princess of where. He simply introduced himself as a lowly peasant, thinking she was probably a princess of the world of Pandemonium. The two were of the same age, 17. They quickly became friends and their meet with each other during each full moon became like a date. Though he has always thought that she was from the illusional world so the two could never be... but even so, she's as real to him as life. Her touch, her scent, her voice, the little song she hums when fiddling with the petals of her favorite flower, which all were ever so real to him, and that was good enough for him.
2 years passed as these dates occur.
He later finds out that she was the princess and began to see her less... finally during one of their encounterment, she asked him why he's doesn't always come anymore. He made up an excuse of that he has a job that keeps him much too busy and exhausted to reach the city. She was disappointed, but knew that these fewer visits were at least better than none.
Johan begins to feel depressed knowing that the woman he has fallen for is an actual person and belongs to the royal family of his city. He was but a peasant... nothing more... he had stopped going to the Abandoned City all together and a year since then has passed. To get his mind off it all, he spend his week's earning that was saved for the month's food to booze at the tavern. As he stumbled drunkly through the city, he fell through a croud onto the street, where he fell in a puddle of water from the recent storm. Above him a horse screeched and the man mounted panicked to calm the horse. The horse finally calmed and the angry man dismounted himself and picked up Yohan by the shirt screaming "What the hell do you think you are doing?!" And dunked his face hard into the puddle, hitting his face on the ground. The water cleared Yohan's face of dirt and debree and that's when Celest noticed it was him. He's almost grown a beard now, hair at shoulder-length and shaggy, but she knew it was him.
She halted the parade (because it was her birthday) arranged by her father and ran over to him, facing him up and putting his head at her lap. "Yohan! Yohan!" She calls to him. He struggled, but got up and began to walk away. She grabbed his arm and asked him why he left. He shook his arm way from hers and kept walking. Now crying at the scene of the man she had loved and waited for each full moon from midnight to just before the sun rose, celest turned him around, looked at him as he stumbled pathetically. He turned to walk away again and she spun him back around and slapped him, gave him the saddest look, and ran off with tears streaming down her cheeks. A drop into the puddle.
Wow! I was completely into the atmosphere when I was writing this! You can tell from as I was trying to explain everything in the end fast, I slightly went back into story mode. Um.. yeah I'm really tired, so sorry to make the ending sections so crappily. I'll end it here for now, if anyone is interested, maybe I'll re-write this entire thing and add an ending to it all.