Walking on Cobblestones

This is the opening paragraph to a WIP that I am playing around with. I am not sure if it will go anywhere: maybe it will... maybe it won't. The Main Character is an archaeologist who is in search of her holy grail and winds up with less than she hoped for. Unfortunately her hopes make her blind to the facts and the maneuverings that follow leads her on a winding road through political intrigue and religious squabbles.

For starters: What do you think of the title? The character: Love her? hate her? Is she sympathetic sounding? Intriguing?
As always: The characters and events in this post and all connected posts are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. 


Gleaming white against a backdrop of cerulean sky, she ascends amidst the rock and clay, angel of light rising up in an intangible dusk that has followed her halfway around the world. She stretches her arms outward as though to take in the broken and shattered, hands aching palpably. Involuntarily, she rubs the hollowed center of her hand, sensing the inarticulated connection. She stares into the clouds, heart aching for the brokenness she senses crying out in the darkness. She looks up, her mute supplications carried up on the wings of the wind as it whips up and over the rock, lifting her scarf vertically out from unyielding shoulders, a semaphore for change in the days ahead. Oblivious to the gales that assault and batter, she is statuesque, patiently awaiting the days ahead. Gray pillows boil toward her on the desert’s horizon, hungrily swallowing all that is in their path. The laying out of battle plans: gathering of forces, placement of reinforcements, lines being laid for attack are in full operation by the forces that will bombard are all that concerns her. Alliances have been made, the enemies of her enemies moving together, whispering conspiracy that her eavesdropping ears picked up in the halls she once dominated. Impending attacks from distant shores are what she deliberates and prepares for, knowing they will attempt to assail her position so she will be vulnerable to a full on assault with the final aim of making her their inverted Hypatia. Her arms raise involuntarily once more, vulnerability in gesture and frame, yielding to heaven as gracefully as Henry the Eighth’s second wife.