✵ featured ~
❝Once upon a time in Baghdad, a street girl teaches the Khalifa of the kingdom why a king needs a queen.❞
✵
Started: June 5, 2021.
Completed: March 30, 2022.
✵
cover by @xniftykayx
featured on wattpad historical fiction, undiscovered...
We make each other alive. Does it matter if it hurts?
— Ingmar Bergman
✵
Him
He walks down the darkened pathway under the midnight moon with his mind amiss. The echos of his footsteps mingle with his horse's as it trots behind him. He holds its reins in one hand and his unsheathed sword in another. The silence in the streets bites him but he's heedless to it.
One of his men steps forward to take the reins from him as he approaches the house. He hands it to him and sheaths his sword, pushing open the door and entering the house. His friend is already awaiting him inside and smiles at him in welcome.
"You're late tonight. I thought you weren't coming."
"There are just more and more things weighing me down."
"Tell me about it."
"Spies I'll butcher once found to get them off my mind." He sits down on a chair and throws his head back, feeling drained, disheveled, placing a hand over his chest as he adds, "And she who's taking roots in my heart which I cannot cut."
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Her
She doesn't know what is love. She doesn't have a word or definition for it. It isn't an image to her either which she can outline, neither anything definite she can touch. Love is abstract. It's like a dull pain within you that you cannot pinpoint-- within the chest, inside the heart, and everywhere in the blood and bones. Or maybe in the soul. Noura doesn't know. All she knows is that it hurts, terribly so, and nothing can cure the ache.
The moon is no more a sharp silver contrast in the sky as the first rays of sun kiss the horizon. The corridors of the palace are silent like a graveyard and the torches lit them no less eerily. Hafez follows her as she roams through them to find her way outside.
The early morning hour is a portrait of deep blue and faded gold. The breeze is cool and calm and the air around her doesn't suffocate her. She walks down the pathway inside into the garden. No one is around except the guards appointed on duty, who are standing much far away to disturb her peace.
She swans around aimlessly, quietly, not bothering to strike a conversation with Hafez like she usually does. Her thoughts have been gyrating around issues that are like a claw to her throat. No matter what she does, she cannot lull them, neither can she find an escape in sleep.
Eskander. She lifts her face to the sky, a glimpse of God's might on its full display. What if...
She leaves those thoughts incomplete, unable to allow herself any grievous assumptions. She cannot bear a possibility of him suffering-- of losing him. She never has considered a life without him.
