✵ 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...
I wouldn't have minded dying, were death to come but once.
— Mirza Ghalib
✵
Him
"Let her go."
He cranes his neck towards his friend who's sitting on the floor of the small room with a map in his hand. The numberless nights that he has come to him awaiting every dawn has lost their count now. There's still dark outside, and he's grasping on every minute he can get to prolong the inevitable.
"Set her free," his friend suggests, and he leans back against the wall in desperation.
"Were our situations reversed, would you do the same?" he supposes.
His friend smiles and hums at him. "The one I love loves me back, akhi. There's a difference. But if she didn't, what force could I use to turn her heart towards me? I'm no God."
"Maybe Noura will fall for me too. Eventually her heart will soften towards me. I can wait for her."
"Maybe. But until then, she'll feel enslaved to you. Now what good is a woman to you if she believes you to be her oppressor than her protector? She'll always be on the run from you, and this chase will never end." He folds the map and puts it aside before paralleling his stare. "Until you find yourself being a choice of her freewill, this is how it's going to be. That's why I say, let her go. Let her find you on her own if she desires to."
"Let her go?" He closes his eyes and a sigh escapes his lips. "Alright then, I'll set her free."
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Her
The sky is in dusty shades of orange and gold as the threads of sunrays breath their last through the horizon. The water on the the pond reflect them like light reflected from a crystal and the fish beneath the surface swim as if floating through that light. In the distance, the birds chirp and crack the silence but never break the serenity of the moment.
For anyone, the palace could've been paradise, only until living in this paradise would prove it otherwise. Solace is but a rejected prayer here. Noura sighs and dips her fingers in the pond. Only her little escapades to the garden can save bits of her every now and then.
"Maman," she mumbles to herself. "He promised to reunite me with you. And no matter what everyone says about him, I believe in him."
A fish swim towards her, then swims back away, and she retracts her hand. The sun keeps slipping into the dusk. She looks up at the sky.
"But even if I return home, I've already lost part of it." She places a hand over her heart. "Eskander, who have we been to each other? It is as if we've been strangers."
She smiles at the irony of their fates, as if their paths were to intersect but never connect-- to never be one. She breathes through the ache as if her soul being shred to be stitched into a new form.
