The shadow disappeared into me. My chest unclenched, the pressure releasing until I inhaled air, the pain across my body growing. Then... thin gold lines rose up like malleable threads from my arms, legs, chest, tongue. They shot upwards as if to the Heavens. Pulsing, shaking – they were an entity of Divine making.
More pain lanced through my body and I howled. The warrior glanced in my direction before refocusing on Uma.She cannot see the gold lines around my body, I realised.
The threads shuddered, as ifsomethingfrom the Heavens flowed through it, into my body. A white wave of light erupted. Everything turnedbrightlike the night retiring to dawn.
To my shock, the cold brightness emanated fromme. It pulsed densely before shooting forward and cleaving the warrior like a white blade to churned butter. There was nothing left of her body but a spread of limbs, scattered.
Heavenly light, like in Babshah’s stories: the power of nur.
The other raiders turned at the display. The nur rose in me like a torrential wave as I limped to my feet.
What struck me most in that moment was not the death I dealt out, but rather the sheer awe brimming in Uma’s gaze – fear and satisfaction warring against each other. I turned to the other raiders with a strange calm, reaching into my own pain. The Heavenly light answered, cutting down soldiers until reinforcements arrived from the Azadnian village.
My fingers curled around the holy affinity, basking in its immensity. Through the carnage I felt like a stranger looking down upon myself, mind clear.I can save them, I thought. Like Babshah’s tales, my tribe will hail me as a Heavenly warrior, a way to reclaim the glory of our steppes.
Once, the people thought I was a curse. Now I can be a blessing.
How wrong I was. When the affinity faded and my body collapsed, I looked up. I’d been too late. Our tribesmen were already dead. The dusty wasteland spread before me, the cracked ground resembling the textured underbelly of a rattlesnake. Destruction was all that was left across the grasslands, and a Heavenly power that saved no one. It breathed its cursed air, wreaking havoc until no tent, human nor beast went untouched.
As reinforcements trickled through the settlement, Uma and I stumbled back to the central pastures, sighting our burned yurts in the middle of the Tezmi’a valley.
The khan’s decapitated head was staked upon a broken spear. Eyes open and suspended in death, the khan stared solemnly at the image of our own destruction as if spinning a story now in the realm of souls, taking the tribe’s legends with him.
More lifeless bodies populated our settlement than any survivors. And many more must have been captured. I couldn’t discern Babshah from the other bodies, all a mangle of blood. From our tribe of over two thousand, barely three hundred survived.
Eventually that day was called the Night of Tezmi’a by my people. A night of ruin.
It was the beginning of my curse: I had potential for strength, but without death I could never reach its peak.
Becoming...
Babshah Khatun, Usur Khan, Hawah, Haj, Sheeth, Mehmet, Ayslan, Habil—
The names blurred in my mind along with memories: of arriving in darkness after endless days of walking; the exchange of murmured words between my uma and a figure at a garrison; a dry room and a bowl of poultices. After days of travel with Uma, I had risen in a daze – barely registering the horses, or arriving at a gated city – before a swarm of guards led us to a quiet room of gold walls, the calm suddenly shattered by a partition sliding open, a voice from a servant announcing, ‘His Blessed awaits you.’
‘Get up,’ Uma hissed. I rocked on the kilim rug, gazing at the gold-threading dyed along my forearms.
Babshah Khatun, Usur Khan, Hawah, Haj, Sheeth, Mehmet, Ayslan, Habil—
‘Up now, child.’ Uma’s calloused hands gripped me.
I suddenly remembered to breathe. ‘Help me,’ I gasped out and my words careened through the small room. ‘My head, it hurts. W-who will tell their stories, Uma? I cannot forget the names of the dead. Please, I can hear their voices, their stories – I-I must go to Babshah. To finish the folktale—’
Uma wretched me upwards in a bruising grip. Her glassy eyes like knobs of jade mirrored my own. ‘Enough. You are stronger than the dead.’
I pressed my palms to my cheeks. ‘No, no, Uma, I’m not. We must return to Tezmi’a! Babshah Khatun is waiting!’
Her fingers dug harder. ‘Babshah is dead! The lands of the Camel Road are not our home!Not anymore.’
I stilled. Behind her, a palace servant watched us stiffly from the entrance of the small administrative room.
‘We have journeyed too far into the heart of Azadniabad to turn back. We will have one chance,’ her voice wavered, ‘for the emperor is never in the business of mercy to give more. The emperor does not know about your affinity gifted from the Heavens. But when he does, he will give us refuge. Please.’ Her voice hitched. ‘You have yearned to meet your dada. Today he can finally name you.’
From the doorway, the servant cleared her throat.
We followed her down a long corridor. At any other time, I would have marvelled at the illuminated floral paintings, the walls of blue silk tapestries woven through with shimmering garlands, the crane carvings on stelae, the embellished copper lanterns holding firelight, but I could not conjure any feeling, numb like frost.
Dragging my leg behind me, my braids hung like black straw around my face. We passed through a light blue marble archway with a dome at the top, painted cranes at the borders. Inside it were wide copper inner gates that guards swung open into a grand hall.
