It’s the Simorgh: the Bird King.
A metaphysical tide strikes my core. Every Eajiz must feel the way the Third Heavenly Bird threatens to snap all bonds from existence.
And we watch the world as balls of light shoot down from the Heavens, bringing storm winds across the mountains. The trees begin tremoring before standing on their roots and whipping across the city, creatures scurrying after. The clay cracks open like a great egg, swallowing throngs of people. Jinn-folk manifest, flying to the cosmos to escape the great storm.
Below, Azadnians scream at the colossal shift as if the flood is dousing the parchment of the world. Waters rise from the roots, the land spits up its reservoirs, and the blue-black waves engulf the valley, by the angels under the Divine’s command.
Shadows from the sky plummet downwards. Birds of every type, dropping as if a poison in the air has struck them. Screams echo from the lands and I begin laughing in disbelief. Had this been how the disbelievers of the Great Flood had felt, as the ark passed in safety while they drowned?
In a panic, I tug at the tufts of the Simorgh. ‘We must be quick before the flood destroys us too. Use the nur to protect the tribes and lands of the Camel Road,’ I command it.
The hundred-bond line carves through us, pulling us from the Eighth Gate.
‘You are the Bird King,’ I urge the Simorgh. ‘Send your subjects: cranes, ravens, buzzards, sparrowhawks and ababil to lift and save the people in Sajamistan and Azadniabad. Have the birds carry them so they may see the destruction.’
The Simorgh’s wings lift and fall, churning an endless supply of golden cranes and hawks and ababil and ravens that travel at the speed of cosmic light across the continent.
The Heavenly Bird soars us through the grey sky, traversing unnatural distances, travelling faster than the floodwaters, until we soar from the rocky Stone City to above Khor’s steppes and its ruined townships to the border of the Zayguk kingdoms, to the valley before the Black Mountains. It opens its beak, huffing its cold light across the pastures like a silver blanket shimmering atop the mountains. We soar to the west and east of the steppe-lands.
The floodwaters press against the nur, failing to penetrate the barriers as the water spreads across southern Azadniabad and northern Sajamistan. I command the Simorgh’s nur – so pure and unlike my own – like moulding clay in my hands. For a wavering moment, people are the threads and I, as a maker, wind them through my fingers. I demand their submission. I demand their surrender. It is so fitting: the Camel Road is a broken land of revolution; where violence is the seed and anger is the water.
At the tops of the Kin Mountains, crowds of humans huddle in horror – the ones who heeded the warning to move toward higher ground, watching the floodwaters rise.
Another roar overtakes the continent, the flood toppling mountains as they crack and shudder. Villagers’ cries follow. Birds swoop and carry the ones who have not drowned.
Many are young on those hills, staring up at the mighty Simorgh’s shadow before looking down, watching their homes wash away in the flood – alive but knowing they will have no home to return to in the aftermath. But I think they deserve it. So many of them without their homes, like my own eradicated from their raids.
And when they live with tales about the flood’s utter destruction, they will speak of how they thought the nur was their ark to guide them through the flood, only to have it turn its back on them.
High up, my vision wavers into a kaleidoscopic array of souls, the Veil lifting. The veins of the world criss-cross into sturdy rows, planes of square disks, and the people – the pathetic, puny creatures of the world –
appear as no more than specks. And my hand draws from above, pushing and pulling the fabric of the world.
Destroying and creating.
Destroying and creating.
Lands crushed and a girl the subjugator. I smile.
I am a holy mother and the world bows like children at my feet. I stroke shapes on to the canvas of the planet, and I snip the strings of fate. I am no mortal but the extension of a Divine.I am power. I hold the book of the world within my grasp, inking fate.
I’ve saved her, have I not? The Camel Road lives in an island of destruction. She breathes. She exists. And if her salvation is through a brush dipped in blood and swept lovingly across the celestial canvas, I would let the crimson seep into each crevice that carves the land, into every mangled body buried beneath its dirt, to be freed. Better this than the drawn-out invasion of mutilation and indoctrination.
My hand raises to the sky, fisting as if to cup the clouds. My thumb blots the grin of the rising sun as it laughs in glee at all the cruelty. The new dawn breaks into a violent red, bleeding into pink dew. People will see now the promise of the Third Heavenly Bird was a myth.
I always dreamt of a land of peace. But it does not matter what I wanted. I would live with the crushing grief, I would know the enemy is more than just an empty face on the battlefield. This land in Azadniabad was my home as much as the Camel Road. And its people were more than Warlord Akashun.
Questions dart through me that I try to dispel: Had I killed my clansmen? How many Zahrs live? How much of Sajamistan has borne the waters?
But they need to witness the consequences of a flood, high above like me, to realise humanity is nothing against Divine forces. Azadniabad fears now. Sajamistan too. The entire continent does. Finally. And I know well – all fear can turn to love.
What breaks that awful fervour is a slow realisation as the Simorgh sails us north, past Tezmi’a, the pastures of my birthplace in the Camel Road. When we fly across Lake Xasha, the body of water ejects large waves before we can form the last nur barrier.
‘Wait,’ I demand. ‘Why are you not saving Tezmi’a?’ I try to command the bird, but the thought blots like a finger against fresh ink. The creature does not heed me – avoiding Tezmi’a – as icebergs descend to swallow the alpine of my birthplace. ‘Wait!’
Somewhere, from an immaterial plane, the angel booms in my mind,Your power is not an absolute; to take one’s home away, your home follows.
My fists grip the Simorgh’s feathers in horrible understanding. ‘I don’t understand,’ I whisper.
