[c=#2dba69]The Nights of Nour - Part 1
The Voice Beneath the Ruins[/c]

[c=#f2c14e][i]Found rolled inside a cracked jar, at the entrance of a sanctuary half-swallowed by sand.
The ink had faded, but every word remained legible, as though the wind had chosen not to erase them.[/i][/c]

Night 1, under the reign of Vizier Kais

I tell a story every evening. That is the price of my next morning's breath.

The throne room always smelled the same at that hour: lamp oil beginning to smoke, sandalwood burned to mask the guards' sweat, and beneath it all, something more stubborn - fear, mine, which I always struggled to keep out of my voice. Vizier Kais never asked for the same thing twice: a betrayal, an impossible love, a monster defeated by cunning rather than force. As long as the story held until dawn, I lived. The day my words ran dry, I knew what awaited me, and I didn't need anyone to remind me.

That night, though, I invented nothing.

I had wandered away from the palace before sunset, as I often did, to search in the desert's silence for what the clamor of the halls never offered me: an idea, an image, a fragment of something true to dress in lies for the night. The sand, still warm beneath my sandals, held the memory of the day. I walked a long while, until the dunes gave way to ruins I had never noticed before - eroded columns, half-swallowed by sand, carved with patterns the wind had failed to erase: a winged silhouette, open hands, and at the center of every fresco, the same unmistakable shape - a carpet, spread out like a wing, carried by nothing but the wind drawn around it.

A gap between two collapsed blocks seemed to wait for someone to slip through.

Inside, the air was cooler, almost damp despite the desert surrounding it. My lamp lit a tall, silent chamber, at whose center stood a pedestal of black stone, empty, polished by centuries of hands that had left nothing upon it. Around it, sand had seeped through cracks in the ceiling, forming small, motionless dunes against the walls, as though the desert had patiently gnawed at this place ever since it was abandoned.

It was from that empty pedestal that a voice rose. Not a cry. An ancient murmur, almost muffled by the stone itself, as though it had taken centuries to learn to speak through it.

"My voice was cut off before the end. Since then, I have had no end."

His name is Ashkar. He didn't tell me outright what he was, only what he had been: a weaver, in service to a sultana whose name he spoke only with a tenderness still intact after all these years. With his hands - if a djinn can be said to have hands, he added, with something that sounded like a smile in his voice - he had woven for her fabrics that existed nowhere else: carpets that kept the day's warmth through the desert night, veils that sang in the wind, and one last piece, the finest of them all, which he wouldn't describe further that night.

"This pedestal once held something that bound me here, half free, half prisoner. It was torn from me long ago, along with everything I could still call mine. It has wandered this desert ever since, carried by hands that no longer even know they carry it."

I didn't understand, that first night, what he truly meant. I sat for a long while before the empty pedestal, knees drawn to my chest, listening to what he could still tell of his own story - fragments, images, never one continuous account, as though he himself had lost the thread of what was missing. His voice held nothing threatening. It carried instead the vast weariness of those who have waited too long to still hope, and who hope anyway.

"The dead who still walk this desert, the wrapped ones who never lie down to rest - they are the guards of the one who betrayed me. They have always searched for what they can never keep. If one of them falls before you, look closely at what it carried. You won't find a trophy there. You'll find a piece of me, left to drift in the sand."

I left before dawn, without an answer, but with far more questions than I had come to find. Kais got his tale that night - one more, invented in haste between two heartbeats, a story of a sultan and a genie that I made cheerful enough to let him fall asleep content. But that one, the true one, I haven't finished writing.

If you hold this parchment, know only this: somewhere in this desert, a story still waits for its ending, and it hides in the arms of those who can no longer quite die. Face them, if you cross their path. Ashkar will know what you find, even if you yourself don't yet know what you're looking for.
