[c=#2dba69]The Nights of Nour - Part 2
Sarheed's Lamp[/c]

[c=#f2c14e][i]This second parchment was wedged beneath a loosened slab, in a room narrower than the first, only a few steps from the empty pedestal.
The dust covering it wasn't only sand.[/i][/c]

Night 5, under the reign of Vizier Kais

I went back to the sanctuary the very next night. I had no good reason to give anyone, except that I could no longer think of anything but that empty pedestal, and that voice which seemed to have waited a thousand years to find someone who would listen to it all the way through.

Ashkar was waiting, if a bodiless being can be said to wait. He picked up his account where he had left it, as though the time between visits didn't truly matter to him.

"The sultana I served was named Yamina. She had no need of my carpets to rule - she governed through justice, not splendor. But she loved beauty for its own sake, without ulterior motive, and it was for that reason, I believe, that I came to offer her the finest work of my existence."

A carpet, he told me, woven thread by thread over seven years, from the very colors of the sky he gathered at dawn and dusk, so light it seemed to ignore the weight of the world. A carpet that flew, not through raw magic, but because it had learned, through patience alone, to no longer wish to touch the ground.

"Her vizier, a man named Sarheed, saw in that work everything I had never put into it: a weapon. A way to carry war farther, faster, without ever fearing retaliation. He asked Yamina to hand it to him. She refused. So he turned to me directly, in the dead of night, with words meant to sound like an offer and which were nothing but a polite threat."

He didn't need to tell me what he had answered. The empty pedestal before me told the rest well enough.

"Sarheed could never force my hand. But he found another way: in the greatest secrecy, he unraveled my carpet thread by thread, and from what remained of it, he shaped a lamp - a vessel small enough to fit in a palm, sturdy enough to contain what was left of me once the work was destroyed. He believed he would imprison me in it forever. He never foresaw that his own guards, those who had carried out the sentence, would themselves bear the mark of what they had broken."

It was on my way back that night that I crossed paths with the first of them.

He stood motionless between two dunes, the bandages wrapping him crumbling in places, revealing gray, dry skin like dead wood. I had no time to wonder what he carried or didn't: he lunged at me the moment he sensed my presence, with a speed nothing in his posture had suggested.

I defended myself with what I had - a short blade, more useful ordinarily for cutting bread than fending off the dead. The fight didn't last long. He collapsed in a cloud of fine dust, and when I dared search through what remained of him, I found only sand and scraps of cloth, nothing at all resembling a lamp.

I came back empty-handed, my heart still pounding more from fear than from the fight itself. Ashkar, when I told him the following night, didn't seem surprised.

"Not all of them carry what you seek. Many have wandered so long they've forgotten what they were guarding. But one of them, somewhere in this desert, still carries it. Don't lose heart over empty sand. Every time you face one, you draw a little closer to the one who isn't."

Vizier Kais, for his part, noticed nothing of my shortened nights. I offered him, that evening again, a tale of a sultan and a disloyal vizier, without telling him just how much it resembled the one I had just heard.
