[c=#2dba69]The Nights of Nour - Part 3
Something Lurking in the Shadows[/c]

[c=#f2c14e][i]This third parchment, I found slipped against the empty pedestal itself, one morning, without knowing who had left it there.
I eventually stopped asking myself the question.[/i][/c]

Night 11, under the reign of Vizier Kais

I have faced four since last time. Four clouds of dust, four handfuls of cold sand between my fingers, four returns to the palace with empty hands and trembling legs. I was beginning to recognize their gait before I even saw them - that way they have of stopping short, as if still hesitating, before lunging forward without any restraint left.

The fifth, I never saw coming.

He waited, motionless against a collapsed stretch of wall, so similar to the stones around him that I walked within three steps of him without noticing. It was the sound - a light, metallic clinking, almost musical - that made me turn my head. Something hung against his chest, held by a thicker strip of bandage than the rest, catching my lamp's light in a way the sand never could.

A lamp. Small, dark, its narrow neck half-wrapped in cloth, as though someone, long ago, had wanted to stop it from breathing.

He lunged at me before I could make a single move. I remember mostly the weight of his arm against my shoulder, the sand that filled my mouth as I fell, and the blade I drove in without thinking, more from reflex than courage. He collapsed all at once, like the others, in that same cloud of fine dust that smelled of hot stone and time.

But this time, when the dust settled, the lamp was gone.

I stayed a long while on my knees in the sand, searching, hands trembling, refusing to believe it. It had slipped somewhere, or dissolved along with him, or had never truly existed outside my exhaustion. I returned to the sanctuary that night with a taste of defeat I hadn't felt in a long time.

Ashkar, however, didn't seem disappointed when I told him.

"You saw it. That's already more than many can say."

"It slipped away from me," I answered, my voice harsher than I meant it to be.

"It slips away from no one by accident. It still chooses, even reduced to what it has become. Sarheed believed he had locked me forever inside a dead object. He never understood that a thread, even cut, keeps the memory of the hand that wove it. That lamp recognizes patience when it meets it. It won't be taken by the first hand that comes along, nor even the tenth. It waits for the one who will keep coming back regardless."

I didn't know, that night, whether those words were meant to comfort me or were an admission that he himself didn't know how much longer it would take. But something in his voice had changed - a little less caution, perhaps, or a little more trust.

"Don't count the nights or the fights. Just keep facing whoever crosses your path. The day one of them falls and the lamp stays in your hands without slipping away, you will know it before I even need to tell you."

I left before dawn, as always, with a brand new tale for Kais and another, far truer one, that I kept whole for myself alone. That night, for the first time, I didn't have to force myself to believe I would eventually succeed.
