The Southern Chamber lay beneath the palace like a secret the earth was trying to keep. Behind barred doors and down stone steps worn smooth by countless feet, thirty women waited in the half-light of a world that had forgotten the sun.
All marked. All silent. All erased.
They did not speak—not because they couldn't, but because words had become meaningless in a place where nothing they said could change anything that mattered. What was the point of names when you were all the same thing now? What was the point of stories when the ending was always identical?
The rules were simple enough to memorize, brutal enough to break spirits:
One cup of water a day, and a meal of bread and thin soup. No questions. No talking to guards. Veil your face. Kneel when spoken to. Exist without existing.
Amal watched a girl—she couldn't have been more than sixteen, with eyes like bruised flowers—break the first rule on her second day. She asked for food, her voice cracking with thirst and hunger and the desperate hope that mercy might still exist in this place.
They dragged her away by the ankles, her fingernails scraping against stone as she tried to find purchase on the smooth floor. Her cries echoed through the chamber until they were swallowed by distance and locked doors.
She never came back.
The lesson was clear: hope was a luxury they could not afford. Compliance was the only currency that mattered now.
* * *
On the seventh night, as the other women slept the sleep of the defeated, Amal dreamed of freedom.
She stood in a forest where the trees grew tall enough to touch the sky, their leaves whispering secrets in a language she had never learned but somehow understood. A bird landed on her shoulder—not the dusty sparrows of the city, but something magnificent with feathers that shimmered like oil on water.
"Eight is your number," it whispered in her ear, its voice like wind through silver bells.
She woke shaking, her heart hammering against her ribs like a caged thing trying to break free. Around her, the other women slept on, their faces slack with exhaustion and surrender. Most had long since given up any thought of escape, any dream of return. They had learned to survive by becoming ghosts, by existing without disturbing the air around them.
But Amal had not given up. Not yet.
That night, she began to study the guard's pattern with the intensity of a scholar memorizing sacred texts. Four steps to the left. Pause. Turn. Four steps to the right. Pause. Turn. She etched the rhythm into her memory until it became as familiar as her own heartbeat.
On the thirteenth night, she made her first attempt at freedom.
She had stolen a rusted spoon two days earlier, slipping it into her undergarments when the guards brought their meager evening meal. For hours each night, she had worked at the mortar holding the bars of the back window, scraping away ancient cement with patience born of desperation.
At midnight, when the guard was lighting his cigarette and the other women were lost in dreams of better lives, she slipped through the gap she had created. The night air hit her face like a baptism, cool and clean and infinite with possibility.
She ran barefoot across the mud-caked stones of the outer courtyard, her feet finding purchase on surfaces slick with dew. Thorns bit into her soles, drawing blood that left dark traces on the pale stones, but she didn't stop. She couldn't stop. Freedom was a taste in the air, a promise just beyond the palace walls.
But her scarf—the same one her mother had embroidered with trembling fingers years ago—caught on a branch near the outer wall. She tried to untangle it, her fingers shaking with urgency, but the fabric held fast.
Too slow. Always too slow.
The guard's boot landed between her shoulder blades with the force of a hammer blow, driving her to the ground. Her face hit the earth, dirt filling her mouth, her nose, her eyes. The taste of freedom turned to ash.
They didn't speak. There was nothing to say.
They beat her with methodical efficiency—one blow to her ribs, another to her back, a third that made her kidneys scream. Then they heated the branding iron again and pressed it to her wrist, burning the Mark deeper, darker, making it permanent in ways that went beyond the physical.
This time, Amal screamed.
Not from the fire, but from the knowledge that she had almost—almost—tasted freedom. That for one perfect moment, she had been a girl running toward her own life instead of away from it.
They dragged her back to the cell and threw her onto the straw mat like a discarded doll. She lay there in the darkness, listening to the moaning of the other women, the echo of rats in the walls, the guards laughing about something she would never understand.
And when dawn came, when the call to prayer echoed faintly from the farthest minaret, Amal whispered into the darkness:
"Seven more."
Seven more attempts. Seven more chances to reclaim the life that had been stolen from her. Seven more reasons to hope in a place where hope was the most dangerous thing of all.
The Mark on her wrist throbbed with each beat of her heart, but beneath the pain, something else stirred. Something that burned brighter than any iron, something that could not be branded or broken or bought.
The darkness in the Southern Chamber was not the merciful darkness of sleep or the gentle darkness of evening prayers. It was a living thing, malevolent and hungry, that clung to the walls like a curse made manifest. It seeped into skin and lungs and eyes, transforming the very air into something thick and suffocating. Amal had learned, during those first terrible weeks, that closing her eyes did not banish the dark—it simply made her dreams darker, more twisted, more haunted by the faces of women who had already given up hope.
The chamber breathed with the accumulated despair of generations. It smelled of iron and sweat, of old blood that had seeped so deeply into the stone that no amount of scrubbing could remove it. There was the faint rot of forgotten cloth, the sour tang of unwashed bodies, and underneath it all, the metallic taste of fear that seemed to coat everything like dust.
A single torch sputtered in the hallway beyond the bars, its flame dancing with the arrhythmic spasms of something dying. It offered no warmth, only the mockery of light—enough to see the despair in each other's faces, not enough to find hope in the shadows.
Thirty-two women shared this space that had been designed for perhaps half that number. They sat in silence most days, too broken to speak, too tired to dream, too defeated to remember what their voices had once sounded like when they had belonged to themselves.
Each day bled into the next with the inexorable persistence of water wearing away stone. They were awakened before Fajr by the slam of iron doors and the bark of nameless guards whose faces had become as interchangeable as the stones in the walls. Sometimes they were yanked by the wrist—always the marked wrist, always hard enough to reopen barely healed wounds—and ordered to clean the outer halls of the palace with rags that had been used for the same purpose by countless women before them.
Other times, they were marched to the kitchens to peel vegetables until their fingers blistered and bled, or to the stables to scrub the blood from execution blocks with brushes that left their knuckles raw and torn. And sometimes—perhaps worst of all—they were simply left to rot in the dark, forgotten like secrets that had outlived their usefulness.
When Amal attempted her second escape, it had been driven more by instinct than hope, more by the animal need to run than by any rational plan. She had found the sharpened rib of a bird that had somehow died in their cell—a sparrow, perhaps, that had flown too close to their particular corner of hell. Working in the absolute darkness of the hours before dawn, she had twisted it into the hinges of the outer vent that led to a waste chute, her fingers becoming intimate with rust and decay.
The stench had nearly made her vomit—human waste and kitchen scraps and something else, something sweet and rotten that her mind refused to identify. But she had held her breath and crawled through the narrow passage like a snake shedding its skin, imagining with each forward movement that she was leaving the old Amal behind in the darkness.
She made it to the fifth pillar near the southern gardens before a boot caught her ribs with the force of a battering ram. The impact drove the air from her lungs and sent her sprawling across the manicured grass where nobles walked in daylight, her blood darkening the soil where flowers grew fat and fragrant.
They dragged her back by the hair, her scalp screaming as strands tore loose in their fists. Her face carved a furrow in the earth as they pulled her back toward the chamber, back toward the darkness that waited for her like a jealous lover.
This time, they branded the Mark deeper, the iron glowing white-hot in the brazier's heart. She did not scream—had promised herself she would never give them that satisfaction again—but the skin of her wrist sizzled like meat on an open flame, and the stench of her own burning flesh mingled with the torch smoke until she could taste her own destruction.
"She still doesn't cry," a guard muttered to his companion, his voice filled with something that might have been admiration if it hadn't been tinged with disgust. "This one is stone."
They starved her for three days after that. The others watched from across the chamber, some with pity in their eyes, others too broken to feel anything beyond the dull ache of their own survival. Amal sat in the corner, her back against the wall, and felt her body consuming itself from the inside. But she did not beg. She did not weep. She simply waited, counting her heartbeats like a miser counts coins.
In those early months, as the seasons changed beyond the barred windows they could not see, Amal began to notice the rhythm of things. The palace, she realized, was like a vast clock, its movements as predictable as the tide. She memorized the footsteps of guards before prayer times, learned to distinguish between the heavy tread of the day shift and the lighter steps of those who worked the night watch. She noticed how one guard limped slightly at dusk, favoring his left leg, and how another always paused to light a cigarette at the same spot in the corridor.
She kept her eyes down and her ears wide, absorbing the gossip of kitchen maids who thought the marked women were too broken to understand or remember. She learned which nobles passed by at which hour, their silk robes whispering secrets as they walked. She memorized the sound of different keys, the creak of different doors, the way voices carried differently in stone corridors depending on the weather.
Knowledge, she had discovered, was a form of power. And power, even in its smallest forms, was something she could hoard like bread.
The women shared almost nothing at first. They were strangers, all of them, broken in different ways but united by the Mark that had erased their individual histories. Fear made them suspicious of each other, and despair made them selfish. They hoarded their meager rations, their small comforts, their private griefs like treasures that might lose their value if shared.
But gradually, inevitably, proximity began to work its alchemy. Three faces emerged from the mass of suffering like stars becoming visible as the eye adjusts to darkness.
Sabria, the eldest, carried herself with the ghost of dignity. Her fingers were thread-thin and delicate, marked by decades of intricate needlework, and silver streaked her temples like paths traced by tears. She had once been an embroiderer for the court, creating garments so beautiful that queens had wept to wear them. Her voice, when it came, was soft and careful, filled with metaphors that transformed their harsh reality into something almost bearable.
Najwa was younger than Amal, perhaps eighteen, with the sharp tongue and flame-bright heart of someone who had not yet learned that resistance was futile. She carried her bruises like war medals, displaying them with a pride that was equal parts defiance and madness. She laughed too easily, as if trying to prove to herself and the world that they had not yet broken her capacity for joy.
And then there was Halima. Silent Halima. The mother. Her son had been taken the day she was marked—torn from her arms by guards who had laughed at her screams. She had not spoken a full sentence since arriving at the palace, but at night, Amal could hear her whispering lullabies to the straw mattress beneath her, her voice cracked and hoarse from crying.
The first real conversation came during laundry duty, when the late autumn rain drummed against the palace walls and the air hung heavy with the promise of winter. Amal and Najwa were bent over steaming buckets in the washing courtyard, the scent of lye stinging their eyes and making their noses run.
"What day is it?" Najwa asked suddenly, scrubbing at a stain.
Amal looked up. "Don't know. Does it matter?"
"Maybe it's my birthday." Najwa's voice was flat. "Hard to tell anymore."
They worked in silence for a while, the only sounds the splash of water and their own breathing.
"How old are you?" Amal asked.
"Twenty. You?"
"Twenty-one."
Najwa glanced at her. "So that's why you're here. The curse thing."
"My father thought so." Amal wrung out a shirt harder than necessary. "Yours?"
"Uncle. Said I had too much mouth."
"Did you?"
"Probably." Najwa almost smiled. "Still do."
More silence. Then Najwa lowered her voice. "You seen the prince?"
"No. You?"
"No. But the guards..." Najwa shook her head. "They get different when someone mentions him. Scared."
"Of what?"
"Don't know. But they say he walks around at night. Alone."
"Maybe he can't sleep either."
Najwa looked at her sharply, then let out a short laugh. "Maybe."
That night, lying on their straw mats, Najwa whispered across the darkness.
"My uncle said I needed breaking." Her voice was quiet, matter-of-fact. "Guess this is what broken looks like."
"You don't seem broken."
"No?" Najwa turned her head toward Amal's voice. "What do I seem like?"
"Angry."
"Good. I'd rather be angry than nothing."
Sabria joined them sometimes during the long hours of cleaning and mending. She would work in silence, her fingers moving with the memory of decades of skill, then speak without looking up.
"I made a robe once for someone important. Took months. Beautiful thing." She paused, threading a needle. "He never wore it. Said it looked like chains to him."
"Rich people," Najwa muttered.
"Rich people have their own prisons," Sabria said quietly. "Just prettier ones."
Amal listened. Always listened. In this place where knowledge was currency and secrets were the only treasure that couldn't be stolen, she hoarded every word, every story, every fragment of information that might someday prove useful.