The morning after the storm had the quietness of a dream that refused to end.
No wind stirred. No bird sang. The mansion stood still, wrapped in its own silence, like an old temple remembering its prayers. Only the garden breathed — faintly, cautiously — as though afraid the world might wake again into chaos.
And there, among the pale lilies and the whispering grass, Maya sat.
The iron bench beneath her was cold, painted white once, though the paint had long since flaked away. Around her, the air held the scent of rain and dust, faint traces of a night that had torn and then rebuilt the world. She sat without movement, without sound, her diary closed beside her — a silent witness to what had been spoken and what had been lost.
Before her, the garden pond shimmered faintly under the gray light. Its surface was still — so still that the faintest tremor of her breath could have broken it. But she did not breathe deeply. She did not wish to disturb it. She simply sat, her hands folded neatly on her lap, her gaze fixed on the small, half-finished sketch resting on her knees.
It was the face of a boy.
A face she drew again and again — each line exact, each shadow repeated until perfection turned to ritual.
Arib.
The name no longer carried pain, nor longing, nor warmth. It was only a sound that existed somewhere in the hollow of her mind, an echo with no echo in return. Yet her hands remembered the shape of his eyes, the curve of his lips, the softness of his hair falling over his forehead. Memory was a habit her body could not unlearn, even when the soul had stopped listening.
A breeze passed faintly through the garden, stirring the edges of her drawing.
She placed a gloved hand upon the paper, pressing it flat again, and resumed the stroke of her pencil. The graphite whispered softly against the page — shhhh, shhhh — like the hush of a distant tide. Each mark deepened the illusion of life upon the paper. Each mark confirmed that the life itself was gone.
Behind her, quiet footsteps approached.
One by one, her brothers entered the garden — Fahad first, then Fahim, Fahan, and the twins. Their clothes still carried traces of ash and dust. Their faces bore the marks of the night's battle, bruises fading into quiet awe. None of them spoke at first. They stood at a distance, uncertain, watching the girl who no longer belonged to their understanding of the world.
Maya did not turn.
The sound of footsteps on gravel stopped beside the bench.
Fahad spoke first, voice rough and low, as if afraid the air might fracture at the sound of it. "You're… here."
She said nothing.
His eyes drifted to the sketch in her hands, to the soft, patient movements of her fingers. "You've drawn him again."
Still, no answer.
The others gathered near, hesitant. They did not dare sit beside her; they only folded themselves onto the ground a few steps away — not near enough to touch her shadow, but close enough that their presence might be felt if she allowed it. They watched her hand move — steady, precise, tireless — shaping a face they had never seen, but all somehow feared.
Fahim whispered, "She doesn't stop. She's been here since dawn."
Maya's pencil paused for a moment. Then it continued, smooth and exact.
She did not look at him. She did not acknowledge time.
Fahan, his arm still in a sling, leaned slightly forward. "Why him, Maya? Why always him?"
There was no answer. Only the sound of graphite against paper, the rhythm of something ancient and automatic. A ritual, not an act.
The brothers exchanged glances. The silence pressed around them like a second air.
Fahish finally murmured, "Maybe she doesn't remember us..."
Maya's eyes flicked up — briefly, coldly.
Her gaze passed over them like the sweep of moonlight over gravestones.
She looked, but she did not see. And then her eyes lowered again to the drawing.
The line of the jaw, the curve of the cheek. The shadow beneath the chin. The faintest trace of a smile that once had meant something.
The brothers fell silent.
Time in the garden did not move as it should. Minutes and hours merged, dissolved into the quiet rustle of leaves and the faint hum of the bees that dared to return. The flowers stood tall again after the storm, their petals washed clean by the night's rain. But they, too, seemed subdued — as if even the blooms were holding their breath in her presence.
Mahi watched from the veranda.
Her hands clasped the wooden railing so tightly that her knuckles whitened.
Her lips trembled with words she could not speak. She wanted to call out to her daughter, to run down the steps, to wrap her arms around that small, still figure. But the memory of that night — the scream, the flinch, the words "Don't touch me!" — stopped her like a wall of glass. Love had become a danger too.
So she stayed where she was, her tears silent, her prayers unspoken.
Maya's drawing grew more complete.
She shaded the corner of the eye, softened the line of the mouth, traced the faint scar that only she could remember. When she finished, she stared at it for a long time, as though trying to determine whether it had changed from the hundreds she had drawn before.
It hadn't. It was identical.
Always the same. Always perfect. Always lifeless.
With a soft movement, she tore the page from her diary. The sound — rrrriip — was the only thing that dared disturb the garden. She folded the paper neatly, pressed it once against her palm, and placed it beside her on the bench. The wind picked at its corner, trying to lift it away, but she pressed it down again.
Then she began another.
Fahad shifted uneasily. "Maya, stop. Please. Enough."
Her pencil did not pause.
Fahan's voice broke next, quiet but desperate. "You'll lose yourself."
Her hand moved faster, the lines darker now, the strokes urgent yet detached — as if some unseen command was guiding her. A soft tremor ran through her fingers, but she didn't notice. The air around her seemed to darken slightly, shadows gathering behind her shoulders like waiting wings.
"Maya," Fahim said, rising halfway to his feet, "he's gone. Let him rest."
The pencil snapped.
The sound was sharp, final, echoing faintly through the still garden.
Maya froze. The broken half of the pencil fell onto her lap, rolling slowly before landing on the ground. She looked at it — not in anger, not in sadness — merely as one observes the ending of an action. Then, with the same detached calm, she reached into her diary and drew out another pencil.
Her brothers said nothing more.
Minutes stretched into hours. The sunlight drifted across the garden, changing color — pale gold to white, white to amber. The shadows of the trees grew long, touching her feet, retreating again as the day began to fade. She did not move except to draw. Her body remained as still as the marble angel that stood at the edge of the pond — the statue carved centuries ago by someone who had also believed that beauty could defy time.
By evening, the bench beside her was covered in drawings.
Faces, eyes, hands — each a fragment of a boy who no longer existed.
Some perfect, some incomplete. All identical.
Fahad rose at last. "Come inside, Maya. The night's falling."
Her eyes lifted once toward the fading sky. The color there meant nothing to her.
She gathered the pages silently and laid them in a careful stack upon the bench. Then she rose, slow and fluid, her black attire catching the dim light. For a moment, the dying sun touched her face — a soft gold that should have warmed her skin, but did not.
She turned without a word and began to walk toward the mansion.
The brothers followed, silent, keeping their distance as always. They moved like shadows behind her — uncertain guardians of a girl who no longer needed guarding. When she reached the veranda steps, Mahi stepped aside instinctively, her heart trembling in her chest. Maya passed her without a glance.
In her room, the curtains remained drawn.
The air smelled faintly of paper and ink, of long nights spent in silence.
She placed the drawings on the table one by one, arranging them like relics. Then she took one and pinned it to the wall above her bed. The eyes of the sketch seemed to look back at her, gentle and knowing — but she felt nothing.
She sat upon the edge of her bed and opened her diary.
Her writing filled the pages like rows of ghosts — silent, endless, disciplined.
No emotion marked her words, no tremor betrayed feeling. Each line was a record of existence, not of life.
Outside, the garden glowed faintly under the moonlight.
The wind touched the folded papers still lying on the bench, scattering a few into the pond. They floated there, faces dissolving slowly into water, ink bleeding like veins spreading into darkness.
From her window, Maya watched them.
Her eyes followed the slow movement of the paper drifting across the surface — not as a mourner, not as a lover, not as one remembering — but as one observing a law of nature: that everything drawn by hand must someday return to water and vanish.
Her brothers stood at the garden's edge, watching too.
None of them spoke. None dared to approach her again.
They only stood, like sentinels at the gate of something sacred and lost.
The night deepened. The world quieted.
Maya turned away from the window and blew out the lamp. Darkness filled the room — soft, absolute. She lay down upon her bed, eyes open, unfocused, fixed on the faint outline of the drawing on her wall.
The face of Arib watched her through the dark.
She did not blink. She did not dream.
Outside, the papers sank into the pond one by one, until nothing remained.
And the garden — that quiet garden where she had drawn him again and again — grew still once more, waiting for a new dawn that she would neither greet nor feel.
For Maya, the world had already ended.
What remained was only motion — the quiet repetition of a life that no longer carried life within it.
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