The city of Ashara did not sleep the night Arman ibn Sahel died.
Smoke still clung to the execution square long after the crowd had scattered, and the stones—washed by servants until their hands bled—refused to lose their darkened stains. No fire had burned there in the ordinary sense. Whatever had happened at dawn had left something behind, something the city could feel but not name.
Lady Zafira did not return to her chambers.
Instead, she moved through the palace corridors like a shadow that knew the way. Torches bowed as she passed, their flames shrinking to nervous embers. Guards avoided her eyes. Even those loyal to the Sultan felt an unspoken unease in her presence, as if some invisible mark followed her footsteps.
She reached the western archive just before midnight.
The bronze doors stood ajar.
That alone was impossible.
The western archive was sealed by decree—no entry without three keys, each held by a different office. Zafira touched the door. It was warm, as though recently opened, or as though the stone itself had a pulse.
Inside, chaos reigned.
Scrolls lay unfurled across the floor. Shelves had cracked and split, their contents spilled like wounded birds. Ink bled across parchment, words rearranging themselves slowly, deliberately.
History was rewriting.
Zafira closed the door behind her and pressed her back against it, steadying her breath. She had known this would happen. Arman had warned her—had planned for it.
She crossed the room and knelt beside a scroll she recognized at once: The Founding of Ashara, a text older than the Sultan's line. Where it once spoke of divine favor and rightful conquest, new sentences emerged, their ink darker, angrier.
The kingdom was not chosen. It was borrowed.
Zafira's fingers trembled.
A whisper brushed her ear.
"You see now."
She did not scream. She had promised herself she would not.
Arman stood near the far wall, whole and unburned, his silver eyes dimmer than before but unmistakably alive. Yet something about him was wrong—his shadow fell in two directions, and the air around him shimmered faintly, as if he were standing in more than one moment at once.
"You're dead," Zafira said quietly.
"Yes," Arman replied. "And no."
He stepped closer, his feet making no sound. "The execution severed me from the present, not from existence. The oath needed blood. Mine was… sufficient."
Zafira rose to her feet. Anger surged through the fear. "You let them kill you."
"I let history believe it," he corrected. "That belief is the lock. What comes next requires a key."
He gestured toward the scrolls. "The Sultan thinks power lies in controlling records. Laws. Memory. He never understood that memory resists cages."
Zafira followed his gaze—and then she felt it.
A presence.
Not Arman. Not the city.
Something deeper stirred beneath the palace, ancient and impatient. The floor shuddered softly, as if responding to a name spoken long ago.
"The Covenant is waking," she whispered.
Arman nodded. "And when it fully opens, Ashara will have to choose what it truly is—a kingdom built on fear, or one built on truth."
Footsteps echoed in the corridor outside. Armored. Urgent.
"The Sultan's men," Zafira said.
Arman's form flickered. "They cannot see me. But they can see you."
He placed something in her hand—a ring, cold and heavy, etched with the same forbidden runes that had bound him that morning.
"When the time comes," he said, voice fading, "burn the lie."
The doors burst open.
Zafira turned to face the guards, her expression calm, the ring hidden in her fist, the weight of centuries settling onto her shoulders.
Above them, in the highest tower of Ashara, the Sultan awoke from a dream he would never forget—of blue fire, broken crowns, and a woman standing where his throne should be.
And beneath the city, the ash remembered its oath.