The sun bled over the horizon like a wound across the sky, setting the sandstone walls of the Chittorgarh fort aflame in hues of gold and crimson. Wind whispered through the jharokhas and carved lattice balconies, carrying with it the scent of marigolds and ash. It was an hour when the veil between day and night fluttered like a silken scarf caught on thorns, uncertain of its place in time.
Princess Meera of Mewar stood at the edge of the palace terrace, her eyes tracing the outline of the distant Thar Desert. Her anklets chimed softly as she leaned against the carved marble railing, the pearls in her braid catching firelight like fallen stars. She was a vision draped in rose-pink silk, her gaze stormier than the monsoon sky, and yet quieter than the sands that swallowed the horizon.
"He sings again, Princess," said Chanda, her handmaiden, entering with a tray of rosewater.
Meera turned her face slightly, her voice a murmur. "Does he?"
"Every night. Beneath the banyan tree outside the stables. The guards say he sings to the moon."
Meera let out a soft, nearly imperceptible breath. For three nights now, she had heard the distant strains of music drifting across the palace courtyards — a voice unlike any other, velvet and fire. It haunted her dreams and lingered like perfume on old silk.
The poet was a slave. A captive brought from the defeated kingdom of Malwa. His name was Veer — the irony of it not lost on anyone, for he was once a soldier, now shackled with bronze cuffs, his tongue freer than his limbs.
Meera had never seen him up close. But his voice held something that pulled at the marrow of her bones — a sorrow that matched her own, though her cage was gilded.
She had never been free. Not truly.
Later that evening, under the guise of stargazing, Meera slipped from the women's quarters with Chanda close behind. Draped in a modest veil, she moved like a whisper through the palace's rear gardens, where peacocks roamed like jeweled ghosts.
She found him there, as she had guessed. Beneath the banyan tree, lit by moonlight and the dying glow of a lantern. He was singing to the stars, his eyes closed, one palm pressed against his chest.
His voice wove tales into the wind — stories of broken cities and eternal love, of rivers that remembered their dead, of fire that wept for what it consumed.
Meera froze.
Veer opened his eyes.
They met hers.
He did not bow, nor tremble. His gaze was unflinching, filled with a strange kind of reverence and defiance — like he had expected her, not as a princess, but as an echo.
"I know that song," she whispered, stepping closer.
He rose slowly. "You remember it?"
"I dreamt it."
A silence passed between them — heavy, pregnant with something unspoken. A memory neither had lived, yet both felt as though it were carved in their bones.
She looked at his hands — scarred, calloused, made for war, now tamed by art.
"Where did you learn that song?" she asked.
He stepped forward, close enough that she could see the faint bruise at his temple, a gift from a careless guard. "From a dream. A woman in red sang it to me, beneath a dying tree."
Her breath caught.
The desert winds stirred, lifting the hem of her veil like a lover's hand.
That night, a thread pulled taut between a princess born of fire and a slave born of chains. A song reawakened. A memory stirred from dust.
The sands beneath their feet did not know yet — but destiny had begun to burn anew.