*"If you walk where winds forget to blow,
If silence lies beneath your toe,
Look not for riches, shade, or tree—
But for a petal watching thee.
She does not speak, but she will see
The longing you pretend to be.
And if your soul is not yet numb,
She'll bloom again, for you, alone."*
"Title: To the One Who Finds Her Next, extract of Ode to the Rose in the Sand by Assim K. Tarik."
The poem ended like a breath drawn too deep—a hush before revelation. No dedication. Just an old, faded page tucked inside a bound collection titled Ode to the Rose in the Sand. It was Assim K. Tarik's first published book—or rather, the first he dared to print himself. A tale of a wanderer returning to a homeland he no longer recognised, stitched together with poems like this one. Most readers would take it for an elegant piece of speculative fiction—romantic, nostalgic, and a little strange.
They wouldn't see what hid behind the metaphors. Not yet. He had not written it to be understood. He had written it because the words came, because he could not sleep until they were let out.
Assim K. Tarik sat in the heart of his quiet library, half-shadowed by morning light, behind a narrow desk carved from windwood, a tree said to remember every storm it ever weathered. Shelves curled around him like the ribs of an ancient beast—wooden, creaking, alive with paper and possibility. Dust clung to beams like sleeping ghosts. He, its sole keeper, claimed no fame, no lineage of sorcerers, and no noble pursuit of arcane might. He called himself a writer. A magician of words. A weaver of unseen threads.
His hand hovered over a fresh page, ink shimmering faintly on the nib of his quill. The book was done, but the feeling wasn't. Not inside him.
Assim had always been a mystery—even to himself. Once, as a child, he had been diagnosed with what the physicians termed a "mana distortion disease"—a wild and uncontainable storm of magic inside him. But no spell could he ever cast. No wand accepted his touch. Magic schools turned him away with polite pity. His family mourned the dream of magic. But as the years passed, so too did that mourning.
But the ailment was a misdiagnosis.
The truth was stranger.
Assim didn't lack magic. He simply carried a different kind. One unrecognised by the rigid systems of formal spellwork. His mana didn't respond to wands, glyphs, or potions—but it listened to ink. It stirred when he wrote. His pulse quickened with poetry. Words, not willpower, shaped his magic.
At first, he thought it was imagination. Then came the books. Stories that read differently to different readers. Characters who spoke to readers in dreams. Emotions that clung long after a page had been turned.
He began to suspect. Then to believe.
This isn't a sickness. It's a language the world forgot.
And so he began to write. Assim turned to literature—to stories, to forgotten books, to languages both magical and mundane.
Not to cure himself—but to understand. Every book is a key. Every poem a seed. Somewhere between fiction and ink, he was building something. A self. A spell. A library no one else could write but everyone could read.
He wrote quietly, published quietly, and lived quietly. His books, when read, told different tales to different people—never the same story twice. But only a few ever read them.
He was content with mystery, the ink of his words reaching where his mana could not.
Assim lived upstairs, above the shelves, where the wind could whisper through cracked glass and the ghosts of unfinished poems paced like nervous cats. His routine was simple: wake before dawn, transcribe dreams, brew milk tea, and then sit in his worn chair at the front desk and pretend to be a normal bookseller.
But even on days when no one visited, he kept the library open. For one never knew who the books might be waiting for.
Today, someone came.
A soft chime announced the door's hesitant push. The woman who entered looked uncertain—not of herself, but of the place. Her cloak was travel-worn, her boots dusty, and her hair was tied in loose braids threaded with a pale ribbon.
"I didn't expect this place to exist," she murmured, more to the air than to Assim.
Assim looked up from a leather-bound journal. He rarely offered greetings. Most visitors who found the library did not come by accident.
"Places that aren't meant to exist are the most necessary," he replied.
She walked slowly between the shelves, trailing her fingers across spines as though listening for something not spoken aloud. "Your books don't have summaries. No titles on the spines. No genre, no blurb. How is anyone supposed to know what's inside?"
Assim smiled faintly. "They're not supposed to."
"Then how do people choose?"
"The right book chooses its reader."
She gave him a sideways glance. "Is that your way of admitting you're a terrible marketer?"
"I'm an excellent liar," he answered. "But I never lie to the books."
She raised a brow but said nothing. Her gaze eventually landed on a slim volume resting beneath a crooked wooden sign that read: First Wounds, First Words.
"What's this one about?" she asked.
Assim hesitated. That book had been the first to hum softly in the presence of another. It always drew in those who weren't looking for answers but for mirrors.
"A journey", he said. "Of a man who returns to a place that no longer remembers him. Of a flower that shouldn't bloom. Of voices in sand and silence."
She picked it up, opened it to the middle, and blinked.
Assim watched carefully. Her lips moved slightly, reading, and then she frowned. "This is… not what you said."
"It wouldn't be," he said softly. "Not for you."
She closed the book. Her expression was unreadable. "So you write the same story over and over, and somehow it changes?"
"No," he said. "I write what I must. What they see is their own secret."
She stared at him for a long moment. Then, quietly, "Are you a magician?"
Assim looked down at his ink-stained fingers. "No, a humble writer, a magician of words if you must," he said.
She didn't press further, considering him to be either a high-flying con artist or a powerful magician. Instead, she placed the book into a cloth satchel and dropped three silver tokens on the desk. "I don't know what this is," she said. "But it feels like it's something I lost before I was born."
Assim nodded, fingers brushing the tokens. "That's how you know it's yours."
When she left, the chime rang again—softer this time, like a whisper threading between realities.
He returned to his chair, picked up his pen, and began to write again.