I kept seeing the same name: Sol. It ran through every page like a vein. I skimmed the worst parts, but the ending hooked and held me.
History spoke of nineteen Sols; four had apparently escaped the slaughter.
The numbers wouldn't let go. I tried stitching them to what I knew: I'm Sol. My family on Earth was four. It felt like a reach—something I didn't want to believe—but the math kept whispering: nineteen, fifteen… four missing.
Could I be one of the missing Sols?
The last lines said they executed everyone. No mercy. No struggle. And still—Al-Saif wrote they could have won. So why didn't the Sols fight? Why close the gates, bow the head, and let the blade do the speaking?
I ran my thumb along the margin and felt where the quill had bitten the page. On the word mercy the nib dug deeper, leaving a ridge you could read with your skin. There was a faint brown smear over won, a place a hand had hesitated—ink dragged by the side of a finger. The journal smelled of lamp oil and old smoke; candlewax had fallen in a teardrop that hardened on the spine. Even his silence had weight.
Why hide—and then die?
It didn't make sense if power was what mattered. It didn't make sense if survival was the point. But the tone of the last paragraph taught me something uglier than the blood on the floor: everyone despised the Sols. Everyone except Al-Saif. He wrote like a man ordered to call a murder peace, with the light of the goddess of Sol trapped above him, watching.
I closed the journal. The paper rasped under my palm. The numbers stayed open in my head. Nineteen. Fifteen. Four. I wanted the coincidence to be a lie. I wanted my grief to be ordinary, not an equation someone else started.
But the ink was dry—and it knew my name.
Before I could close the chest, a heavy footstep hit the mud outside the tent. The canvas shivered. The sound went straight through me.
A tall soldier pushed through the flap—no crest, no colors, just a plain tabard and a face carved by bad weather. He didn't speak at first. Three strides and his hand clamped my shoulder.
"Come along, boy. You're coming with me. You—thief."
His voice was ragged, but the words landed clean. It was over. Every warning I'd been given didn't deserve the breath it cost.
He hauled me upright. I didn't fight. There was no point.
"I'm taking you to them," he snickered, breath sour with old wine. "They'll know exactly what to do with you."
Daylight slapped my eyes. Sun hammered the canvas rows; heat lifted the stink of oil and thin soup. Mud sucked at our boots as he dragged me toward the village, cutting through lines of tethered horses and stacked shields, past the last cookfires and out along the rutted road.
Soldiers we passed flicked their eyes over me and then away—quick, mean pleasure in some, thin relief in others. A few even breathed out, light as a laugh, grateful it was me and not them. No one spoke. That was its own kind of consent.
My thoughts ran rampant about how I was going to die—torture or a hanging. We stopped at what felt like the last place I'd ever see. He threw me to the ground and laughed, more mock than humor.
"It was nice meeting you."
Then he slammed me into the door of what looked like an abandoned tavern. My face bounced off warped boards; breath tore out of me like someone had opened my ribs. I coughed and dragged for air while my palms raked through splinters and glass. Cuts lit up. Blood made the dust sticky.
Light pushed in through shattered windows in hard, dusty bars. It landed on a counter heaped with broken bottles and an empty rack like ribs behind it. Tables slumped, legs kicked out. Chairs were just wreckage. Cobwebs sagged thick as old curtains. The place smelled of sour ale and wood that had stayed wet too long—like a mouth that never closed.
A voice rose—high, sing-song, wrong in a way my bones remembered. My heart didn't just kick; it bolted.
"Look what the cat dragged in~"
Footsteps skimmed the glass—light, unhurried—coming from a side door by the bar. The glow caught the hem of black robes first. Then she stepped into it.
White mask. Mouth cut wide and sewn with red thread into a grin that never blinked. Her head tipped too far, like a hinge over-turned. The pitch of her voice leaned sweet and came back sour.
Naqra.
She rocked on her heels as if the floor were a toy. Glass whispered under each shift. Tap—tap—one finger touched the mask where a cheek should be, coaching the grin to hold. A bright little giggle escaped—too clean for this ruin, too clean for what she had done.
My throat closed. The room snapped into two rooms—the tavern now, and the chamber then. Leather biting wrists. Lanterns breathing. Luca's breath catching as he tried not to make a sound. The tiny, animal noise he made when the shear closed. I tasted metal.
"Mm~ look at you," she lilted, delighted at the way I flinched. She crouched until those red stitches hovered inches from my face and hummed a tune that snagged like a broken spring.
"New boy… new noise." Another giggle, sharp as a pin. "Wait."
Her head turned almost ninety degrees, like she was listening to a thought inside my skull. "I've seen you. I don't forget pretty things~"
She rose in one smooth pull and lifted me by the back of the neck, one-handed. Fingers small. Grip absolute. My feet found nothing. Panic spat sparks through my limbs; they didn't catch. Somewhere inside the panic was a chair and a boy who would not scream.
"Qassi~ does this boy look familiar to you?" she sang—still staring straight into my eyes, as if I were the one who would answer.
My heart lurched, then thundered so hard it hurt. The air went cold.
Footsteps answered from the same doorway: slow, certain, measuring the room before it bothered to enter. A figure stepped into the light. The mask was the same as the night my life ended—white plane, a cross of gold stitches running from brow to chin, splitting silence down the middle.
Qassi.