As Ali and Kamel left the Çatalca Line behind them, and rode deeper into Bulgarian land, the war stopped being an idea and became a physical thing for Kamel—something that pressed against his ribs with every step of the horse.
The words on the sign clung to him. Not as a threat, exactly—more like a seal. As if the border itself had closed behind his back, and now the world had quietly decided for him. A man could ride forward and tell himself he was still free. But the longer he went, the more he felt it: there would be no clean turning around. No undoing this.
This was an invasion. The first war he had ever been truly part of. The Empire stepping forward again—boots, hooves, rifles—testing whether its spine still held.
And with that came a thought he hated for its softness, for the way it crawled into him like sweat beneath his collar.
What if this is wrong?
Ali did not share the doubt. Doubt could not live in him. He lifted his face to the open sky and shouted, his voice bright and fierce, as if the heavens were waiting to be reminded.
"Allāhu akbar! Forward we go!"
The cry carried down the imperial road, bold and unafraid.
Kamel said nothing. He simply rode, eyes forward, hands steady on the reins.
The road itself looked ancient—packed earth over old stone, hardened by centuries of hooves and wheels. In places it widened enough for two carts to pass side by side; in others it narrowed between shallow ditches and low hedges. Dust rose with every step of the horses and hung in the air before settling again like fine ash.
To the right, beyond wheat fields cut short by harvest, lay the small humble village of İzzettin.
Low houses crowded together. Roofs bleached pale by the sun. A small mosque with a thin minaret still visible from the road, as if it were trying to stand on tiptoe and be seen. A narrow dirt track branched off toward it, threading through pasture and small stands of trees.
Until very recently it had been a place of life—nearly a thousand souls, they said. Livestock. Children. Prayer.
Now it was quiet.
The old man's people had been the last to leave. Driven out, they claimed, by the Moss Men.
Kamel felt something twist in him at the thought—not only pity, but a bitterness so familiar it almost tasted like home. He had heard who the villagers were: Crimean Tatars, Muslims who had fled earlier expulsions—driven from their lands by the Russians, pushed across borders like dirt swept off a threshold. They had found a patch of safety in Thrace, built houses, planted fields, made themselves useful and obedient in a place that was not truly theirs—and then history had come again with its boot raised.
First the Russian Slavs, then the Bulgarian Slavs, same people again. Different flags, same pressure. Misfortune with the same face, returning as if it had never left.
Anger tightened Kamel's jaw. His gaze lingered on İzzettin longer than it should have.
He pictured the other scouting group moving toward it on the side roads—men alert, horses careful, eyes searching but still trusting the world to behave according to rules. He hoped, fiercely, that the Moss Men were nothing but rumor: frightened talk, a handful of Bulgarian militia trying to slow an army with superstition and signs.
Yet the stillness was wrong.
No animals moved in the fields. No dogs barked. No smoke rose from chimneys. Even the wind seemed reluctant to pass through the trees, as if the air itself did not want to disturb whatever had settled there. The sun burned hot down upon the land, but the village did not feel warm.
It felt abandoned in a way that went beyond absence.
It was peace without breath.
And then he saw it.
A brief flash—just a heartbeat—like sunlight caught on glass. It came from the bushes near one of the houses, sharp and precise. Gone as quickly as it appeared.
Kamel slowed his horse and raised his spyglass.
Nothing.
Only leaves. Shadow. A bush stirred by wind.
The light did not return.
Still, the unease crawled higher along his spine, a quiet certainty whispering that eyes were upon them. Not the obvious kind. Not watching from the land, but as the land.
Ali's voice cut in, loud and eager. He pointed left, past trees and rolling fields.
"Look there," he said. "Its the German railway."
The line ran parallel to the road at a distance—steel cutting through green, straight and unbroken. German-built, modern, solid. Intact. That alone felt strange. Kamel had heard the rumors too: that the Germans had pulled away suddenly, that their support had vanished like mist. Some blamed German greed for oil in Libya. Others religion. Others British pressure. Kamel had never believed any of it fully.
Why build something so carefully, only to abandon it?
Along the side tracks another patrol kept pace—twelve mounted scouts spaced out cleanly, rifles slung, heads turning as they searched their slice of ground. Beyond them, Kamel knew, there were more: small units fanning along the frontier like the teeth of a comb. The Empire was advancing with its eyes open.
At least, that was the plan. The Çatalca line stretched for approximately twenty five miles, and the farther you pushed, the wider the gaps became.
The imperial road ran straight and firm under hoof, the kind of country generals loved—open farmland, gentle rises, scattered villages, and only thin patches of woodland. Good ground for speed, bad ground for hiding. An ambush here would have to be bold, or stupid.
He spared a thought for the scouts sent north, where the land buckled into darker hills and thicker forest toward the Black Sea—places where a man could disappear within ten paces and a rifle crack could come from anywhere. The south sounded worse in another way: waterlogged ground, broken bridges, slow work under a hard sun.
So Kamel accepted the center without pride. Of the three thrusts, they had drawn the easiest road—and that meant they would also be first to meet whatever waited ahead.
Seeing the other patrol steadied him. They were not alone. The net was holding.
However, the question that had gnawed at Kamel did not vanish so much as thin, stretched out by distance and motion. With every empty farmstead, every fence and wall raised by Muslim hands and left standing without people, the doubt of, if this was right lost its edge. These places reminded him why he was here. Why men rode east instead of staying silent and hungry in the capital.
And then his thoughts drifted farther back, to another land taken, another coast lost.
He remembered Libya.
Not the word on a map, but the place—salt wind off a blue coast, whitewashed walls, nets drying in the sun, the small, ordinary pride of a life that finally felt stable. He had been a simple young man then, recently married, with his first child in his arms and the second already on the way. He fished, traded small goods, carried crates, did whatever a man did to keep a roof steady. He even had a horse—nothing grand, just a tough little animal he kept like a treasure—and enough skill with blade and rifle to be respected without having to boast.
Then the Italians came.
Foreign uniforms, hard voices, rifles held like ownership. They spoke of "security," of "fortifications," of what the Empire now required. One morning it was his village; by evening it belonged to someone else. Men were ordered out at gunpoint. Families were given minutes to gather what they could carry. Anything left behind was simply… taken. A home could become a military post without apology. A life could be uprooted with a gesture.
So he fled—back across the sea with whoever he could keep together.
And in Constantinople his family—his wife, his children, his parents, brothers, sisters, the old ones who moved slowly and the young ones who cried loudly—were crammed into a refugee quarter with thousands of others, surviving on thin soup and borrowed blankets, pride swallowed down because hunger didn't care about pride.
That was why he was here.
By serving—by riding with the scouts—he could send money home. Bread. Medicine. A handful of coins that meant the difference between surviving and quietly vanishing. Perhaps more, if fortune favored him. Land, if the Empire reclaimed it. A house. A future that did not end in a crowded room and an unmarked grave.
So now, as Ali rode beside him, speaking with fire and certainty, Kamel understood where that fury came from—and why so many believed this war to be righteous.
But for him, the pull toward this road ran deeper still.
Back in Constantinople—amid the stench, the hunger, the press of bodies in the refugee quarters—Kamel had watched something else form. Something he had never truly faced before, not even when he had been driven from his first home.
Hatred.
Not the sudden kind that flared and burned out, but a slow, accumulated hatred that settled into people like a disease.
When the warships of the Great Powers had finally withdrawn from the Dardanelles, when their guns no longer loomed over the city and the threat of foreign intervention faded, the restraint went with them. The pressure that had been held down by fear found release.
Kamel saw it spill into the streets.
Christian men were dragged from doorways and beaten where they fell—not for anything they had done that day, but for what they were taken to represent. Women were shoved and cursed, spat on as they tried to flee, their clothing torn, their terror treated as proof of guilt. Even children were not spared—stones hurled at small backs, curses screamed into young faces, hands wrenching them from corners they had believed were safe.
The few Christian holy places that had been allowed in the city quickly became targets. Churches were broken open, their doors smashed, their walls defaced with filth and slogans. Shops were looted in daylight, openly, as if theft itself had become righteous the moment it found an enemy.
For a time, Kamel had tried to stand against it.
He remembered one alley in particular—narrow, dark even at midday—where two young Christian girls had been cornered by a group of men. He remembered stepping between them, heart pounding hard enough to hurt, his voice shaking but loud enough to carry. He remembered the laughter that followed, and then the way it faded when other eyes turned their way. He remembered guiding the girls out, their hands cold in his, their faces frozen in a fear too large for their age.
It did not last.
After that, the Christians disappeared quickly. Boats slipped from the harbors at night. Families left by road with what they could carry. Houses stood empty within weeks.
And the city barely seemed to notice they were gone. Nearly a quarter of its old population had vanished—Christians first, and the Jews with them. The government smoothed it over, spoke of isolated incidents, of minor disturbances swiftly contained. Officially, nothing had happened, and the Entente powers had seemingly accepted that.
The emptied streets filled quickly anyway. Muslim families moved into abandoned rooms. New tenants took over shuttered shops. Life rearranged itself, and the absence was treated as correction rather than loss.
At first, that troubled him deeply.
Then, slowly, he began to listen.
He listened to the Muslims.
To the stories whispered in the dark. To the cries that rose at night when the city could no longer pretend to sleep. Under arches and in courtyards, in mosques thick with sweat and incense, men howled their pain toward the sky.
He remembered the voices most of all.
"Ya Allah, avenge our sons!"
"They defiled my daughter and burned my house!"
"They carved open children—slit their throats like lambs!"
"Infidels must drown in the blood of their own pigs!"
The stories came from everywhere and nowhere—Macedonia, Kosovo, villages whose names had been erased along with their people. Tales of massacres and flight, of women violated and men butchered, of church bells ringing while mosques burned, of neighbors turning into executioners overnight.
Kamel had listened. And he had remembered. Other words as well which hit him hard.
The city spoke endlessly of loss—of an empire gnawed down to the bone by infidels and traitors. In coffeehouses, in mosques, in the alleys choked with refugees, the same argument returned again and again, growing louder with each telling. They said it was the Christians who had done this. The Bulgarians, the Greeks, the Serbs—former subjects who had risen against the order Allah Himself had set upon the world.
Had they been crushed when they first rebelled, people said, had their lands been broken, their men enslaved, their churches torn down and replaced with minarets, none of this would have happened. The Balkans would still kneel. Trade would still flow through Ottoman hands. The borders would not have shrunk, and the streets of Constantinople would not be swollen with beggars and widows.
They said mercy had ruined the Empire. Tolerance had poisoned it. The infidel had been allowed to live too long, to grow too bold, to forget his place. And now he had yet again come with fire and bayonet to take what was never truly his.
If only the wars had been finished properly—if only the land had been made purely Allah's—then Constantinople would still shine as it once had: not merely a city, but the crown of the world, the beating heart of Allah's dominion, a golden proof that Allah favored the House of Osman above all others.
But it was at the mosque—Süleymaniye, the great one—that something in him finally shifted. It was there that the words found their shape, and justification hardened into certainty.
He had gone only for warmth, to escape the rain. The courtyard was packed tight with men: some barefoot on the cold stone, others wrapped in threadbare coats, a few with tarnished medals pinned to sleeves that ended in empty cloth. Refugees, veterans, beggars—faces drawn thin by hunger and fury alike. Beneath the great domes, the imam's voice rose, steady and iron-hard, carrying to every corner of the hall.
"For years," the imam said, "we held our hands open. We spoke to them with patience. We showed them our Book and asked only that they leave us in peace. We did not rush to the sword. We did not answer insult with blood."
A murmur rolled through the crowd.
"And what did they give us in return?" he demanded. "They burned our villages. They drove our families into the roads. They mocked the call of the Adhan while our women fled barefoot through the mud. They took our restraint for weakness. They took our mercy for fear."
His voice rose now, sharp enough to cut.
"The Book is not a charm to soften the hearts of those who spit upon it. It is law. It is command. It is judgment. When patience is answered with fire, when mercy is repaid with chains, then the Book does not forbid the sword—it names it."
He swept his gaze across the hall.
"Are you not men? Are you not believers? How long will you watch others take what is yours while you pretend that silence is virtue? Go, then. Take back what was torn from you. Take their lands, their wealth, their honor—by the right of those who were wronged. This is not cruelty. This is reckoning."
He struck the lectern with his palm.
"The Prophet did not beg forever. He endured—until endurance became humiliation. And when the time came, he rose. So shall you."
The crowd broke as if a dam had failed. Shouts slammed against the stone like blows. Men cried fragments of verses they barely understood. One tore a sword from his belt and lifted it high, his hand shaking with sudden purpose. Another screamed for a march on Sofia, his voice raw—not with faith, but with the need to move, to strike, to make the waiting end.
Then an old scholar rose.
He was small, narrow-shouldered, his beard white and neatly kept, his robe plain and worn thin at the cuffs. He did not shout. He did not raise his arms. He simply waited until the noise ebbed enough for his voice to carry.
"Brothers," he said, calmly, and the word itself seemed to cool the air, "the Book also speaks of restraint. Of patience. Of judgment tempered by mercy. We are not the Almighty. We do not see as He sees. The Book is without error—but we are not. A man who sheds blood believing himself righteous must one day answer for how he read the words that led him there."
A hush spread, uneven and fragile.
"Zeal," the scholar continued, "has destroyed nations as surely as cowardice. Beware that in seeking justice, we do not loose wrath instead. Beware that in claiming Allah's will, we do not mistake our own hunger for His command."
For a brief moment, doubt moved through the crowd like a draft beneath a door—felt, unwelcome, but real.
Then the imam stepped forward again.
He did not rush. He did not shout.
"You speak truth," he said, his voice steady and clear, "and none here would deny it. The Book is perfect. Man is not."
He turned slowly, letting the crowd feel included in the answer.
"And so when the words weigh heavily upon us—when interpretation threatens to divide us—what are we commanded to do?"
He did not wait.
"We are commanded to look to the Prophet himself. To his life. His judgments. His actions."
His voice hardened, gaining an edge.
"Did he not fight when fighting became necessary? Did he not take land when land was denied him? Did he not seize captives when his enemies would have enslaved his people? Was his mercy endless—or did it end when endurance became humiliation?"
A murmur rose, darker now.
"We are not guessing at the meaning," the imam continued. "We are following the example that was set before us. The truth was shown to the unbeliever, and he rejected it. Again and again. And when truth is rejected with fire and chains, then war is not corruption—it is law."
The words fell heavy, deliberate.
"Mercy is not owed to those who have shown none. Patience is not virtue when it becomes self destructive."
The crowd answered him with sound—fists striking stone, boots scraping, breath coming fast and sharp. The old scholar tried to speak again, but the tide had already turned. He was pushed back, not struck, simply erased—his warning swallowed as if it had never been spoken.
Kamel stood among them, feeling the press of bodies, the weight of the dome above, the strange sensation of certainty settling into place like a blade sliding into its sheath.
Then the imam raised a hand.
Silence fell—not slowly, but at once.
His final words came measured, almost gentle, spoken like a man easing a wound he had just opened.
"And to those who still doubt the righteousness of our cause," he said, "let me set your hearts at ease."
A pause.
"Yes. Peace is always possible. We could surrender. We could kneel. Lay down our arms, our pride, our faith—and place the lives of our children in the hands of those who have already shown us what their mercy looks like."
He let that sink in.
"We could gamble everything on the hope that chains will be lighter next time. That the knife will stop at our throats. That our women will be spared. That our people will be allowed to exist quietly beneath foreign rule."
His voice grew colder.
"But you know where that road leads. You have seen it. Italy. Macedonia. Kosovo. Thrace. You have seen the refugees. You have buried the dead."
"To surrender now is not peace. It is erasure. It is the slow death of a people. It is watching your faith mocked, your homes seized, your daughters carried off by men who do not even see you as human."
A ripple of anger surged through the hall.
"So I ask you," he said, louder now, "will you accept rule by such creatures? Will you live on your knees beneath them? Or will you rise—as your fathers rose when they crossed these lands with sword and fire—and decide your fate with your own hands?"
The answer came before he finished speaking.
He pressed on, voice ringing with promise.
"Do not fear death. Death has meaning. Every martyr before you carved a path that you now walk. Their blood was not wasted. Their wars were not empty. And if you fall, you will not fall alone, nor forgotten. You will fall as they did—standing."
The crowd surged, no longer hesitant, no longer divided. Tears streamed down some faces. Others laughed, wild and unsteady. Men clutched one another, or dropped to their knees, or began to move as if marching already lived in their bones.
"Rise," the imam commanded. "Rise and take up arms. March not as scattered men, but as one people. Let Edirne hear your footsteps. Let the enemy learn that we are not finished, not broken, not waiting to be slaughtered."
"For Allah," he cried, "rise and fight!"
After that, what restraint remained didn't bend—it snapped.
The crowd went feral. Sound crushed sound. Men screamed until their throats tore open. Some embraced like brothers already marching to die. Others fell to their knees, sobbing and chanting through clenched teeth. Boots scraped stone—men already moving, already leaving.
This wasn't a gathering.
It was a storm inside stone walls.
Kamel felt it in his spine, in his ribs—when doubt didn't fade but burned away, leaving only heat and direction. He shouted with them, fists clenched, voice gone raw:
"Death to the infidels!"
"Edirne is ours!"
"Drive out the pigs!"
The chants spread like fire over oil, mutating—growing sharper, darker.
"Torch the churches!"
"Take their women—every one!"
"Spill the Christian blood!"
"No priest left breathing!"
"Burn it all!"
"Wipe their seed from the land!"
Kamel flinched, but his mouth stayed open. His voice joined the roar.
He hated it.
Hated the weight of the words. Hated how easily they came. Hated that they no longer pointed at armies or borders, but everywhere—homes, temples, mothers.
The line between sacred and slaughter had dissolved. Someone screamed a prayer. Someone else screamed a curse. And there was no longer any difference between them.
Faces around him had changed. Men wept as they shouted. Others grinned, teeth bared like animals. Joy bloomed where grief had lived. Rage found purpose.
"Blood for blood!"
"No mercy!"
"Leave none behind!"
"Even their children!"
"Cleanse the land!"
He understood then—truly, finally.
This would not stop at soldiers.
It would not stop at men with rifles or flags.
It would fall upon everyone.
Old men. Mothers. Infants.
Church bells would not be spared. Cradles would not be spared.
Only one thing mattered now: who was us, and who was not.
Kamel shouted louder—not because he believed, but because silence felt like stepping in front of a stampede.
The crowd was no longer a crowd.
It was a weapon.
And he was inside it.
That moment changed everything.
This was no longer war.
This was a righteous purge.
And something monstrous had been loosed to see it through.
Now—days later—riding the broken imperial road toward the ruins of a city his people once called their own, he kept returning to the same question, like a tongue probing a sore tooth:
Was it truly Allah who demanded these things—
or only men shouting loud enough to drown out doubt?
The Winchester on his back knocked softly against the leather strap with each step of his horse. American steel. Foreign weight. A reminder that even their rage had been outfitted from outside.
He'd heard the rumors in the capital and along the column: counterfeit money circulating, printed far away; loans that came with invisible strings; rifles arriving through channels everyone pretended not to see—Americans, French, British, each "helping," each profiting, each nudging the Empire like a tired beast toward whichever cliff suited them.
None of it sat right.
Not because he had suddenly become pure, or gentle, or innocent—he wasn't. He had wanted vengeance. He still did, some days. But the more he looked at the machinery behind it, the more he felt the taste of something else beneath the slogans: weakness.
A dying state borrowing breath. A wounded empire taking weapons from hands that smiled while they fed it—hands that would not lift a finger to save it when the bill came due.
And yet the conclusion that rose in him was not comfort.
It was fear.
Because if the Empire failed here—if Edirne remained lost, if the Balkans stayed in strangers hands, if the frontier held and the retreat continued—then what followed was not simply another defeat. It was collapse. A nation folding in on itself. A people scattered. A faith pushed back until it became a memory told by hungry mouths in dark rooms.
He gripped the reins harder, jaw tight.
Whatever Allah wanted, whatever men wanted—one fact remained, hard as the road beneath him:
this war was not about glory.
It was about whether they would still exist when the shouting stopped.
While lost in these thoughts, they rode into a strip of light woodland where the fields tightened and the air cooled by half a degree. The imperial road—packed earth over old stone, pale with dust—began to curve left, following the lay of the creek. The sound of hooves changed too: not louder, not softer, just different—more hollow, as if the ground itself had thinned.
Ahead, a small stone bridge came into view.
Short. Wide. Old. Its pale blocks were fitted tight and worn smooth at the edges where iron rims and hooves had passed for generations. Beneath it, dark water slid through reeds and shade—Black Creek, the refugees had called it.
Ali did not hide his relief.
"Finally!" he shouted, voice ringing too brightly in the quiet. "The black creek! Water and rest await us! Come on, Brother Kamel—ride!"
He urged his horse forward as if this were a summer ride and not an invasion. As if the silence around them belonged to peace, not warning.
Kamel followed, still half tangled in thought, still tasting that bitter mixture of righteousness and doubt. And for a moment—just a moment—his fear loosened.
The land looked empty. No smoke, no movement. No peasants in the fields. No barking dogs. No carts on side tracks. If the Moss Men had truly cleared the villages only to frighten, if they meant only to empty the borderlands and make the Empire stumble over ghosts… then perhaps no one needed to die today. Perhaps the Ottomans could simply ride in, plant flags, reclaim what was lost, and the worst of the blood could be avoided.
Then Kamel saw something that did not belong.
Not a man.
Not a shape.
Just a wrongness at the roadside—foliage that shifted when there was no wind. A brief flash, like sunlight catching something thin. His eyes narrowed without knowing why. His skin tightened.
And there—at knee height—something faint and straight, so fine it barely existed.
A line.
Kamel's mouth opened.
"Ali—!"
He never finished.
The line snapped upward, suddenly taut, as if the bush itself had pulled it with intention—raised to the exact height of a rider's throat.
Ali rode into it.
There was a sharp, ugly jerk—like a hand yanking a man back by the collar—followed by a sound Kamel would never forget: not a scream, but a gagged wet choke that came from deep in the body. Ali's head snapped back. His hands flew to his neck.
His horse shrieked and lurched sideways.
Ali toppled out of the saddle, landing hard, rolling once, then scrabbling on the road with both hands pressed to his throat as if he could hold himself together by force.
Blood poured between his fingers.
Not a clean cut that bled.
A tear that emptied him.
Air tried to come in and couldn't. His mouth opened in a terrible effort, but what came out was only choking, bubbling noise—half breath, half panic—until even that began to fail.
It happened so fast Kamel's mind refused it.
His body reacted anyway.
He hauled back on the reins too hard. His horse reared, front hooves punching at the air, screaming as if it understood before he did. Kamel clung on, teeth clenched, trying to make the world slow down long enough to understand it.
Something hit him from behind—hands, not bullets—strong, precise hands that yanked him backward out of the saddle like he weighed nothing.
He slammed into the road. Dust burst into his face. The impact punched the air from his lungs so completely he couldn't even scream.
Then the shadow came over him.
A figure—no clear outline, only hanging strands and torn cloth and the color of plants—rising out of the roadside like the land itself had stood up. Kamel's brain tried to name it as a bush, a man, a trick of light.
It failed.
A knife flashed.
The figure dropped onto him, driving the blade down with cold certainty.
Kamel didn't think. He moved.
His hands shot up and caught the attacker's wrists. The knife stopped inches above his chest. Their arms trembled. Kamel felt the strength behind that push—steady, controlled, almost bored—as if the Moss Man had done this a hundred times and knew exactly how long it took for someone to tire.
Kamel's shoulders burned. His breath came in ragged pulls. The blade crept lower, millimeter by millimeter.
He turned his hips hard, dragged a knee up, and kicked—full force—into the figure's side.
The Moss Man rolled off him smoothly, not clumsy like a soldier in heavy gear, but quick and practiced. The knife skittered away into dust.
Kamel scrambled backward, trying to rise—
A leg hooked his.
Not a grab. A trap.
The Moss Man wrapped him up low, tight, as if his limbs were ropes. Kamel's balance vanished. His weight was taken. His body was turned the wrong way before his mind could catch up.
Pressure came suddenly—sharp, deliberate—
crack.
Kamel saw his leg twist into an angle a leg should never take.
Pain detonated up his spine so violently he saw white.
He screamed until his throat tore.
The Moss Man released him and rolled away, already moving, already resetting, as if Kamel were no longer a fight but a broken thing on the ground.
Kamel lay there shaking, unable to stand. His horse had bolted. Ali lay a few meters away, hands still at his neck, but his body had gone slack—eyes staring, mouth open, the road drinking what was left of him.
Kamel's mind reached for one last comfort: Hasan. The rest of the patrol. They were behind the curve. They had to be close.
Then the air behind the bend filled with cracks—fast, sharp, too many—followed by screams that cut off mid-note.
Kamel's stomach dropped into something cold.
The Moss Man stood and began walking toward him, knife back in his hand. Not rushing. Not hurried.
Enjoying the time.
Kamel fumbled at the strap on his back, fingers slick and shaking as he dragged the Winchester down, screaming at the thing coming for him.
"What are you!?" he shouted. "What do you want!? By what right do you do this!?"
The Moss Man stopped.
He did not lower the knife. He did not tense. He simply stood there, head tilting slightly to one side, as if listening to something only he could hear.
Then he spoke.
His Arabic was broken—flattened by a foreign tongue—but his voice was steady, almost reverent, as if reciting something learned long ago.
"I am an extension of his will," he said.
"I fight. I die. Because it is my duty."
He took a step closer.
"Death," he continued calmly, "is my duty."
There was no anger in him. No hatred. Only certainty.
Kamel managed to wrench the rifle free at last—but as he did, his eyes flicked to the side.
Another Moss Man stood there.
Close. Silent. Watching.
He had not moved. He had not needed to.
And in that instant, Kamel understood.
This was not a fight.
This was not even an ambush.
It was an execution.
Something seized him from behind—an arm locking his shoulders, pinning him in place. The knife drove into his chest with a heavy, final force.
Pain flared once—sharp, blinding—then drained away into cold. The road tilted. The sky blurred into white. Sound pulled back as if the world were being wrapped in cloth.
As his strength fled, Kamel heard a voice close to his ear—quiet, deliberate.
"Go," it said, "into the abyss—warrior of the false prophet."
Then darkness took him.
Kamel lay dead on the imperial road, his blood soaking into dust and stone. Ali lay not far away, already still.
Behind the curve, the rest of their patrol was being torn apart—men and horses erased in moments, their screams swallowed by trees and distance.
And the road, moments later, returned to silence.