Author's Preface
The sounds of the festival carried clear across the camp — drums rolling steady beneath the higher, winding notes of a lute, laughter rising and falling with the games being played around the fires. Halima slipped away from the noise and into the quiet of her own tent, Umniya fussing against her shoulder, already worn thin from an hour spent with Leila that had ended, as it always did lately, in tears.
"Why won't you let Aunt Leila feed you anymore?" Halima murmured, settling into the cushions, guiding her daughter to nurse. "You weren't like this when you were born, you know. Now you know my face, my voice, and nothing else will do." She stroked the fine down of Umniya's hair, smiling despite the exhaustion in it. "By the measure of this world, I suppose I'll be nursing you for years yet."
The tent flap stirred, and Yahya ducked inside, his tired face softening the moment his eyes found them. "Now you have a playmate, little one," he said, crouching to brush a finger along his daughter's cheek. "You won't be lonely much longer."
"Did you lack playmates, growing up?" Halima asked, amused.
"No — Hayat, Darim, and the other children filled my days well enough." He settled onto the cushions beside her. "Though there were hours we weren't allowed past the tent flap, for safety. In those hours, I used to wish for a brother or sister close in age to pass the time with. Faris didn't come along until I was already a grown man."
"How old were you, exactly? When Faris was born?"
"Three hundred and ten. Perhaps twenty. We don't count the years so precisely here."
Halima stared at him a beat, and then laughter broke out of her, genuine and startled. "Yahya... I married an ancient man! On Earth, you'd be the oldest person who ever lived, by a margin nobody could even measure!"
He laughed along with her, leaning into it. "An old man, yes. Desperately in love with a young girl who fell out of the sky."
The music drifted louder from outside, and something playful sparked in Halima's chest. "Yahya. Dance with me."
He frowned, genuinely baffled. "I don't dance."
"I'll teach you." She settled Umniya carefully into her cradle and rose, pulling him up by both hands. "It's called a waltz."
"Wats?"
"Waltz." She guided his left hand to settle at her waist, placed her own hand on his shoulder, laced her fingers through his. "Step back. Now forward. Like this." He stumbled at first, unused to the pattern, but his body found the rhythm quickly enough once he stopped overthinking it, years of warrior's balance translating easily into something far gentler.
"We used to dance like this at school," Halima said, smiling at the memory, eyes distant. "At the academy too. Wonderful nights, dancing until the hour grew far too late to admit to."
Yahya's grip tightened almost imperceptibly around her waist. "You danced. Like this. With men."
"Of course." She smiled, oblivious still. "It was lovely."
"And they touched you the way I'm touching you now? Your hand, your waist?"
"Yes." She laughed, still not catching the shift in him. "I could have danced all night, some evenings."
"All night." His voice had gone flat and dangerous.
She finally registered the look in his eyes — nothing playful left in it at all — and her laugh died in her throat.
Something had been building in Yahya for longer than this single moment, and it broke loose now with nowhere left to go. He knew, somewhere beneath the surge of it, that she hadn't known him then, that she'd lived a whole separate lifetime on a world he'd never see, while he'd spent five centuries waiting at the edge of a lake for a face he hadn't even known yet. Knowing it changed nothing about the image now lodged behind his eyes — other men's hands where his should be.
Slowly, heavily, Yahya unclasped his fingers from her waist and stepped back, leaving Halima staring at him in utter bewilderment. He turned toward the entrance.
"Darim!"
Darim appeared at the flap within seconds. "My Seyyid?"
Yahya lifted their sleeping daughter from her cradle with careful, steady hands, passing her over to his trusted commander. "Take her to my parents. Tell them Seyyida Halima is unwell and needs rest."
Darim's eyes flicked once between them, reading the weight in the room without needing it explained, and he bowed and withdrew without a word, the baby settled against his shoulder.
"Yahya." Halima stepped toward him, alarm rising fast. "Why did you send her away?"
He closed the distance instead of answering, catching her face between his hands and kissing her hard, a kiss with none of his usual gentleness in it, something raw and consuming behind it that frightened her even as her body answered it despite herself.
He pulled back, eyes wild, rimmed red. "You may not have known me, back on that world of yours. But I intend to reclaim every moment those men ever had with you. Tonight you stay in this tent, and you show me whose wife you are."
"Yahya, let me go outside—" Fear sharpened her voice now. "I never felt for any of them what I feel for you. You are the only one, the only love I've ever truly had!"
"I am jealous!" The words tore out of him, raw and unguarded. "It burns through me, Halima, every hour of every day! When you spoke before of simply interacting with the opposite sex in your world, I felt a shadow of jealousy, but I swallowed it, knowing you grew up in a different culture. But now you tell me you touched them so intimately?! Danced with them, let their hands rest where only mine belong?! From this moment, you tell me before you leave this tent. Every step. Everywhere you go, and with whom."
"Yahya, what's happened to you?" Tears sprang to her own eyes now, frightened and bewildered at once. "You were never like this. You're calm — gentle — you're frightening me."
Something in him collapsed entirely at that, the anger draining out all at once and leaving only grief standing in its place. He sank down, tears spilling freely as the words broke loose. "Forgive me. Forgive me, Halima — everything that's happened has broken something in me. Five hundred years I waited for you. Five centuries alone, and only Allah's mercy kept my mind whole through it! And now... now that you are finally in my arms, I am forced to face how short your time is! How quickly your years will pass, how fragile your human life is in these sands, while I am left behind! What happened to Latifa broke something in me too — every time I looked at her pain, I imagined you in her place. If something like that were to happen to you... I cannot survive losing you, Halima!"
He buried his face in his hands, shoulders shaking. "I can't survive losing you. I don't sleep anymore, thinking of it. I try to accept it the way faith asks me to, and it's too hard. It's too agonizingly hard to carry."
Her own fear dissolved entirely into something softer, aching for him. She crossed the space and wrapped her arms tight around his trembling frame. "Yahya. Insha'Allah, we'll find a way through this. We can't surrender to despair — I'm here, right now, with you. Whatever comes after belongs to Allah alone to decide. You can't let this break you apart — Umniya needs her father. Our future needs you whole."
"Without you," he said, voice cracking, "I won't survive it."
"Yahya." She stroked his hair slowly, holding him through the worst of it.
He pressed his forehead to hers, eyes closed, breath still unsteady. "I understand everything you're saying. It's simply so hard to bear alone." He drew in a shaking breath. "Stay with me tonight. Just tonight. Don't leave."
She nodded, holding him close in the low lamplight, and neither of them spoke further of the fear now sitting plainly between them — a shadow they would have to learn to walk beneath, together.
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