Chapter Eight #2
‘I don’t think I can trust anyone,’ she said eventually, the bitterness sharper than the fruit’s flesh. She tried not to notice the way Mareena flinched, how her hand drifted forward as if to offer comfort, a touch, a tether, only for Alina to pull her arm swiftly out of reach.
No words passed between them. None were needed.
The doors opened.
Isla and Arena stepped into the room, now dressed in phoenixian fighting garb, their silhouettes no longer draped in the softness of survival, but shaped by purpose.
‘Sandhalla,’ Isla said with a small wave as she crossed the room and lowered herself onto one of the vacant cushions. Hello.
For a time, silence reigned.
Alina studied the two women with careful eyes, her thoughts a steady storm just beneath the surface. She tried to drown the memories clawing their way up, the laughter under starlight, the smell of warm spices on Hessa’s skin, but they lingered like smoke in the back of her throat.
She needed only one thing from them. Truth.
Her shoulders tensed the moment she felt the shift in the air, the soft weight of something unseen.
Hessa.
Crouched behind her like a guardian of old, a warm hand ghosted onto her shoulder, gentle but anchoring.
‘You can trust them, amira,’ came the soft voice. Not real, not truly, but no less powerful for it.
Alina didn’t dare move, didn’t nod, though she ached to. She kept her attention fixed on the Dunayans, forcing her mind to stay tethered to the present.
Her thoughts drifted, unbidden, to the dunes she had once called home, a land of endless sand and skies pricked with stars. A place she had loved because Hessa had been there.
‘Does Saren know you’re here?’ Alina asked at last, her voice cool but steady.
Isla shook her head. ‘I think most of them truly believe Saren’s lie. That you killed Hessa.’
Alina’s eyes narrowed. ‘And why didn’t you?’
Doubt coiled in her chest like a serpent. Could they be trusted? Or were they agents of Saren’s cruelty, here to unravel her from the inside?
‘Yaar ayash,’ Arena said then, speaking for the first time.
Your eyes.
Alina stiffened. ‘What about them?’
‘Eyes can never lie,’ Isla murmured, her voice soft as wind over sand. ‘Not when they’re filled with love. And yours when you looked at Hessa…They shone brighter than the moon for her.’
A knot tightened in Alina’s chest, grief rising like a tide she could not fight.
The phantom hand on her shoulder pressed a little firmer, steadying her. And beneath her robes, against her heart, the pendant Hessa had once meant to gift her burnt like a brand, a secret flame never meant to go out.
‘I have no army,’ Alina said, swallowing the ache that lodged itself in her throat like a stone. ‘No kingdom. Nothing to offer you.’
Arena clicked her tongue, lifting her chin in that quick, sharp gesture of dissent that belonged to the desert, wordless but firm.
‘Tsa,’ she said, leaning forward, her voice steady and bright as firelight. ‘Waa ayadakun yaa hataa Saren.’ No. We will help you kill Saren.
Alina sighed, the breath catching on sorrow. ‘We are three. Against hundreds of Dunayans. Your people.’
‘Yaars tamba,’ Arena replied without hesitation, her white eyes gleaming with fierce resolve. Yours too.
‘You are farahi-sahraa,’ Isla added, placing her hand over her face and drawing it downward in the sacred desert greeting, a gesture of both honour and kinship. ‘Sahraa qamh haiklii.’
A single grain does not make a desert.
The old desert saying struck Alina like a blade to the heart. Sharp, ancient, and true. A call to unity. A vow of belonging. Something within her stirred, a buried scream desperate to rise.
‘Sahraa qamh haiklii,’ Arena echoed softly.
Alina nodded once and turned her gaze towards Mareena Noor, who had watched them in silence. Not detached, but listening like the flame listens to the wick.
‘Will you help me?’ Alina asked, her voice barely more than a breath. Yet the weight of it nearly crushed her. Her heart pounded with such violence she feared it might tear itself from her chest. ‘Teach me how the Phanax fight. Teach us.’ She gestured to Isla and Arena across the table.
‘You are only three,’ Mareena replied, repeating Alina’s own doubt aloud. ‘Even if I teach you… it will not be enough.’
‘No,’ Alina agreed. ‘It won’t. But we shall die trying and our grains shall return home, to the desert.’
Something shifted in Mareena’s crimson eyes. A flash of pride, of hope, of something dangerously close to admiration.
‘Very well,’ she said at last. ‘I will teach you.’
Alina inclined her head in gratitude, though her hands trembled and her limbs burnt with the urge to rise, to move, to outrun the fear that still lingered like smoke in her lungs.
More than anything, she ached to run into the dunes and disappear, to lie beside Hessa beneath the stars in whatever world waited beyond.
‘Waa kair janta, amira,’ whispered a voice like desert wind at her ear.
‘Waa kair janta,’ Alina murmured in return, to the ghost that would never truly leave her.
We fall together.