"She played the long game as sweetly as a master plays the tar."

Sima wandered through its winding alleys, past stalls filled with dyed fabrics that bled color into the dust, past trays of freshly baked flatbreads stacked high, their scent thick with rosemary and cardamom. The weight of the vial in her palm was a brand, burning through her skin, a choice she could not unmake.

Escape was a mirage – Hormoz's reach extended beyond the city walls like shadows at dusk. Remaining was to court death – Farid's keen eyes would soon pierce her carefully constructed façade. And always, always, there loomed the Shah, whose armies had turned her family's ancestral home into a graveyard of broken promises and shattered dreams.

But Farid... ah, Farid. He had crept into her heart like moonlight through a latticed window, silent and inevitable. His laughter rang like water in a desert spring, his touch gentle as rose petals scattered on marble. He was meant to be nothing more than a stepping stone on her path to retribution, yet he had become the verse that made her whole poem make sense.

Would she be able to kill him too? 

Or worse—watch as someone else did it?

The answer came when she turned a corner and saw them. 

Three men in the Shah's black-and-gold armor, led by Kaveh the Merciless. They pushed past vendors and beggars, their hands gripping their swords, their eyes scanning every woman in sight. 

They were looking for her.

Her stomach dropped. 

She was out of time. 

१

Farid had expected many things when he entered the Zurvanite sanctuary – a temple where time itself bent to ancient prayers. He had not expected truth to wear such a merciless face.

The corridors wound like serpents through living stone, each passageway a throat carved from sand-kissed rock that had witnessed a thousand thousand sunrises. Every threshold bore the weight of divinity – arched doorways where Zurvan's infinite form danced across stone, his countless arms reaching through past and future like branches of an eternal tree. The Zurvanites themselves moved like wisps of incense smoke, their earthen robes falling in waves around them, their silence a language older than words.

They guided him deeper into the temple's heart, past chambers where sacred relics whispered their secrets to the shadows, past devotees whose prayers rose like moths into the amber light of oil lamps. The air grew heavy with myrrh and frankincense, but beneath it lurked another scent – the sweet-sour perfume of mortality's final embrace.

In the innermost sanctum, destiny awaited.

Farid crossed the threshold and time stopped breathing.

His father – the mighty Shah, the Great Lion of Persia – lay broken upon silk cushions the color of spilled pomegranate seeds. His once-golden skin had become a tapestry of decay, peeling away in delicate layers like autumn leaves, weeping an otherworldly ichor that pooled beneath him like toxic dew. Where his flesh had surrendered to corruption, pale creatures wrote their own dark poetry in his wounds. The air was thick with the song of ending – not the clean death of battlefield glory, but the slow unraveling of a body betraying itself.

When Kaveh stepped forward, his words fell like pebbles into a bottomless well.

"Prince Farid. We thought the mountains had claimed you in their eternal embrace."

But Farid's world had narrowed to the sight before him – his father, the Sun King, now a lesson in impermanence. Here lay power brought low, strength rendered meaningless, glory transformed into grotesque poetry. The Shah who had conquered nations now could not even conquer the decay consuming him from within.

"Where is the Sogoli?" Kaveh's words fell like stones into still water.

"She will be here soon," Farid answered.

From the incense-laden shadows emerged the chief healer, his once-pristine robes now a painting of failed hopes, stained with the evidence of every remedy that could not halt death's advance. He bowed with the grace of a reed bending before the wind.

"Your Highness."

"What is your verdict?" Farid's words carried the weight of mountains.

The healer's sigh was ancient as the desert winds. "In forty turns of the seasons, I have not witnessed this poison's dance. It is an assassin's masterwork, patient as the night sky waiting for dawn. It flows from flowers that once bloomed in a single garden – a garden that became ash and memory ten winters past."

Farid felt winter itself creep into his veins, turning his blood to rivers of ice.

"Where?"

The healer's hesitation stretched like a silk thread about to snap. Then he spoke the word that turned the world to glass:

"Golemut."

The chamber contracted like a wounded heart, its walls drawing close as conspiracy. The very air seemed to flee, leaving only truth's merciless presence.

The healer's continued words – prophecies of death and endings – scattered like leaves in an autumn storm, unheard and unnecessary. For in that moment, the Shah laughed.

A cruel, rasping sound, thick with phlegm and amusement. The effort cost him—he doubled over in a fit of coughing, blood splattering the cushions beneath him.

Then his gaze found Farid, and in those fever-bright eyes blazed the terrible light of understanding.

"She was right beneath my nose, like a rose concealing thorns."

The world shattered like a mirror struck by lightning.

Farid's breath caught in his throat like a caged nightingale. Knowledge bloomed in his mind with terrible clarity.

"Sima," her name fell from his lips like a prayer turned to poison.

The Shah's smile was a crescent moon waning into darkness, a gleam of grudging admiration in his dying eyes. "I made her an orphan. Turned her kingdom to ash and memory. And she crafted her vengeance like a master weaver, thread by patient thread, until the pattern was complete. She played the long game as sweetly as a master plays the tar."

Farid's world collapsed into a single point of understanding.

His Sima. His beloved Sima.

For ten years, she had been feeding death to his father drop by drop.

This was treason – a crime that demanded blood for blood.

And he had given her his heart, like a fool offering water to a mirage.

His hands curled into fists tight as pomegranates in winter. His jaw set like stone against stone. Had her love been real as mountain streams, or false as desert waters? Had he been nothing more than a piece on her shatranj board?

He turned to seek her, his heart thundering like war drums, desperate to hear truth from her own lips.

But Kaveh stood before him like fate itself. "This hunt is not yours to lead, my prince," he said,

Farid's rage burned like summer winds. "She belongs to me."

"Not anymore," Kaveh replied. "I will return with the Shah's nightingale. And you must decide if she sings or dies."

Then, he called for his men. And Sima's fate was set in motion.

१

Sima pressed herself against cool stone in a shadowed alley, becoming one with the darkness. The footfalls of Kaveh's men echoed through the streets like drumbeats of doom. They moved through the bazaar like wolves through a flock.

Her fingers found the dagger at her waist, its familiar touch a comfort. She had spent years crafting this moment, this final act of justice, this blood-price for all she had lost.

But now Farid knew the truth that lay beneath her mask.

Would his hand be the one to write her ending?
Would her heart allow him?

The vial weighed in her palm like all her sins combined. One chance remained – if she could reach the temple, if she could complete her decade-long dance of death...

A voice cut through her thoughts like a blade through silk.

"Sogoli."

She spun, blade rising like a crescent moon—

Kaveh stood before her, immovable as mountains.
Behind him, three warriors waited, their weapons gleaming with deadly promise.

"The Shah awaits." His words fell like autumn leaves. "Prince Farid awaits."

And Sima knew, with the certainty of stars turning in their courses, that her time had drawn to its close.

१
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