House of the Sun, pt. 1
The wind had abandoned them.
The sea stretched vast and motionless, an expanse of polished bronze beneath the weight of an unmoving sun. The fleet - forty ships lashed together by fate and desperation - drifted in uneasy silence. Men and women crouched beneath fraying canvas sheets, shielding themselves from unrelenting heat that pressed upon them. Their water barrels grew lighter by the hour, their rations reduced to salted fish and the brittle crumbs of old flatbread. The youngest no longer cried, their bodies limp in their mothers’ arms, their lips cracked, dry, and bleeding.
At the prow of the lead vessel, a man knelt in quiet contemplation. The mystic’s robes, once fine were now stiff with salt, his already-dark complexion further deepened by the sun. His fingers traced the symbols carved into the wood, glyphs of passage and protection, though no shipwright had put them there. He had inked them in his own blood upon their departure, the night they stole away from the shores of the Qurassi Sultanate, the city of Aru-Shatra burning behind them.
They had been called apostates.
The M’aktun were never a people of the sword. In the two decades since the death of Amira IV, while the would-be rulers of the Sultanate carved each other apart, the M’aktun had sought only to endure. But no man, no tribe, could remain neutral forever. When the pretender, Khalid Rahman, declared his claim righteous under the law of the the Last Breath, the M’aktun refused him. When the warlord Bashir al-Hafix demanded their mystics divine his path to victory, the M’aktun denied him. When the armies of the western city-states burned their shrines and salted their wells, the M’aktun did not fight.
They fled.
The Beholden Sea had been their salvation, the Tamrissi Passage their only hope. But now, with the wind lost and the horizon a shimmering illusion, the sea felt more like a tomb. The mystic exhaled slowly and lifted his gaze to the sky. No clouds. No sign of change. The sun hung there, vast and golden, fixed in its dominion.
A woman approached, her steps soft but deliberate. She was lean from the hunger of travel, her brown skin drawn tight over high cheekbones. She did not bow, nor did he expect her to. “Samat… we cannot last like this,” Yasira murmured. “The water will barely hold another day. The people whisper of ill omens.”
The mystic did not look away from the sky. “The omens do not shape the winds, sister.”
Yasira crossed her arms, glancing toward the decks behind them, where sailors sat listless, their eyes hollow. “Perhaps not. But the people believe them.”
A pause. Then Samat rose, the stiffness in his bones a reminder of how far they had come. He stepped forward, pressing his palm against the scorched wood of the railing. Beneath his fingertips, the ship’s grain was rough with age, but something lingered there, a whisper of motion. He closed his eyes and let the breath slip from his lungs. When he spoke, it was not for Yasira beside him, nor for the frightened souls who waited in the shade. It was for the sea.
“Zihara kel vanir… Ha’shan, kel nir.”
Words from before the war, before the exile, before they had even been given a name. Winds of the Unseen, lay us our path.
The deck creaked beneath him. A gull, unseen for days, shrieked somewhere in the distance. Then came another, and another. He opened his eyes, following the sound.
On the horizon, dark shapes had begun to rise from the sea - monoliths of stone, jagged and vast, breaking through the endless ocean. At first, they seemed unreal, mirages conjured by the fevered minds of the desperate. But Samat knew better. These were not illusions.
The Tamrissi Passage had never been empty. It had only been waiting.
A shout rose from the mast as the first gust of wind struck the sail, filling it with sudden purpose. Voices called out, and the fleet stirred once more. The sea, so still for days, had begun to move again. Samat remained kneeling at the prow, staring ahead at the rising stones. He did not speak, not yet. He could feel it, a shift in the air, something deeper than mere wind and tide. This was no ordinary crossing.
This was a threshold. And something was waiting on the other side.