House of the Sun, pt. 3
The young mystic, Tahir, pressed his palm against the sun-warmed stone, feeling the grooves beneath his fingers. The rock still held the memory of the day's heat, as if it had absorbed the sun’s light and refused to surrender it to the coming night. His breath slowed. The markings - etched into the cliffside like scars in flesh - glowed in the amber dusk, their meaning seemingly close, but just beyond his reach.
"Ha'say qutran," he whispered, barely aware he had spoken aloud. The stone remembers.
Tahir was the youngest of the mystics, barely past his shayih, his naming rites, and yet he had been drawn to the runes with a gravity he could not explain. He was lean from the journey, his skin darkened by the desert sun, his robes travel-worn but still marked with the blue-threaded sigils of his station. His hands, calloused from both ink and toil, hovered carefully over the stone as though he might draw something from it, some fragment of lost wisdom buried beneath its surface.
Behind him, the elders of the M’aktun knelt in hushed reverence, their hands pressed to their foreheads before touching the earth. Their robes, once pristine, were frayed by weeks of travel, their faces marked with sun-creased lines of wisdom and exhaustion alike.
Samat, the eldest among them, was as still as the rock itself. His once-black beard had turned silver over the years, but his back was straight, his presence firm as he regarded the runes with something bordering on longing. He had guided them here through faith alone, through the whispered prayers of his ancestors, and now he stood before their destination, unbowed.
Beside him knelt Yasira, ever the skeptic. Her sharp eyes - dark as storm-touched waters - studied the carvings not with wonder, but with measured scrutiny. She was younger than Samat but carried her own weight of years, and she had never believed in blind faith. The Hasna Sayifra had been a myth, a tale to quiet children before bed, until now. And even now, she did not yield to the impulse of awe.
But for Tahir, this was something else entirely. This was not merely history. It was awakening.
The words of his grandmother returned to him, whispered over the low embers of a brazier, her hands weaving unseen symbols in the air.
"Hasna Sayifra was the first to greet the morning and the last to see the dusk," she had told him. "Its walls knew the name of the stars, and its stones drank secrets from the sky."
He had been a boy then, staring up at her with wide eyes. "Where is it now?" he had asked, and she had only smiled, pressing her palm against his cheek.
"Lost," she had said, "but waiting."
Waiting.
And here it was.
His fingers traced one of the deeper etchings - a long, sweeping arc, different from the others. Older. Perhaps even older than the tongue of the M’aktun. The markings here were not merely words; they were a language of their own, a forgotten dialect of stone and shadow.
"The Hasna Sayifra," Samat intoned behind him. “House of the Sun.” His voice, hoarse from the dry air, carried the weight of a man who had spent a lifetime searching for something he had never truly expected to find. "A place of knowing."
“But what knowledge remains?” Yasira’s voice was measured, though even she could not mask the unease curling at its edges.
Tahir barely heard them. His attention was fixed on a particular set of carvings - symbols that seemed to shift with the light, transforming as the sun dipped lower. The wind picked up, threading through the ruins, curling through the stone hollows with a sound that was not quite a whisper, not quite a voice.
He swallowed, feeling his throat go dry.
"Rashan ah’taru," he murmured. "The sun has found its way home."
For the first time since they had arrived, Samat turned his gaze toward Tahir, studying him with something unreadable in his weathered features.
"What do you see?" the elder asked.
Tahir exhaled slowly, pressing both palms against the carved stone, feeling its heat, its history. The symbols beneath his touch seemed to pulse, as though the rock itself were breathing.
"I see a door that has been waiting to be opened."
The wind shifted again, a low howl threading through the ruins. A sound like breath through pursed lips.
For the first time, Yasira’s expression flickered - not with skepticism, but with something else entirely.
Something dangerously close to belief.