As I walked away from Akbar's home, I felt the key burn in my pocket. I hurried as best I could, and felt a thin slather of sweat suffocate my skin from the noon sun. The slums were silent as people lazed inside.

A drifting wind caught up a pile of sand and blew it across the alley. It was like a silken curtain, yet stung.

I scrambled to my little home, rushed inside. Looking around, I dipped my hand in a jar and wiped my face with some cool water.

I did not realize how heavy my heart was beating, how dry my mouth was.

Nothing was free.

No one was free. Not even I.

I had stolen freedom, and with that lost everything. What is its cost, this freedom? More than I can say is worth it. Much more. I have regrets that weaved into my soul and will clench me until the Chinvat bridge.

I worked swiftly. As the sun traveled, I was losing time to pack. The only service my worthless life would have was to move quickly, to be out finding this place. I perhaps was hopeful, but I did not know what ran through my blood in truth. I focused more if my mind wandered. I brought what I could carry and travel like the wind. Why was I so worried about speed? I felt it again, breathing against the hairs on my arms: the feel of being hunted.

As the shadows lengthened and a red mist dipped the world, I poked my head out of doorway and looked up and down the alley. Afareen was sitting outside, watching her children. The men laughed in rowdy groups. A thin dog came and sniffed my doorway, then trotted down the path and joined a young man. The slums were stirring.

I slipped away from my hastily constructed life. I walked down that alley the last time, down the streets, past the walls. I stopped, watching the sun sit on the rooftops and jewel through the latticework. With a sigh, I stepped away.

I wouldn't plan to traverse the desert hills at night, and not even other roads, but the one I choose was well guarded. The land was covered in a rich blue cloth, and the path gleaming in the thin moonlight. A haze enclosed the edges of objects, and the dry mountains in the distance were merely vague blocks of black. The only smell was the crisp nothing of frozen air, which cleared the senses and numbed the nose. I snuggled my face in a thin scarf and huffed to warm the wrap. There was a rather rich town farther out, and I was sure I could reach it before the mid-night. There I would procure the tools I needed.

Akbar said the ruin was a set of four pillars, all broken from a former height he guessed was measureless. I doubted this, but he had a wonder in his eye that may have convinced me in my uninhibited youth. Rubble surrounded the circle of stone trees, and a thick coverstone sat, bound to the earth with heaps of sand. I ventured that it was impossible to move such a thing he described without ten men, but he turned to me in a rush and pointed at the golden key. There, he said, is your ten men. The key, in turn, Akbar found imbedded in a stone miles away from the ruin. It was a bright stab of yellow in the sandy rock, an obvious souvenir for a man with an eye for gold. Yet it was so pushed into the stone that he used his entourage to work at it. So much sweat for a tiny thing.

I fingered the key in my pocket constantly, just to be sure it was there. It seemed like a dream, that I had the only object keeping humanity from the immortal medallion. It seemed as if all eyes were upon me, as if all vagrants would leap out and slit my throat for the treasure. Yet the wide road gaped at me, shining like a cold river in the scant moonlight. The frigid air wrapped forcefully around me like stones pressed against my flesh.

Suddenly, in this frozen expanse of blue, a brilliant white spot manifested.

I leapt to the side of the road and crouched down, swiftly filled with deep fear. So, the feeling of being watched was not simply my fancy. I reached down for my ratty dagger. It was a pathetic thing, but the only weapon I had at the moment. I sank to the bitter earth like a cloth, knowing that my only chance would be surprise.

Yet the figure turned, and I breathed a sigh of wonder.

She, wrapped in the most luminescent and thin of fabric, slowly revolved like a moonlit cloud and looked directly at me. Impossible! How had she seen me, her back in my direction when I hid?

Yet her eyes spoke beyond my imagination.

I rose, forgetting the dagger in my hand, entranced.

Her ghostly robe wavered in a nonpresent wind, and it was the purest of whites. The moon glanced off her, a halo of eerie light outlining her form.

I walked to her under a spell of her beauty. I could not tell you one word of what I felt: it is more told in a thousand - at an instant. I was enamoured, and her presence sang like a thin wind, filling the world with a vibrant and warm ring. As I approached, I saw her skin was ruddy as moist, rich soil, her eyes heavily lashed. Her splendor saturated my soul, and I felt like crying and laughing all at once. I was grand, I was humbled.

Then her eyes struck a shivering cord in my absorbing land of light.

They were more than black: there were no whites in her eyes, and the ebony stretched out forever, greater than the night sky. They captured no glint.

She did not speak.

With those unnerving eyes, she did not waver her stare. I felt it burn into me like the scorching noonlight. I felt every space of flesh heat, crack and curl like the desert floor. My eyes felt like brands of white metal, pushing into my skull. My nerves screamed like strands of fire. The air I took in was no longer icy, but a furnace wafting into my chest.

I thought I screamed.

I thought I died.

It was beyond agony.

...yet it was nothing

Yes, in my peeling flesh and crisping muscles, I remembered my Khatereh, my Raha.

If I remembered that, then I must have been dying.

With their voices whispering about my bleeding mind, I smiled at the thought that on the bridge, my regret, my eternal regret, would murmur and dissipate.

I smiled.

Then I was upon the moonlit road again.

...without a mark upon my skin. I looked up.

She smiled

and the world broke into an expanse of serenity, stronger than before.

I fell to my knees, my eyes burning from tears.

I turned my face up to ask her who she was –

- she was gone.

I quickly scrambled up, ran along the road, crying out Khatereh's name, spinning and crying, soul drenched in both a swelling sorrow and an expanding content filling me to the point my lungs heaved in labor and throat grew scratchy and all I wanted was her back, all I wanted was her back.

I collapsed on the side of the road, spirit torn.

As I lay sprawled on my back, raspy breath issuing fog, I realized

I realized

...she had no shadow.