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Bedouin
It is the goddesses of fate that lead him to encounter her like this, in a place as dusty, a place as
unfitting.
Although he cannot say for the life of him what that meeting should be like, because he is honest in saying that he doesn't remember anything of the last time he saw her, but that it was windy and dark and ominous,
and it's been so long since things were like that. Years have passed. Two, or three, he cannot tell for sure. Now it's sun and sand and glorious horizon and glorious silence and glorious afternoons by the Nile. And he isn't a coward, he thinks, only that he… isn't exactly sure. What he is to her. What she is to him. How it is he should handle it.
Rishid's come with him only so far, and the Western Desert is mute with the passing of time in all but that strange little household he is in, a nook of Bedouins today, a hideout for Tuareg bandits tomorrow (one can never tell with the peoples of the desert);
strange it is to him that he relates. He likes it there but for the scent of riverwater in the air.
He likes it there, as he waits for her sitting on rough camel skin, drinking black black coffee with an age-weathered patriarch that tells him stories of genies and the Quran. Eating dates and breathing incense. It makes him remember a past life he didn't have.
She arrives when the afternoon is making the sun bleed red on the barren sand, and she comes to them like a queen of the sands, dressed in black silks and gold ornaments and she could be coming from Saba for all that Dark Malik can tell as he toys with the bone of the last date he ate and hums a folk song with voice raspy from never singing, never speaking.
"Masaa el kheer" the patriarch says, helping her dismount the pureblood stallion, and she looks so gracious Dark Malik can't honestly say he remembered her like that, graceful like the goddess of the old times,
Isis.
Her walking towards him comes with the faint sounding of bells and rustles of silk and fine metal, and when she takes off her delicate veil she expects him to do the same,
and so he takes off his white veil and head piece,
and her eyes widen ever so slightly; and her parted lips draw in a silent gasp. He thinks he knows that it means she is surprised, but why wouldn't she be.
"Allah be with you, sister," he says, and the patriarch leaves them to the breezy solitude of the camel-skin tent, incense, and bleeding sun on the horizon.
.
.
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A/N: Desert sunsets. I'll never grow weary of writing these.
I'm such a great Fearshipper I can't believe I've not written this chapter before. Still, I don't know if this will be romantic. I don't think so. I'd like to keep this story romance-free. What say you? *quotes Aragorn*
I'm desperate about Coroner's Court. I'm writing and writing but... there's something missing. But I'm working on it. Honestly.
