***
{Outside The Projection}
Layla’s breath hitched—just for a second.
Then, before she could even think to stop it, a few tears slipped free.
She wiped at them fast; her throat tight, her chest heavy.
Because God, he still cared.
Even after everything.
Even after all the Hell he’d been through.
His feelings—for her, for her father—they hadn’t faded.
Not even a little.
If anything?
They’d only grown.
That realization hit her like a gut punch.
She sucked in a shaky breath, trying to compose herself, but her heart wouldn’t stop pounding.
And she wasn’t the only one feeling it.
Safira was going through her own crisis—but for a completely different reason.
Because Malik?
Malik was nervous.
And not just your usual, stiff-shouldered, wary-eyed kind of nervous.
No.
This was different.
She saw it clear as day.
His being at the inn, other than checking out what enamored Layla so much, was to delay their meeting.
A ‘foreign emotion,’ the projection called it.
But to her?
It wasn’t foreign at all.
It was obvious.
Her teacher was anxious.
Meeting her again made him nervous.
And for some reason—
That made him seem… cute.
Safira blinked, utterly stunned by her own thought.
Did she just—?
Oh.
Oh, this was dangerous.
A slow, amused grin tugged at her lips before she quickly hid it behind her sleeve.
***
{Inside The Projection}
The inn was alive with voices, the clatter of cups, the low hum of men speaking.
Malik remained at the bar, fingers wrapped around the ale he barely touched.
It tasted foul, thick with bitterness that clung to his tongue.
A bitterness that wasn’t real. A bitterness that was self-inflicted.
Still, how Layla could down this like water was beyond him.
He didn’t see how it would help; perhaps that was because of his Divine Rank, but either way, it wasn’t something he’d dabble in again… well, at least not alone, and definitely not ale; Layla made that drink undrinkable.
After setting the cup down, he continued to ponder and reminisce, brooding about this or that as he usually did.
But then, through the haze of noise, a melody rose, pulling him out of his endless thoughts.
Soft at first, a single note weaved through the air.
A ballad.
A song of sorrow.
Of remembrance.
Malik didn’t react, at least not at first.
It was just another sound in the crowd lost in the shuffle of the inn.
But something in it—something familiar—made him pause.
Duun-diinng~…
That sound.
His heart stilled.
His grip on the cup loosened.
He turned, slowly, toward the source.
There, near a corner of the inn, where the lamps burned low, a woman sat on a stool.
Her cloak was simple, her face partially hidden by a hood, but he didn’t need to see her to know.
Malik knew her.
Twenty years ago, when he was just a boy, he’d stand outside an inn in Zawaya, listening to this same oud.
He’d press his ear to the wooden walls, desperate to catch every note, her every word.
And now…
Pluumm… Trriiing~.
It made him smile.
“Oh, where were you when the fire raged,”
But then, as he truly listened, the warmth faded.
“When the steel ran red?”
The words struck deep within his chest.
“Where were you when the night was slain,”
A story woven in song, painted in sorrow.
“And the ground drank dead?”
His breath caught.
“We stood, we swayed, we held the line,”
“But the tide ran high.”
He swallowed hard and gulped down half of his drink.
Wiping his mouth clean, he stared down into the dark liquid in his cup, though he no longer saw it.
“One by one, we fell in turn,”
“Yet we did not die…”
“For the Shepard did not sleep.”
This story wasn’t just a tale or a legend—it was his.
The Shepard.
The tide was the bandits that stormed them in the dead of night.
The steel that flashed, the blood that ran into the sand, their fall…
Rehan’s voice, roaring commands, people standing, fighting, breaking.
“Oh, they came like a flood of beasts,”
“With their sharpened teeth.”
“And we cut, and we bled, and we cursed,”
“For the ground beneath.”
A memory clawed its way forward.
A blade sank into Rehan’s side. Layla screamed his name.
A blink that was forgotten by the world. The first blink.
“We stood, we swayed, we held the line,”
“But the tide ran high.”
“One by one, we fell in turn,”
“Yet we did not die.”
“Then the wind grew still, and the sky turned black,”
“Chains rose from the sand.”
“And a whisper low, and a word once spoke,”
“Turned the flesh to land.”
Malik’s hands curled into fists.
This… this was a sacrifice he despised.
“He stood, he swayed, yet the dead stood tall.”
“One by one, they gasped and wept,”
“And they cheered the call.”
The final lines settled over the room like dust in the wake of ruin. And Malik, the man who had long since sworn he had no more tears to give, felt one slip down his cheek.
“Oh, where were you when the fire raged,”
“When the steel ran red?”
“Where were you when the night was slain,”
“And the ground drank dead?”
Another tear fell as he inwardly apologized to Sinbad.
“Oh… where were you when the Sparrow fell dead?”
The last note lingered, stretching into silence, before the inn slowly returned to life.
Voices picked up again. Cups clinked. Laughter broke the quiet.
But Malik? He sat there, frozen in time.
That final line couldn’t have hit him any deeper.
***
{Outside The Projection}
The crowd watching the projection was anything but quiet.
Voices overlapped, muttering, murmuring, hissing. Lost in the weight of the song.
A few men, alongside the dumbass, whispered among themselves, shaking their heads:
“Foolish,” “Weak,” “This isn’t the Sultan we know.”
Their words held some truth but were incredibly insensitive and stupid.
They had seen Malik be decisive so far, never questioning himself.
But now? He was acting anxious, displaying too much emotion.
It was obvious why, but their minds didn’t bother understanding that.
Or perhaps they did and were just ignoring their true thoughts entirely, preferring to just dunk on the man without a single semblance of human intellect.
Either way, this, right here, was how Malik would’ve acted without the world making decisions for him.
He was never given the luxury of deciding something without anything forcing him.
So, since this was a new circumstance, it was only natural for him to stutter.
It was to be expected.
But again, that didn’t stop their muttering.
Layla, alongside many others, didn’t hear them, however.
Rather, she didn’t hear anything but Malik and the projection.
The moment the first tear slipped down his cheek, her breath hitched, and the world shrank.
She saw nothing but him, there in that inn, his hands clenched around a cup he wasn’t drinking from, his eyes locked on something only he could see. Regret coiled around him like a vice, squeezing, suffocating. His shoulders trembled, not from rage, not from fury, but from something much, much heavier.
Grief.
And the moment the second tear fell, Layla couldn’t hold it anymore.
She had lost it completely, even worse than before, pressing a trembling hand to her lips, biting down on her sobs that threatened to escape.
Malik had promised Sinbad he wouldn’t cry ever again.
That he would never let the past pull him down, that he’d keep walking, keep pushing forward, no matter what.
And yet, here he was, breaking that promise.
A promise he broke not once but twice for her and her father.
Like Safira of a few minutes before, she wanted to reach through the projection.
But, of course, it wasn’t to break anything but to understand it. Mend it.
It was to grab her husband by the shoulders, shake him, and scream at him.
Why? Why now? Why let it all in now? Just forget it! Forget me! I—I don’t deserve… you.
That song—those words—it wasn’t just some poetic nonsense meant to make drunks weep into their ale.
It spoke of Rehan’s sacrifice in a brilliant light. Exaggerating it into a legend.
Malik hated that to his core.
He couldn’t stand something he hated to be celebrated in such a way.
It was the night that had stolen brothers from each other.
Sons from their mothers, fathers from their daughters, and husbands from their wives.
The night that had carved scars so deep into their souls they would never heal.
The night where Rehan had made his choice, and Malik had let him.
A choice that haunted him every single day.
It was a damned night.
Layla felt the same.
And so, she did the only thing she could do.
She cried with him.
Not loudly. Not dramatically.
Not in the way others wept when they wanted the world to see their sorrow.
No, she cried silently. She let the tears slip down her face, hot and aching, mirroring his.
She kept clutching the fabric of her sleeve, pressing it to her mouth, and biting down to keep herself from making a sound.
This moment was for them.
This was for the kids they used to be.
For Rehan, who had made a choice they could never take back.
For Malik, who did the same, forcing himself to live with it.
For herself, who had been left behind.
She wasn’t sure how long she stood there, drowning in it.
But when she finally forced herself to look up at the projection again, Malik was still sitting there. Still lost in that song, lost in his failure.
And Layla?
Layla had never felt so alone.