Chapter 151
And within the space of consciousness that had suddenly become too bright as all the clues that had once been scattered began to merge into a single complete image, Nirma remembered something, something she had heard from the mouth of the Abnormal they had captured in the case of the murder of eighteen crusader soldiers, the Abnormal who had ridden within the body of Leontios Chalkeus, the Abnormal who, before she silenced it with a power that could not be resisted by a being of its kind, had whispered something, had said something that at the time she dismissed as meaningless rambling, something she stored in the furthest corner of her memory because she had no time to think about it amid the chaos unfolding around her.
His friend at Uhud Hill.
The Abnormal had said that she must meet his friend at Uhud Hill, precisely when the Battle of Uhud took place, precisely when the Muslim community suffered one of their greatest defeats against the Quraysh disbelievers from Mecca, precisely when Islamic history stood at its most fragile point, at a point where even the smallest change could alter the course of everything that would come after.
Thus began a negotiation that Nirma had never imagined would take place within this nameless room, within the only space across the entire timeline where she could lower her guard without fearing that a single mistake would become the end of everything.
Not without reason, because in this space, for the first time since she became a fugitive hunted by every agency across time, she sat with Arya not to plan an escape, not to calculate the remaining ammunition, not to map out evacuation routes from one year to another, but to do something far more difficult than all of those.
To try to guess where and when something they had never seen would appear, to try to read the mind of an entity that dared to twist the sacred verses of five different religions with a boldness that defied the logic they understood, to try to enter the consciousness of a being that might have existed since before humanity first inscribed sacred words upon stone or skin or paper that would never last forever.
Nirma, who sat with her back touching nothing, with her hands still resting upon her thighs, with her breath still moving in and out in the same rhythm as when she first sat in this place, spoke first, her voice emerging in a tone different from usual, a tone like someone thinking deeply, trying to piece together fragments of a puzzle too many and too scattered to be seen in a single glance.
"What if," she said, and she let her words hang in the echo-less air, allowing Arya, who sat before her with the watch still glowing on his wrist, to look at her with eyes no longer pale yet still holding traces of worry he could not fully conceal, "this Abnormal appeared when the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad began to fall? Not merely falling like other kingdoms that rise and die upon the same land, but collapsing in a way that did not only destroy a power but also a civilization, collapsing in a way that burned libraries filled with thousands of manuscripts that would never be read again, collapsing in a way that killed scholars and philosophers and jurists who would never be replaced, collapsing in a way that left wounds that never healed in the collective memory of the Muslim people for centuries afterward. Would that not be the perfect place to sow chaos? Would it not be when everyone is too busy saving their own lives to notice what moves among the ruins, when history is being written by trembling hands filled with fear and despair, when no one would realize that something has changed because everything else has changed too much to be compared with what should have happened—would it not be at such a moment that something seeking to alter the course of everything would choose to appear?"
Arya listened without moving, with his fingers still resting upon the watch he never removed, with eyes that did not blink even as the blue light from the small screen reflected upon the moist surface of his corneas.
And when Nirma finished speaking, when her flat voice ceased to hang in the echo-less air, he shook his head, slowly, very slowly, a motion that felt more like something born from the awareness that he had to say something he did not wish to say rather than from certainty that he knew the correct answer.
"That possibility could be true," he said, and his voice carried a tone he never used when speaking about targets or missions or escape routes, a softer tone, like someone trying to wrap a bitter truth in layers of words that were not too sharp, "but you must not forget one thing, Nirma. One thing that may be more important than all fallen kingdoms and all burned libraries. The era of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. The time when the first four caliphs led immediately after the death of Prophet Muhammad SAW, the time when the Muslim community had to learn, for the first time, to live without the physical presence of the one who had been the source of revelation and law and guidance for them, the time when every decision made, every word recorded, every action taken would determine the direction of that newly born religion for centuries to come. And in that era, Nirma, particularly during the time of Umar ibn Khattab, something happened, something that might not be visible to eyes that only see battles and conquests and territorial expansion, but for someone who understands that religion is not only built by revelation descending from the heavens but also by memory passed down from one generation to the next, that event was an extremely crucial turning point. Umar ibn Khattab deliberately halted, prohibited, restrained the effort to formally and widely record hadith. He chose not to allow the words of Prophet Muhammad SAW to be written upon paper that could be copied and spread and read by anyone who could read, he chose to let those hadith remain within the chests of the companions who directly witnessed them, within memories that would die with the bodies that carried them, within an oral tradition that could change, could be forgotten, could be reinterpreted by generations who had never heard the voice that originally spoke them. Would that not, if you think about it, be the most fragile point in the history of a religion that claims its holy text is perfect and unchanging? Would it not be when someone decides that words do not need to be written, when memory becomes the sole guardian of what is true and what is false, when no one can verify whether a hadith passed from mouth to mouth truly came from the Prophet's lips or was merely a fabrication born from political interests that never invoke the name of God—would it not be at such a moment that something seeking to twist meaning, to bend direction, to plant seeds that would grow into a tree never intended by those who first planted it, would choose to appear?"
To be continued…