In the high tower of the Stone Citadel, the air was warm, smelling of melting beeswax and imported frankincense.
Bilal sat at a massive oak table covered in sheets of rag paper.
He was forty-four years old, his thick beard now heavily frosted with silver, giving him the undeniable aura of a Patriarch.
Sitting across from him was Nura.
She was ten years old now, her olive skin and dark, observant eyes a stark contrast to the pale, blonde orphans of the North.
She wore a fine dress of Axiomra-blue wool, but she carried herself with the quiet, still vigilance of a child who remembered the desert and the blood of her parents.
Bilal unrolled a massive map he had drawn from memory and merchant reports.
"Look here, my little flower," Bilal rumbled, his thick finger tracing a line across the parchment.
"This is Axiomra. It feels large to us. It feels like the center of the world."
Nura leaned in, her dark eyes scanning the ink.
"It is the center of the world, Baba. No one has walls like ours. No one has the white flour."
Bilal smiled, but it was a sad, cautious smile.
He dragged his finger far to the right, past the edges of Europe, deep into the East.
"Here is Baghdad. And here, Kaifeng, the capital of the Song Dynasty," Bilal explained softly.
"In Axiomra, we have one thousand souls. In Kaifeng, they have one million. In Cordoba, they have libraries larger than our entire citadel. Our city is a diamond, Nura. It is brilliant, and it is hard. But the world... the world is an ocean. If we ever believe we are the biggest fish, the ocean will swallow us."
Nura looked up at him, her sharp mind turning the gears of geopolitics.
"Is that why you invite the foreign merchants? To learn how deep the ocean is?"
"Yes," Bilal nodded, feeling a swell of pride.
While Runa was his general, Nura was becoming his diplomat.
"We survive because we know what the rest of the world is doing. But the world is also diseased. And we must be very, very careful about what we let inside."