The caravan burned in the dead of night. Flames licked the heavens as screams and chaos roared beneath a starless desert sky. Tariq’s scimitar gleamed golden in the firelight, coated with crimson. Behind him, a robed merchant stumbled, clutching a chest to his chest. "Please! Spare me, I beg—!" The plea never finished as Tariq’s blade flashed again, precise and soundless. His face, angular and sun-kissed, revealed no emotion; his eyes, black as obsidian, betrayed neither vengeance nor satisfaction. His dark beard, neatly trimmed, was damp with sweat, and his turban of deep cobalt cloth sat askew after the melee. Wrapped in loose, sand-colored robes bound with a raven-black sash, Tariq sliced through the final knot securing the chest to the dying merchant’s hand. The night claimed the cries as quickly as the smoke consumed the stars.
With practiced efficiency, Tariq smashed the lock on the chest and flipped it open. Nestled inside rich, crushed velvet lay the object of his carnage—a slender vase of jade-green glass, etched with indecipherable symbols. He held it up to the chaotic amber glow of the pyre behind him. Once again, the whispers crawled at the edges of his mind.
"Find me."
It was not a voice so much as a pulse of meaning, like the elusiveness of a dream. Tariq shivered despite the desert heat. The whispers had haunted him for weeks now—ever since he wrested the first relic from that tomb in Hurud. This was the second. Two was not enough, the whispers said. The others must be found.
A muffled grunt made him turn. A young boy, no older than fourteen summers, scrambled out from beneath the wreckage of a turned-over wagon. Clad in not much more than a tattered linen tunic, his head was wrapped loosely in a scarf. Wide brown eyes locked onto Tariq’s form, frozen in terror. Tariq tilted his head slightly, resting the jade relic into the folds of his sash. He sheathed his scimitar cleanly, as if the boy’s small frailness hardly warranted steel.
"Go," said Tariq evenly, his voice thin and dry like fallen leaves.
The boy hesitated for a moment. Perhaps he misinterpreted it as mercy. Regardless, he turned and ran into the echoing emptiness of the dunes, leaving his trail of footprints to be swept away like whispers.
Two Weeks Earlier
"Sell me the relic or sell your soul," Tariq had warned as he lounged in the oasis tavern, a goblet of pomegranate wine cupped between his fingers. The dark-red liquid caught the glint of the midday sun filtering through the palm fronds overhead. His robes were finer then—striped black and gold—and the intricate embroidery on his sash suggested he served no petty tribal lord. The merchant across from him gulped audibly.
That first vase, shimmering with impossible silver-blue under the desert sun, had not spoken to him yet. Perhaps he thought it was guilt then, this strange itch in his thoughts. But that was before he'd touched it. Before the dreams, the visions, the unshakable sense that something ancient and vast watched from behind its crystalline colors. He had forced the merchant's hand that day, but as Tariq rode away from the oasis city, the whisper had come for the first time. The whisper of a Queen long-forgotten, desperate to rise again.
"They scattered me."
The Sands of Awakening
The third relic was in the hands of a desert nomad queen, Amina, whose tented encampment moved across the Wasteland of Famiya like a restless mirage. Tariq tracked her for days under a merciless sun, independent of any caravan routes. His camel swayed with patience born of practice, though its rider burned beneath the sun's fury. Wrapped in the same cobalt-dyed turban he’d worn during his youth, when he served caravans, Tariq shielded his gaze beneath the fabric, his black robes spattered with the rusted stains of exertion and violence.
By the time he reached Amina under a blood-red moon rising behind ghostly dunes, he was no cunning thief nor mercenary. He was a supplicant. Amina, tall and commanding in her tunics of layered metallics and glass-bead jewelry, loomed over him. She called him mad when he knelt at the entrance of her tent, his head bowed low, and begged for what she claimed she did not have.
"And if I had such trinkets, vulture, why should I give them to you?" Her voice was rich, with drawn-out vowels made musical by her accent.
He looked up at her then, his dark eyes burning but hollow. "Because they are not yours. They belong to her."
Her laughter struck the air like flint on stone, and for an instant, Tariq thought he might die as her spearmen stepped forward. But just as quickly, her laugh fell still, and she looked into his face as if seeing past flesh and blood. Perhaps it was the relics already hidden in his robes, or perhaps her own superstitions gave her pause. Without another word, she turned away and gestured for him to follow.
The Queen's Voice
When Tariq gathered all five—one wrested from a forgotten crypt littered with venomous serpents, another from the well-guarded shrine of an elder priest—he thought, perhaps, the whispers might stop. Instead, they roared.
In the depths of the midnight desert where no caravan dared trespass and the stars spun drunkenly over the sand, he laid the relics in calculated symmetry upon an ancient carved monolith he could not read but felt he had known forever. Their symbols pulsed faintly, the jade, silver, obsidian, lapis, and gold weaving some ancient symphony entirely within his chest.
"Find me," came the final whisper, unraveling into the darkness as smoke unraveled in air. Then, silence.
A moment later, the sands trembled. The earth cracked open beneath him, and from the abyss rose not a Queen nor a woman nor anything Tariq ever dreamt of. It was both vast and intimate, beautiful and blinding in its horror—a form that shifted between a veiled goddess, eyes filled with galaxies, and a seething, serpentine thing bound in woven silk and starlight. He screamed. But it wasn't fear. It was ecstasy, surrender. He’d found her.
In the stillness that followed, as the winds buried the monolith once again, the Queen’s form regarded Tariq, her servant, with something like affection. No mortal would know the stories whispered between her and his now-mad mind. He grinned up at her with bloodied teeth. She reached down, massive yet strangely human, and touched his forehead with a slender finger cloaked in cosmic silk.
The desert night resumed its stillness once more. Only the faintest whispers echoed where the sands stood untouched.
The Source...check out the great article that inspired this amazing short story: 11. The AI Robot Next Door: How AI Could Become Your Perfect Partner
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