Steel whipped and lashed in the street, and rode upon mounts pounding through the dirt roads.

“What is it, Rahena?” Qamarah called.

“Soldiers.” I grabbed a shawl and ran outside. Qamarah, Layla and Haniya followed.

The figures in metal dragged out fishermen and bazaar-merchants from their houses, men and boys pulled from their huts. People ran across down the roads, screaming as horses ran them down. Somewhere, smoke rose over the skies.

“What is happening?” Qamarah said, grabbing my arm.

“It’s the Shayfahan,” Layla whispered, her eyes glazed as she watched the scene unfold as if she was not there, as if her feet could not move, her muscles had turned to stone.

The other women emerged from the house. The noises felt earth-shattering against our bones as men and women and horses and metal whirled, the earth flying in the air against their hooves.

“We need to go inside,” Haniya shouted. “Qamarah, come!” Haniya grabbed Qamarah and pulled her by the hand, but Qamarah held on to me.

“Inside?” Layla said. “They are dragging everyone from their homes.”

“Qamarah!” Haniya screamed.

“I need to get home,” the weaver-woman said next to them, “I need to find my family–”

Some of the women scattered across the roads, weaving their way through the chaos running to find home; the others ran back inside my house, shutting the door.

Arunnisa and her brother came running out of the house to Haniya. “Amma, I’m scared,” cried Arunnisa.

Haniya grabbed the two children close to her. “Qamarah, Rahena, we need to go!”

The soldiers in their silver disks of armor seemed to me to move slowly in time, and something fell still inside me. One of the men being dragged away fought the Shayfahan soldier’s hands, and the soldier began to beat him.

Someone inside a house was playing an instrument, a slow melody.

It was Isna, I knew, the nearly-deaf daughter of the fisherman.

In the moonlight, I glimpsed Isna’s profile through the gap of an open door, playing the stringed lute with her eyes closed. It was only when she played music by her own hands that she could hear something, Isna said, as it reverberated through her own bones. She played, her eyes and ears closed against the night. Against the melody of Isna’s lute, the soldiers’ arms rose, striking bodies, landing blows upon heads.

Isna’s eyes closed, focusing. For nothing else mattered but that sound: loud, bellowing, it could swallow them up into its cavernous abode. The sound was unlike any other, for in the midst of the fire raging and the people running, and the soldiers beating down upon men – the sound carried, tendrils caressing to take them beyond the fires, beyond the shouts and screams.

If only, the lute-player thought, they could all see what I see: the hand of God reaching down to caress them, to hold them. It is what she saw when she played music. But it did not matter, for they could not see it. They could not see the brilliance of the night skies above them, the shining moon over the tips of the swaying cypress and banyan trees, beautiful and full of light. The men who beat those who did not have weapons or titles or armor, could not see the breath of the night air, purifying and hopeful. Why could they not see it? Isna wondered.

And as the blows landed and the music played, a roar of something loud swelled in my mind, from the pit of my stomach, rising and striking my head. It was an aching terror and pain that was not mine, and yet it was.

Nasreen pushed through Qamarah and Haniya. Across from us down the road, the soldiers were dragging out a man in a long white robe, his dark hair ruffled against his head as the soldiers pushed him down the road, kicking him. Blood splattered on the ground as the man coughed.

Nasreen shrieked, running to her husband Sayed on the ground. A Shayfahan soldier shoved her away. “What are you doing? Please, please, stop it, stop it!” Nasreen screamed. The soldiers dragged Sayed away, leaving Nasreen kneeling on the ground. Two boys rushed out from the house and gripped Nasreen’s neck. But Nasreen remained on the ground, staring off down the road where they had taken her husband. The children began to cry, but she seemed not to see them.

“We have to help her up,” I said.

“What?” Layla said.

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“Help her up!” I shouted, running to Nasreen.

Qamarah and I pulled her up by the shoulders. Haniya and Layla took the children. “Hold each other’s hand,” Haniya said to the four children.

“My house!” Layla shouted, motioning her head north. “There’s a cellar! Come!”

Together, we dragged Nasreen and her children away from the fires and the soldiers, weaving through bodies and rubble and smoke.

“Through here,” Layla said, heading for a low-roofed house at the end of the road, behind which several chicken coops were freed, clucking hens scrambling around the dirtpath.

A small goat, terrified by the noises, bleated against the side of the house. “Nesi, come here!” Layla grabbed the goat, picking it up in her arms.

With one hand, she pulled up a wooden hatch door. “Down there, go!” Carrying the goat who continued to bleat in her arms, Layla climbed below.

I guided Nasreen down the ladder because it seemed she could barely move her arms, her eyes glazing over. “Nasreen, you have to move!” I shouted. With difficulty, we climbed down to the dark earthen cellar.

A sudden light flared out from within – an oil lamp lighting a wrinkled face. Nanu Khulayda cried out, “Layla!” She grabbed Layla into a tight embrace.

Layla gasped, “Nanu! You are here! Where are Ma and Abba?”

I set Nasreen down against sacks of rice and flour, and Haniya set down the two boys, who had stopped crying but stared out with wide eyes.

“Your Ma is here,” Nanu Khulayda said, “One of the soldiers hit her when she tried to stop them.”

“Where is she?” Layla whirled around. “Stop them from what, Nanu?”

“I am sorry baccha, they took your Abba,” Nanu Khulayda whispered.

“No…” Layla whispered. “No.” She glimpsed her mother in the corner and ran to her. She was slumped against the sacks.

Nasreen hunched on the ground in a fetal position, murmuring something under her breath. Haniya draped a blanket around her shoulders.

Nanu Khulayda brushed her hands over Layla’s hair, caressing her head. She whispered in the darkness. “These times…they remind me of the Wraithknife war.” She had been a young woman in the midst of the war, fighting against the invading Altharins who had tried to break into her home.

I leaned against the sacks of flour with Qamarah and Haniya.

The cellar smelled damp, earthy. A scent of herbs pervaded the air, something like lavender sprigs. For a while, we listened to the sounds of running and shouting above muffled by the earth.

Nasreen was whimpering now, grabbing onto her children. I put a hand on Nasreen’s shoulder, but she cringed away from me. She had stopped crying, and her eyes dug into me. “There has always been something wrong with you.”

“Nasreen, I swear I’ll take you right back outside if you think you can talk to her that way,” Qamarah snapped in a hard voice from the corner where she was holding the crying child.

“But it’s true, isn’t it?” Nasreen said, holding each son’s hand in her own as she gazed at me. “You should know this, Qamarah – you should stay away from her. Her entire family, her traitor father.”

“Her father is innocent,” Qamarah whispered. “Don’t you dare accuse Rahena.” Qamarah looked towards her elder sister. “Haniya, tell them.”

But Haniya glanced away down to the floor.

“Haniya?” Qamarah pulled at her sister’s arm. When she said nothing, Qamarah’s voice had gone cold; in a stiff voice, she said, “Haniya, if we get out of this alive by the end of the night, I am staying with Rahena. No one should be alone tonight.”

Haniya turned to face her. She stood up and pulled Qamarah away from the group to a corner of stacked flour sacks towering precariously. “No, you’re not, Qamarah.” Haniya hissed at her sister away from the others. “Don’t get yourself involved when they turn on Rahena. It’s dangerous, Qamarah.”

I watched Haniya’s as she leaned towards her sister, the face of the girl I had wandered the fields with, written poems with, gone.

“Oh? Like you have turned on her?” Qamarah said.

“Qamarah, you don’t have to stay with me,” I called from the ground.

But as I spoke, something from aboveground collided inside my head. I let go of Abdul, holding my own head. Next to me, Layla lay on the ground, rocking, her eyes blank.

And then I heard a familiar voice above. Through the reed slats above, I peered outside. Somewhere up above amidst the flames, my father was being beaten.

“Rahena?” Qamarah whispered.

But I was already rushing out over the ladder and the hatch.

“Where are you going?” Qamarah called.

“It’s Abba!” I called back. I no longer cared if they believed me.

When I emerged above, everything was in silence, burning. Through the flames, I stumbled through the wreckage of my homeland.

At the head of a road, my father knelt to the ground, a tall figure in a white mask towering over him, striking him with the hilt of his sword. His face was bloody, and eyes swollen.

A hand held me back, pulling me by the arm. “Rahena, don’t.”

It was Qamarah. “They’re going to kill you, damnit, don’t!”

I pushed Qamarah aside.

I launched myself towards them, but a Shayfahan soldier’s hand reached for me, pinning me down to the ground.

On the other side, another soldier headed for Qamarah. I screamed at her. But when he knocked her down, she collapsed to the ground. As she fell, her head struck against the fallen rubble, sharp and jagged.

The man’s heavy weight suffocated me, my eyes blurred by mud, but through it I could still see her face on the ground, her eyes staring back at me. Blood seeped across the stones.

Terror fled.

The world tilted.

I did not recognize the scream that left my lungs.

The fires and the rubble all surged through me –— everything I had felt since the first episode all those years before when I did not know what was happening to me — every soul I had felt since then.

Rage filled me, and everything I had ever felt, every shred of pain of another’s, surged through me to the man holding me down.

The Shayfahan man’s arms went slack, the body rigid. With difficulty I raised myself and looked at him. His eyes were empty, hollow. He collapsed into the mud, his eyes staring out into nothing.

I looked at my hands.

I rose, coming for the masked rider.

“Qamarah?” Haniya screamed, shaking her. “Qamarah!”

The tall, masked man was dragging my father by his hair along the ground, his body scraping along rubble.

His face was in shadow, but he motioned to a soldier to take my father.

The shimmering masked man mounted up on his white horse. The horse reared its haunches in the air and rode into the flames.