Smoke, blood, death...

The cries of women suffering for the death of their children flooded the dawn. Mutilated bodies had replaced the scarce dew of dawn on that dusty earth and yellow sands forgotten in the heart of Persia. Black vulture feathers fluttered to the ground where the beast had scorched the earth, and the smell of sulphur permeated the nostrils.

"Arash" cried a woman with a face full of earth, blood and tears, as she entered the temple, "ARASH!"

The woman shouted once more as she failed to get an answer:

"Come out and show your face coward!"

The man she called out to patiently responded:

"No need to shout, Shirin. I heard you perfectly well the first time you called my name."

He looked like a hunter coming from the village. He appeared out of the shadows carrying a torch in his hands that illuminated the tanned skin of his face and his deep orange eyes.

He was calm as usual. That only made his wife even more furious.

"Take a good look at me, Arash, open your eyes and look at me!" Shirin shouted, possessed by anger, opening her arms wide: "All this blood is your own blood! The blood of your children, the blood of your grandchildren, the blood of your own people!"

Arash was unfazed by the claim and just walked in the direction of the large temple fire to light it and begin his prayers.

"I warned them all, but no one would listen to me."

The fire from the bonfire flooded the vicinity of the temple. Shirin could feel the magic floating in the air.

"What good are your gifts if you don't use them to help your own?"

"My magic has served to feed and protect us for years" he replied as he sat down in the middle of a fountain to begin his prayers. "My magic still serves to guard every house in the village. But, like the seasons, we cannot hasten it. Death, however, is always hungry, and knows no time or affections."

"This is all your fault!" exclaimed Shirin falling to her knees, unable to support her body because of crying. "My children, Arash, all my children..."

"They will all be back in this life sooner or later" said the husband as his orange eyes lit up brighter than the fire in front of him. "You know well that sooner or later, we all come back... one way or another."

Amidst the flames, Arash looked at the arrow he was preparing. The obsidian seemed to absorb the power of the flames and his own magic.

Deep down, he was mourning the loss of his children and his people as well, but his conscience was somehow clear.

The demon was very strong, so strong that holy fire alone could not stop it, but for that Arash needed time... even more time, and a special arrow; one that would never stop its flight.

「 心 」

"Xin?"

"Mmm..."

"Did you fall asleep?"

The woman's voice was calm and collected as she asked the question.

"No" Xin replied while lying on the divan with his eyes tightly closed.

He was trying to retain the memory as much as possible in his mind.

"Are you dizzy?"

"A little."

"You don't have to try so hard," the woman advised, standing up to pour him a glass of water. "The point of therapy is not to cause you more problems, but to try to solve the ones you already have. The important ones."

Xin felt this as an accusation from his psychologist, and although he accepted the glass of water, he wrinkled his brow.

"But this is important!" he protested.

"No" she replied unsubtly. "The fantasy dreams where you see an Arab man..."

"Persian."

"Excuse me?"

"He's not an Arab, he's Persian," he corrected her. "He's a man from the ancient lands, and times, of Persia."

The psychologist raised an eyebrow without disguising her discomfort at the correction, but still played along with him.

"Alright, then, dreams of Persian men with orange eyes and magic are nothing more than a projection of your unconscious seeking to draw your attention to what really matters at the moment."

Xin's and the psychologist's eyes met as they both held each other's gaze unblinkingly, waiting for a reaction from the other.

"Do you know what I'm talking about?"

"Arash has nothing to do with my father's death..."

Xin tried to escape the woman's gaze, but it was made difficult by the return of that weight in his chest that kept him from breathing during the nights, coming back to painfully strangle him.

"What about Shirin?"

"What about her?"

"Don't you think her grief over the death of her children is a little like yours?"

"No," Xin replied, trying to hold back tears. "She didn't hate her children."

"And did you hate your father?"

"I didn't, b-but... he did..."

"You still dream about him, don't you?" the psychologist insisted as she held out a box of tissues to Xin.

"Almost every day, yes."

"More than you dream of Persia?"

Xin shook his head hard as he wiped away tears.

"Yes and no," he replied. "It's hard to explain."

"I hear you."

"When I dream of my father I always wake up crying, upset and sad in equal parts... but when I dream of Persia, of Arash and Shirin, it feels strange..."

"Like he's calling you," the woman interjected, reading her notes. "That's what you said last time."

"Yes, like he is calling me... like I'm needed. It's... hard to explain."

"Xin, it's clear that you're going through an episode of post-traumatic stress from not wanting to face your father's death and that your mind, in response to that fear and frustration, is trying to create a barrier between your emissions and the memory of your father."

Xin dropped onto the couch as he squeezed his eyes shut. He was tired and his head was spinning.

"Let's talk about the accident," the psychologist continued. "Tell me what happened after you fainted..."

「 心 」

The cold was unbearable and Xin could feel it burning his skin. But, even more unbearable than the cold, was the strong, dry, chemical smell, and with every attempt to breathe, he could feel the non-existent, antiseptic scent burning his lungs.

"Ugh" was the only thing that left his lips as he tried to speak.

His head ached to the point of despair. So much so that he wished he could faint.

"Xin" exclaimed a worried woman.

She immediately grabbed him by one hand. His fingers ached too and the moment he tried to move them, the effort barely worked.

"Oh, Xin! Xin! Son, oh, Xin!" the woman sobbed and began to kiss his fingers.

The hot tears on his icy skin comforted him in a morbid way. He tried to open his eyes even though they felt so swollen, but instantly he regretted it. The bright light over his head almost made his head feel like it was splitting in half from the pain, and just after that, the beeping of the machine monitoring his vital signs became unbearable:

"Mu-mum..."

His voice came out raspy and hoarse.

"Mu..." he called again trying to search for his mother with his head despite keeping his eyes tightly closed.

Instantly she moved beside him and her lips kissed his forehead. Her tears fell on the face of her badly wounded son.

"Don't speak."

"Wa-water," Xin complained feeling each word burn his throat; as if his tongue was coated with razors, "Wat-water."

He tried to move on the hard surface he was lying on, but the tubes he had been hooked up to wouldn't let him.

"Don't speak, please," she begged, unable to hold back the tears and anguish in her body, "Don't speak baby, my Xin, my child..."

His mother sniffled loudly through her nose as she tried to caress him, but her fingers could not find a space on his battered face where she could touch him without hurting him.

"Oh, my God, why, why," she cried as she covered her mouth and reached for the water her son had asked for.

When she finally managed not to shiver and put the glass in Xin's mouth, he felt the cold water hurt his wounded lips, but at the same time, he also felt the invasive and life-saving way the liquid soothed the burning in his tongue and throat.

With a clearer mind, Xin managed to open his eyes slightly to see his mother, dishevelled, her eyes red from crying.

"What happened to my father?" he managed to ask laboriously as he remembered his father's terrified face and the accident they had been in.

Grief wracked her mother before she could turn around and turn her back on him. She didn't want her son to see her cry, but the tremors in her body gave her away....

"He didn't make it."

"What do y-y.." Xin tried to ask, but his mother interrupted him with the answer to the question he never managed to complete.

"Your father died in the accident," she said at last as she walked to the door and left her son alone with that news.

«Nothing...»

Xin got the impression that even hearing that his father was dead, he hadn't felt anything... or at least he did until the nightmares began.

「 心 」

From the day he had regained consciousness in the hospital, the coming of night had been a complete nightmare for Xin. The dreams of his father and the Persian battles were only the tip of the iceberg.

When he wasn't being attacked by memories of the accident, with the image of his father badly injured and with blood in his mouth as the main protagonist, or Arash's imposing orange eyes, it was the image of his mother crying at the funeral, or Dishi's eyes looking at him while tenderly lying next to him.

Xin couldn't deal with anything at that moment. He just couldn't. Suddenly the phone rang. On the notification strip he could read Dishi's short message:

"I wish I could be with you right now."

Reading that had distracted him from his nightly browsing of travel portals from Hong Kong to Tehran. He didn't know how he ended up on those pages when his initial intention was to listen to music on YouTube.

Thinking of the message, Xin wanted the same thing, and reading it made him smile at the screen involuntarily, but just then the phone started ringing, and his mother's picture appeared on the screen:

«If only things weren't so complicated....» he sighed.

"Mother..."

"Oh, thank the ancestors," said his mother on the other end of the line.

Since the accident she kept calling Xin every day, and every day when she heard him answer the call, she would say the same prayer full of thanks:

"Are you alright, Xin?"

It was the next question without a miss.

"Good, yes..." Xin replied distractedly as his eyes fixed on an offer he didn't know he had been seeking:

«Come and see the wonders of Iran....» it said, next to a picture of a huge snow-capped mountain that looked strangely familiar.

Xin heard a man behind him call out to him, or so he thought, startling him, but when he turned around he saw no one. He was alone in his room.

"Xin?" he heard his name called again, but this time in his ear, and remembered he was talking to his mother.

"Hmm?" he asked absently. "I'm sorry, mum, I wasn't listening to you..."

"I was asking if you had gone to the psychologist" the woman repeated patiently.

"Yes, but mum, I have to hang up, sorry."

"Yes, yes, I understand, I don't want to bother you, but Xin..."

"Yes?"

"I love you," the woman said, her voice fractured from crying. "Whatever happens, never forget that I love you."

"I love you too, mother," her son replied, and hung up.

In his empty room, in the middle of the night and in front of the computer, Xin made a decision that his father would have disapproved of as capricious and impulsive. A decision that he himself recognised as improper and imprudent, but one that, without giving it much thought, he still wanted to make.

He immediately entered the travel portal, filled out the entire form with the requested data, and ten minutes later he was pressing the button to confirm the payment, which opened a new tab:

"Payment registered," he read in disbelief.

Now, for any reason that would matter, there was no going back.