They came with fire on a Raviyani night before dawn.

It was the last thing Hasheem remembered from the raid. For eight years, the night had been a knowledge, a mere fact left on his mind like an old wine stain one had forgotten how it happened. He couldn't recall when he'd lost that memory. Some time during the raid? A day, a week, a month while he was imprisoned at Sabha? Somewhere between his first scream and the last grunt from one of the men he'd satisfied? Which man?

'It doesn't matter,' Dee had said, patting him on the shoulder the first day Hasheem came into his service. 'What happened happened. Sometimes the past shapes who we are, other times it's far better buried.'

'Is it,' he'd wanted to ask a many times, 'better off buried?' Because Dee didn't look like he'd meant it when the mess had to be cleaned up. He'd looked like a man trying to cover up a mistake he couldn't fix. It hadn't happened too often, and while he could count those incidents on one hand, including the one involving Mara's husband before he'd left Rasharwi, to believe said incidents would never catch up with him outside of the city was like wishful thinking to a dying man. A change of identity couldn't help it. A change of scenery had never made a dent. Deep down, he knew it was going to come back one way or another, that it was only a matter of time something or someone would kick the door open, and then the memory would come flooding back to him, along with the unidentified tune that had caused every mess in the past eight years. Only this time, the one who would have to answer for the mess would be Djari.

'I know you,' was all it had taken to kick open that door. 'You're Soraya's son. Yeva's little brother.'

It had caught him unaware, like stumbling out of a tunnel into the searing sunlight, the sudden explosion of pain that had been there the first time a soldier had ripped him open, the day he'd walked into his room to find Mara's body swinging from the wooden beam, or the night Djari was trying not to scream as the man tore into her. It ripped something apart. It broke something out of prison. It brought the tune back to life.

He killed the man.

How, he couldn't remember, the same way he couldn't remember killing the general, or any those people he'd taken apart in Rasharwi. He'd killed the man's companions too, without knowing how or why. Every time that tune started playing, the memories of what he was doing disappeared like a candle being snuffed out before being lit up again. This time, the unidentified tune hadn't stopped when he came back, not while the rasp of Saya's steel was rising above it, not when she was yelling at him to put down the weapon. It was still there when the sight of her walking toward him had begun to waver and fade, when everything around him had turned into an unconvincing image from the past, a dream vaguely remembered, or a premonition of the future that might or might not happen, before something that had came back to life.

They came with fire on a Raviyani night before dawn...

It began with a shriek of a woman, the kind that reminded him of juvenile eagles screeching to be fed. Only at ten he was old enough to know eagles didn't feed at night, and no birds nor animals ever screeched so loud, so high a sound as people when they were about to die. 'Humans,' a raid survivor had said, 'when burned alive could silence anything with their scream.'

The night did go silent. The music and laughter did stop. For a moment that lasted too long, conversations hung unfinished, confessions of lovers paused mid-sentence, young mothers turned from the babes at their breasts to listen. And then, when the second shriek began, what started as a celebration turned into a massacre.

Through the smoke screen formed by the fire that began on the eastern side of camp, the Rashais rode in with their torches already lit. Black helmets over black hair above black armors poured in from the horizon like an unstoppable storm of dark sand, snaking into the gaps between tents to drown all their inhabitants. Only this time the tents weren't being uprooted by the wind and sand, they were being lit on fire along with its inhabitant, and while sandstorms would kill anyone, Shakshi or a Rashai, tonight, the killing was one-sided. It occurred to him then that he'd made the comparison unfairly. This was no wrath of god or nature that came to end their Raviyani. Nature didn't discriminate which life to take, humans did.

The fights broke out. Mother took him by the wrist and started running, her boney fingers digging into his skin, making him whimper. She yelled for his two elder sisters as she did. They'd never hear it, he thought as they searched for Yeva and Zanzi in that screaming chaos. It was hopeless. He didn't think anyone could make sense of anything with all the noise, or see anything with this smoke stinging their eyes, not well enough to find a missing person anyway.

He was wrong.

They didn't find his sisters, not during that part of the night. But you could see far enough––more than enough––to make out the faces of the ones running to fight, to hide children, or to find lost ones. You could see far enough to witness what skin did when it caught fire. You could smell and taste the ash made by charred human flesh in your nose and mouth well enough to remember it for life. And no matter how loud the fighting, the screaming, and the yelling escalated, you could never cover your ears well enough to block out the cries of mothers whose children lay dead in their arms, or your eyes long enough to forget what happened in a massacre.

Not that his mother would let him forget it, in any case. "Look," she said, pulling his hands away from his eyes. "Look at what they've done. Look, listen, and remember."

He didn't want to look and remember, but when you were ten, helpless, and frightened, you listened to your mother.

And so, from behind the large rock at the far end of camp that gave them refuge, through the smoke that stung his eyes and the tears they'd caused, he watched it all happen. A crying child trampled to death. A woman raped and tied to a tent to burn. Men he knew cut open and mutilated beyond recognition. Someone trying to stuff back in his intestine. An old man, staked by a spear through his gut but still alive. The fire that consumed everything he'd come to know, every object that brought back precious memories, every promise made of tomorrow now never to be accomplished. He watched as his whole life burst into flames, into smoke, into dust.

All the while, the full moon hovered just above the sloping silk-smooth dunes, too high, too far out of reach, too beautiful a sight for a night like this. He watched, as Ravi's sacred eye bore witness in silence to the slaughter on Raviyani, as if it was what they had coming, as if this was precisely the fate she had designed for them.

Did we not sacrifice enough gazelles tonight? Did someone make her angry? Where is she, when we need her protection? What is the point of worshiping a goddess who wouldn't come to save you?

He didn't ask his mother those questions. The answers were already in her eyes, on the faces of everyone who were trying to survive the night. No one, god or man, was coming save them. Not the Kha'a whose head had been taken and put on a spike, not their White Warriors who were dying and killing themselves to not be taken alive, not his father who had died a long time ago.

'It was an honorable death,' people always said about his father. But where was honor now and what use was it? No honor would save them from the Rashais, or make sure they died with one tonight, that much he knew for certain.

"Is death painful?" he found the courage to ask. It sounded like it did. Everyone was screaming, weren't they?

Mother looked at him, then looked away. "It is an end to suffering," she said. Her hands trembled, clenched tight, then steadied. "If we die, the pain will be short-lived."

"And if we survive? What then? What will happen?"

She paused, swallowed, and made a decision. "Then life will not be kind...to men or women."

He bit his lip. Life in the desert had never been kind, but when adults needed time to reply to these things, it meant they were working on putting it lightly. "Should we die then?" And end this suffering? Like Father? "All of us?" It would have been a better choice, wouldn't it? Where would they go after this? How would they live? The Kha'gan was falling. They hadn't seen the Khumar or his family alive for some time.

She reached for him, trapping his face between her palms, squeezing it hard enough to hurt. "No," she said. "We are the people of the desert. We do not die without a fight or take our lives to end our sufferings. You will survive. Kjal has spoken. Whatever happens tonight, you will survive, you will stand and fight, you will find water, and you will not give up. Do you understand me?"

Kjal had spoken. Their oracle was only a pureblood like him, and yet everyone had listened when the prophecy was made. 'This boy,' he'd said, 'is the key to our freedom, the flint that will set fire to the Salasar. If you have to die protecting him, it must be done, at all costs.'

Is that why Mother is here and no longer looking for Yeva or Zanzi? Is that why the Rashais have come? Is everyone dying because of me?

"Do you understand?" she asked again, louder this time. There were tears in her eyes, but the drops were too small, too thick with ash to roll down her cheeks. She wouldn't let that happen anyway. Mothers didn't cry in front of their children, he'd come to notice.

He nodded. He hadn't lived long enough to understand it. He nodded in any case, because that was what she wanted to see.

And so he kept watching from the safety of that rock, as he was told to do, through everything that happened, from the first shriek to the last fire as it died down, when dawn came and the killing ended, when those left alive were taken and rounded up, when he discovered that his sisters, Zanzi and Yeva, were among them.

'Life will not be kind,' Mother had said. It was when he discovered what she truly meant, and what happened to women when they survived a raid.

He didn't remember how many soldiers it took to kill them. Women who fought back all died at some point, beaten to death by one of the men who dropped their breeches, or have their throats cut when the last man was done.

They couldn't be sold anyway, the slaver explained to a soldier, to someone in charge. That's why Shakshi whores fetch a good price. Hard to find a desert bitch that wouldn't bite every time you stick a cock into them.

It went on all morning until noon. Some time in the middle of it, his mother started humming a tune, a lullaby he'd known all his life. It didn't drown out the scream. It intertwined with his sister's cries, with the noise of people dying, with how loud his mother's heart was beating, and the sound she was trying not to make as she listened to her daughters being defiled by the Rashais. He wondered why she was humming. If it was meant to soothe him, or her.

But she never stopped humming that lullaby, not when they found her behind the rock, not when they dragged her out in the open, not when they beat her to death with her son still clutched between her arms.

'You will survive,' she'd said.

'If you have to die protecting him,' said Kjal.

He hated the oracle for that. He hated his mother, too, for having listened. He hated that he was alive when he shouldn't. But most of all he hated the tune.

And deep down he knew, had known for a long time, that the lullaby had never stopped, not after her death, not when they'd thrown him into Sabha, not during or after he'd been taken to the pleasure district, not while he was killing for Dee, for Mara. Somewhere in his head, it had kept on playing, most of the time without his knowledge, most of the time he'd managed to keep it buried, forgotten.

But it was playing now, loud as the pain on the side of his head that was screaming at him since those men had arrived to see izr Imami. Somewhere in the far corner of his mind, Djari's presence flickered like a dying candle as he drifted in and out of consciousness. He was awake but his eyes wouldn't open. He was dreaming but these thoughts came to him fully aware. But the humming...the humming wouldn't stop no matter what he did.

'I don't care what you have to do,' Dee's words, slipping in and out of his head like a drowning man trying to stay afloat. 'Start a fight, kill something, go fuck someone, but put an end to that tune in your head before I have to come in and clean up your shit.'

Put an end to it...

'We are the people of the desert...'

The tune grew louder, filling the room, the air in his lungs, poisoning something in his gut...

'I need to see you.' Mara's last words. The image of her feet dangling, swinging under the beam.

'Please...' Djari, crying, in the valley, on the ground, in the dark.

The lullaby escalated. The pain in his head pulsed harder, faster, stayed longer each time.

'You will survive... you will find water...' his mother's instructions. Her hands on his head, his back. The pressure of her arms crushing him against her chest until he couldn't breathe.

'If you have to die protecting him...'

Stop humming. Be quiet...

'... the key to our freedom...The flint that will set fire to the Salasar...'

Enough!

His eyes flew open. He jerked off the bed, gasping for breaths.

Something slammed him back down, knocked the air out of his lungs, pinning him flat against the pelt.

"How about you be quiet?" a voice sounded, in his head, from his throat, his tongue. "It's about time you stay sleeping, you spineless, miserable piece of shit."

***

A/N: This has been one of the most difficult chapters to write, which is why I'm late. I will spend some time on Al-Sana for the next few chapters, I think, and it's no spoiler at this point that you will meet the other side of Hasheem--the one that makes more sense. I am equally thrilled to meet this guy. So many questions to answer. I wonder if Dee has met him, and if so, what happened? (The level at which I'm pantsing this is scary, I know. XDD)

And yes, we now have 4 chosen ones, all broken by shitty parents who wanted their kids to be special. Which is the real one? Is there a real one from the start or are all of them? 

But really though, do we not, in our own ways and considering the butterfly effects of things, have a hand in shaping the future with every choice we make? What if we are all chosen? That's a thought that raises my hair every time. 

Again, if you enjoy this story, please help others find it by leaving a review or buying a copy on Amazon or goodreads. Keyword search of Obsidian: Awakening or Sienna Frost will bring up the book.

On a side note, if you'd like to see me talk about books and writing, there are two podcasts on YouTube where I have been invited as a guest. One is a one-on-one interview, the other is a group chat of me, Richard Nell (Writer of Canadian Amazon #1 bestseller in fantasy), Michael R. Fletcher (successful trad published author of Beyond Redemption), Sarah Chorn (very successful writer and professional editor), and two very influential fantasy book reviewer/bloggers. It's called "Grimdark gathering" on the channel. Don't ask me why I've been invited to join these giants XD But there it is. Links don't work here, but if you search for "Steve talks books" on YouTube you will find them.