Fatiba Darvish stood beneath the maroon awning near the school gates, her fingers fidgeting with the edge of her green tie. The end-of-day breeze tugged at the hem of her uniform blazer, lifting it just enough to remind her she still wasn't used to the way it fit—not just on her body, but on her life.
She watched him.
From a distance, like you do when you aren't sure if someone is watching you back—or too used to never being seen at all.
Shotaro Mugyiwara.
He stood alone, as usual. No books in hand. No bag slung over his shoulder. Just him—tall, expression unreadable, posture loose like a panther who didn't see the point in threatening anyone but could.
He wasn't talking to anyone. He never did when the day ended.
But the way people moved around him, like he was a flame they couldn't decide whether to fear or worship—that said more than words ever could.
He looked… hated.
Not for what he'd done. Not even for what he was.
But for how he looked.
And in that moment, watching him from across the courtyard while students passed between them like river water around jagged rock, Fatiba felt something pinch behind her ribs.
Maybe that's why he'd done it.
Why he'd stood in front of the class and drawn all those stupid doodles on his face just to make them stop laughing at her.
Not because he pitied her.
But because he understood.
What it felt like to be human and still treated like you were something else.
For him, it was the height. The skin. The red eyes. That strange, haunted stillness he wore like a second skin.
For her, it was the scarf. The name. The prayers no one understood. The quiet way people looked at her wrists when she rolled down her sleeves to pray.
She looked at him.
And for a second, he looked up.
Their eyes met—not with tension, not with romance, but with something deeper.
Recognition.
The almond-eyed girl, daughter of Iran's most infamous diamond dynasty, didn't flinch from the stares of others. But his stare? It didn't burn. It reflected.
He saw her.
And didn't ask her to explain.
A car rolled up—sleek, black, windows tinted. The Darvish family insignia shimmered in gold on the hood ornament like a brand that reminded the world who owned her time.
She climbed in silently, settling against the cool leather.
Her driver asked something. She didn't hear it.
All she could think about was the boy back there—
The boy who stood like a shadow at the edge of every room. The boy whose face wasn't cruel but carved by something that had once been cruelty and now was just tired.
Shotaro Mugyiwara.
The name drifted like dust across the inside of her skull, clinging to the corners of thought the way certain words stay behind long after the conversation ends.
The boy who understood.
The one who didn't need to speak to say, I see you.
Because sometimes, being different wasn't something you wore—it wasn't a jacket you could shrug off when the air turned warm.It was a shadow. A second skin. Something that followed you into every room, every gaze, every silence that lasted too long.
Fatiba didn't know him.
Not really.
She hadn't spoken to him. Had only been in the same room for a few hours, heard his voice only once or twice—dry, sharp, tired in a way that wasn't about sleep.
But she didn't need time to read certain truths.
She had grown up surrounded by wealth, yes—polished stone floors, velvet-draped conference rooms, perfume like smoke, and glass. But what she had truly inherited from her family wasn't just ownership of the Darvish Diamond Company.
It was the ability to recognize a diamond.To see it.To know what it was, even when everyone else saw nothing.
And this boy—
This boy was no ordinary jewel.
He was a black diamond.
Rare. Opaque. Unloved by most. Regarded in certain cultures as cursed, or monstrous, or simply wrong. A thing that didn't shine, that swallowed light instead of throwing it.
People didn't wear black diamonds.
They feared them. Misunderstood them. Pushed them away.
But—
When held long enough,When trusted enough,When kept close instead of cast aside—
That black diamond revealed something no other stone could.
It stored every flicker of light inside it.And then—under the right conditions, in just the right pressure, with a shock strong enough to crack open the silence—
It didn't glow.It bloomed.Into a thing that lit up like the Aurora Borealis—wild, silent, impossible.
She sat still in the cool leather interior of her family's car.legs crossed at the ankles,fingers resting lightly over her knee.
The world moved outside the tinted windows.but her mind was still behind —still back at Toyotaro's iron gates, watching that boy with the red eyes
walk through a world that didn't know what to do with him.
The driver asked if she wanted music.
She shook her head.
"No, thank you."
Silence suited her better tonight.
By the time the car turned through the carved archway of the Darvish estate, the evening sun had dipped below the cedar-lined hills that framed the city's richer veins. The mansion rose from its gravel courtyard like a sand-colored citadel—arched windows, date palm shadows stretching long across the garden walls, soft gold lanterns flickering to life one by one.
The front gate opened before the wheels even stopped turning. Old security systems. Older staff.
But inside the heart of the home, she heard it. —
The slow, rhythmic rise of a prayer recited not in thunder, but in breath.Measured. Soft. Steady as the tide.
Her grandfather's voice.
Fatiba stepped through the carved teak doors and slipped off her shoes. The stone floors cooled her soles, and the smell of saffron and old books floated on the hallway's hush.
She found him in the side prayer room.
Hajji Abbas Darvish.
Nearly eighty-seven. Thin as paper but never fragile.His frame wrapped in a pale blue shawl over his kurta, a silver ring turning slowly on his thumb as he finished the final rakat. His white beard fell in neat curls to his collarbone. His brows were heavy, noble things—etched with wisdom and softened by time.
His voice didn't quake. Not even now.
When he turned, he didn't smile.But his eyes warmed.
"You're home," he said in Persian, simply.
Fatiba bowed her head, whispering a greeting as she crossed the threshold.
Most people who heard her last name assumed things.That her family must be hardline, rigid, and old-school to the bone.
But what they didn't know—what they never asked to know—was that the Darvishes had seen the world long before the world had seen them.
Her grandfather had studied philosophy in Isfahan.Medicine in Paris.Spoken at conferences in Istanbul, Delhi, and Cairo.He'd lived more lives than most knew how to imagine.
And though he insisted on five prayers a day,He also believed in the weight of silence.In the power of listening before speaking.
He never raised his voice.
He didn't have to.
Fatiba took off her hijab in front of him without shame—her flaxen hair loosening as it spilled across her shoulders.
He never forced her to wear it.Not once. But still, she wore it every day.
Not out of obligation. Out of choice.
Because out there—in classrooms full of laughter that didn't know how to make room for her—The hijab became armor.It became her flag.A stitched thread of memory that wrapped around her when her identity felt too far to touch.
They thought it was foreign.
To her, it was home.
She looked at her grandfather, now folding his prayer mat with the kind of reverence most men reserved for old photographs.
And she thought—if anyone would understand what that red-eyed boy was carrying on his shoulders—
It would be him.
"Grandfather," she asked, her voice soft as sandalwood smoke,"Did Father and Mother go out?"
He folded the edge of the prayer mat with care before answering."They went to Hong Kong. Business meeting. They left this morning."
Fatiba nodded.
Of course they did.
Business. Always business.
Her mother, ever graceful, ever sharp, wasn't the kind of woman who wore tradition like armor.She wore it like silk—light, flexible, beautiful but never binding.
Her father, on the other hand, was fire beneath a glass surface. Measured in public. Merciless in deals. Precise in posture, words, and timing.
They didn't fight.
They didn't argue.
They negotiated.
Even at the dinner table.
Her mother was from a family that own a company of Jewelry Manufacturing—smooth, elegant, charming.A woman who knew how to lower a voice to raise a room's attention.
Her father was the backbone—calculating, relentless, often absent in body,but never absent in intent.
They were married the way two opposing currents share the same ocean.Always moving. Always tied. But never still.
Sometimes, when she watched them together,It didn't feel like family. It felt like strategy.
Her mother's voice was warm but filtered.Filtered through ten layers of polished presentation.
Her father's eyes —deep-set, obsidian-black —could hold affection and dismissal in the same blink.
They loved her.
She didn't doubt that.
But it was a distant kind of love. Structured. Stately. Efficient.
She grew up learning the difference between a hug and a transaction. Between comfort and approval.
And now, here she was—
A Darvish.
Heir to empires carved from earth's oldest bones.
And still—
She couldn't remember the last time her mother asked how her day went.Or the last time her father looked at her like she wasn't part of a quarterly report.
She sat down beside her grandfather now.drawing her knees up to her chest,letting her head rest lightly against the cushion of his shoulder.
He didn't ask her anything.He never did.
And somehow, that made it easier to speak.Even in silence.
They sat together on the low couch—its cushions worn from years of prayer and whispered philosophies.The call to maghrib had faded now, but the room still held its breath.
Hajji Abbas's gaze drifted to her uncovered forehead.To the scar.
It ran like a pale crescent along the right side of her brow—too large to ignore, too clean to forget.
Most days, it stayed hidden under the folds of her hijab.But tonight, it lived in the open.And with it—came memory.
He remembered.
Not the whole story.But enough.
....
She had only been six.
Bright-eyed. Talkative. Always climbing onto his lap to ask strange questions about planets and prophets and whether ghosts could smell roses.
They'd been in Syria.
A region rattled by tension, parched under the weight of a hundred years of broken borders and still bleeding from yesterday's war.
The reason for their presence there?
A mine.
Darvish Diamond & Co. had discovered a rare vein buried under the ruins of some long-forgotten Ottoman outpost.A black market auction whispered it could be astrophyllite—a kind of cosmic crystal more valuable than its weight in uranium.
It wasn't unusual.Their empire stretched further than most governments.
That day had started normal.
Music in the jeep.Plastic cups of mint tea passed around.Laughter.Arabic songs on the radio, breaking through static like sunlight through fog.
Her uncle—his second son—was driving.Sharp jawline. Always wore sunglasses, even at dusk.
Then—
BOOM.
The sound didn't arrive gradually.It ripped through the world like a scream.
The earth lurched sideways.The Jeep lifted—then twisted.Steel shrieked.Glass shattered.And everything turned white.
Then silence.
Not peace.
The kind of silence that only exists after violence.
He remembered the smell first—burning rubber, oil, blood, and hot sand.He was still inside, half-conscious, jaw bleeding, ribs cracked.His turban had been torn from his head.
Fatiba had been beside him, her small body curled in the footwell, motionless.
Outside, voices.
Shouting in Arabic.
Hate like fire in their throats.
The kind of hate that doesn't care who you are—only who they think you are.
They thought the Darvishes were aligned with the enemy.They thought diamonds came soaked in allegiance.
Her uncle—wise, foolish, brave—climbed from the wreck, hands up, trying to negotiate.Money, even among bigots, could speak all languages.
But then—
The air changed.
It grew dense.Not hotter. Not colder.Just... wrong.
The sky dimmed—not with cloud, but with shadow.A high-pitched shriek echoed, not from a jet, but from something older. Organic.
The ground shuddered.
And then it came.
A creature—no, a being—rising from the cracked soil like a memory made flesh.
Feathers like oil-stained silk.Eyes burning with violet flame.Its body serpentine, coiled like a forgotten god, wings stretched as wide as the shattered road.
A feathered serpent.
A soundless scream passed through them all.
The terrorists scattered—some dropping their guns, others dropping to their knees.
And then—
It attacked.
The gunmen fired all their cartridges at it, but it was as if the creature's feathers were made of diamonds even harder than the ones Darvish Diamond Co. sold.
They attacked and attacked until the serpent began to spit out magenta flames upon them, searing them like kebabs—burned kebabs, kebabs so charred they could summon the Ottoman Empire back from the ashes.
The flames didn't just burn; they obliterated.
Flesh melted into bone, bone into ash.
The air filled with the acrid stench of scorched meat and sulfur.
The ground sizzled where the miasma touched, leaving behind glassy craters.
The serpent's eyes glowed with an ancient fury, indifferent to the chaos it wrought.
In that moment, time stood still.
The world reduced to fire, smoke, and the haunting silence that follows devastation.
But then, from beneath the twisted wreckage of the jeep, he saw her—six-year-old Fatiba—emerging with trembling limbs and tear-streaked cheeks. Her tiny hands clutched the arm of one of the fallen gunmen, attempting to drag him to safety. The man, moments ago intent on ending her life, now lay broken and vulnerable.
She was trying to save him.
A child, reaching out to shield a warmonger from the wrath he had invited.
The serpent turned its gaze upon her.
Its eyes, ancient and unfeeling, locked onto the small figure defying its judgment.
It struck.
A torrent of magenta flames erupted from its maw, searing the air with a hiss that drowned all sound.
But before the fire could reach her, a blur of motion intervened.
Ahmed, his second son—Fatiba's uncle—threw himself between the flames and the girl. His arms outstretched, he shielded her with his body.
The fire consumed him.
In an instant, he was reduced to ash, his final cry echoing through the inferno:
"There. Was. Once. A Hero."
Four words.
No farewells. No declarations of love. Just a statement—a legacy.
Fatiba was left with a crescent-shaped scar on the right side of her forehead, a permanent reminder of that day.
Ahmed had always possessed a peculiar gift—a glimpse into possible futures. He feared it, rarely spoke of it. But in that moment, he must have seen something. A future worth protecting. A reason to sacrifice.
And so, he did.
Leaving behind a scar, a memory, and a story.
. . .
"Grandfather!"
A gentle shake at his shoulder.Fingers warm. Light. Real.
"Earth to Grandfather—are you spacing out?"
The old man blinked.
Reality seeped back in like rain under a door.The lamp overhead flickered softly, casting thin golden light across the prayer mat. The air smelled faintly of saffron and old leather-bound books. A ceiling fan whirred tiredly above them.
Fatiba was staring at him, one brow slightly arched, her flaxen hair still loose from earlier, her scarf folded in her lap now like a question waiting to be answered.
He looked at her—really looked—and for half a breath, he still saw the little girl covered in dust and blood and defiance, reaching out through fire to save a man who would never have done the same for her.
Her eyes hadn't changed.
Just deeper now.Quieter.Sharper around the edges.
He exhaled through his nose, slowly.A breath that had been sitting in his chest for ten years.
"Woah," he muttered under his breath, as though just stepping out of a dream. His voice rasped like parchment.
Fatiba tilted her head, unsure whether to laugh or worry.
"What happened?" she asked.
There was no fear in her voice. Just curiosity,like someone asking about a book they hadn't read but already suspected had a tragic ending.
He didn't answer right away.
Just looked at her.
He sat her down gently beside him.
The old prayer room hummed with quiet life—the faded rug beneath them still warm from his knees,the air dense with the ghost of sandalwood and the long exhale of sacred silence.
For a moment, neither spoke.
Then, slowly, their words found shape.
They began to talk about her first day at school.
She spoke cautiously, like someone testing ice.He listened the way old trees listen to wind—without interruption, only understanding.
He knew she'd face difficulties.The school was Japanese. She was not.And being different in a society that values sameness…was always a quiet war.
That was part of the reason so many in their family had studied abroad.America. Turkey. England.Safer in the margins than standing in the center, trying to explain.
Fatiba had gone to the UK first.
But then came the incident—unspoken, unfinished—and now she was here.Trying again.
And still, despite everything, she spoke.
He let her talk.And when her voice trailed into quiet,he picked up the thread from far older fabric.
"You know," he said, voice like worn paper,"when I was your age… I was not much different from you."
She looked up, curious.
He didn't smile.
But his eyes warmed like coals in a wind.
"I was a boy of Tehran's bones. The poor quarter.No shoes. No future.Dust clinging to my skin like it was trying to raise me instead of my parents."
He chuckled once, dryly.
"Then came the scholar."
He didn't say the man's name. He never did.
"He ran a masjid library that nobody cared about.Half the books were banned. The other half were forgotten.He gave me bread one day. I thought that was all he owed me."
"But he gave more?"
"He gave letters. Gave me the sound of my own name in Farsi.Gave me the Qur'an not as a wall, but as a window.Taught me to read not just scripture, but meaning."
Fatiba said nothing. She knew better than to fill silence meant for truth.
"I wanted to teach after that," Abbas said, his hands curling slowly in his lap."Wanted to lift other boys from the same alleyways.To put chalk in their hands before the world could put steel."
His eyes dimmed.
"But war does not wait for boys to grow."
He looked at her now—not as a granddaughter, but as the mirror of something that never was.
"When I was fifteen, they gave me a gun instead of a pen.Told me to defend borders I had never seen.Told me enemies wore different shoes, not different sins."
His fingers traced a line in the rug without realizing.
"I killed. Too many. Too fast.And somewhere in that avalanche of orders and bodies,I lost the voice of that scholar."
A breath.Low and aching.
"I believed… I had failed him.Failed the gift.The language.The love."
Fatiba looked down, her hand brushing against his.
"And for many years, I told myself no one was left to teach.Because if I believed that…I wouldn't have to try."
Silence folded over them like a prayer cloth.
Then—softly, carefully—he added:
"But you sit beside me. And I speak again."
The moment held.
Long enough for the wind outside to brush against the carved wooden screens,long enough for the world to forget it was still spinning.
Fatiba looked at him. Really looked.Eyes searching the deep canyons of his face, the lines etched not just by age, but by war, exile, regret—and something softer, too.
"Why…" she began,then stopped. Swallowed.
"Why are you telling me that?"
He met her gaze.
The corners of his mouth curled—not a smile of joy,but one of understanding. Of shared gravity.
"Because you are young," he said."And the world is not kind to the young who feel too much."
He leaned back, hands folded loosely,eyes tracing the shadows of the ceiling fan.
"This world," he murmured,"is a hateful place."
His words weren't bitter. They were tired.Tired in the way old steel is tired—sharp, but weathered.
"It only takes some walls between brothers—language, land, belief—to turn them against each other.To make them hate.Kill.Claw.Forget."
He looked at her again.
"Some justify it with history.Some call it vengeance.Some do it for religion.Some for a so-called greater good.And some…"his voice lowered,"…some people just hate. Because it's easier than understanding."
Fatiba didn't speak.
She didn't have to.
He could see it in her shoulders. In the way she held her hands.
"Everyone hates," he said quietly."Only a few… love."
He let that truth hang.Like incense in the ribs of an old masjid.
"Never start a crusade out of hatred."
The words landed softly, but buried deep.
He turned his gaze to the dark window—his own reflection faint in the glass.
"This country," he said after a moment,"Japan—it, too, is a victim of hate.Twice scarred.Not by what they did,but by what was done in return."
His voice was lower now. More measured. As if remembering something he'd seen but never spoken of.
"The bombs…"he shook his head."The people they were made for… weren't even there when they fell.But fire doesn't care where it lands."
Fatiba's throat tightened.
She had never heard her grandfather speak like this.Not in this tone. Not with this weight.
It was like the war inside him had just cracked open—quietly,without warning—and for a moment, she could see all the ghosts he carried.