Aligning Worlds

  ✦ Positioning Statement “Aligning Worlds” is not a fantasy novel. It’s a soul-coded blueprint disguised as fiction. In a literary landscape full of magical realism and cultural mythology, this novel does something quietly radical: it dares to reflect the original, divine architecture of the soul through the lens of story. Set at the edge of perception where the seen and unseen meet, Aligning Worlds draws on Qur’anic cosmology and timeless metaphysical truths—not to explain them, but to evoke them. This is not a tale about empowerment, but surrender. Not about finding oneself, but remembering the blueprint one was always meant to live. Perfect for readers drawn to The Forty Rules of Love or The Conference of the Birds , but seeking a narrative less romanticized and more rooted, more real. ✦ Back-Cover Blurb Some stories entertain. Others reveal. When a young woman uncovers a mysterious stencil etched into the margins of her world, she begins a journey that will undo eve...

Zahra sat back slowly,  the stencil still cradled between her fingers, its weight less physical than spiritual. The room around her seemed to recede, the dust motes in the slanting light dissolving into constellations. Inside her chest, something stirred — an echo, a pulse, a thread unspooling through time. Her breath slowed. Memories not her own — or perhaps memories that were hers, but folded deep beneath layers of forgetting — began to surface like dawn breaking over a still sea. She saw flashes of hands, ancient and worn, guiding ink across parchment. Fingers tracing prayers not just in words, but in sacred geometry, binding sky and earth. She felt the steady beat of a heart syncing with the rhythm of a chant — a lullaby humming through centuries. A whispered phrase rose within her, delicate yet insistent: “Where the light returns, the lineage breathes.” It was no longer words on a page. It was a living breath — her breath. Her eyes closed, and a vision unfolded: A woma...

✧ Scene: The Manuscript Opens Itself The room they entered was quiet but charged — the kind of silence that listens back. Dust-laced light filtered through high windows, catching the gold leaf on aged Qur'anic pages, old ink maps, and genealogy scrolls. Books lined the walls like sentinels, their spines bowed with memory. Aaric moved to the central table and laid the manuscript down with care. Its leather binding, cracked and worn, gave off the faint scent of sandal and cedar. Zahra pulled a stool close, brushing her fingertips over the cover as if it were a pulse. For a moment, neither opened it. It felt like a being, not a book. Then, slowly, Aaric lifted the cover. The script was unmistakable. Zahra recognized the hand immediately — layered, as he had said. His grandmother’s writing, delicate yet firm, interspersed with red marginalia that hadn’t made sense until now. “She wasn’t just copying,” Zahra whispered. “She was encoding.” Aaric pointed to a sequence in the margin: a rep...

Zahra sat at her wooden desk,  immersed in spiritual solitude. The soft scent of sandalwood rose from a nearby burner, mingling with jasmine tea left untouched beside her. A brass lamp cast a golden halo across the page, its light steady and warm. Her fingers rested on the open Qur’an, slowly tracing the letters of the Bismillah. Her eyes moved between Surah Yasin and Surah Qalam , searching not for surface meaning, but for the structure within — the map hidden behind the form. Her method wasn’t academic. It was devotional, embodied. Her breath had to be aligned — not shallow, not distracted — for the ink to yield anything of meaning. She paused before the first ayah of Surah Qalam . نٓ ۚ وَٱلْقَلَمِ وَمَا يَسْطُرُونَ Nun. By the Pen, and what they inscribe. The words didn’t just echo in the room. They pulsed through her chest. Nun — the curve of potential, suspended in stillness. Qalam — the force that renders the unseen into form. Wa mā ...

✧ Scene: The Manuscript Opens Itself The room they entered was quiet but charged — the kind of silence that listens back. Dust-laced light filtered through high windows, catching the gold leaf on aged Qur'anic pages, old ink maps, and genealogy scrolls. Books lined the walls like sentinels, their spines bowed with memory. Aaric moved to the central table and laid the manuscript down with care. Its leather binding, cracked and worn, gave off the faint scent of sandal and cedar. Zahra pulled a stool close, brushing her fingertips over the cover as if it were a pulse. For a moment, neither opened it. It felt like a being, not a book. Then, slowly, Aaric lifted the cover. The script was unmistakable. Zahra recognized the hand immediately — layered, as he had said. His grandmother’s writing, delicate yet firm, interspersed with red marginalia that hadn’t made sense until now. “She wasn’t just copying,” Zahra whispered. “She was encoding.” Aaric pointed to a sequence in the margin: a rep...

✧ Scene: The Manuscript Opens Itself The room they entered was quiet but charged — the kind of silence that listens back. Dust-laced light filtered through high windows, catching the gold leaf on aged Qur'anic pages, old ink maps, and genealogy scrolls. Books lined the walls like sentinels, their spines bowed with memory. Aaric moved to the central table and laid the manuscript down with care. Its leather binding, cracked and worn, gave off the faint scent of sandal and cedar. Zahra pulled a stool close, brushing her fingertips over the cover as if it were a pulse. For a moment, neither opened it. It felt like a being, not a book. Then, slowly, Aaric lifted the cover. The script was unmistakable. Zahra recognized the hand immediately — layered, as he had said. His grandmother’s writing, delicate yet firm, interspersed with red marginalia that hadn’t made sense until now. “She wasn’t just copying,” Zahra whispered. “She was encoding.” Aaric pointed to a sequence in the margin: a rep...

Aaric sat alone in his apartment,  the city lights filtering through the tall windows behind him — blurred and distant. The manuscript copy lay sprawled across his desk, its presence heavy, like a voice too long silenced. He hadn’t moved much since returning from his father’s house. The confrontation echoed in his mind like a bell that wouldn’t stop ringing. The words “I chose not to indulge her” repeated over and over, not just as betrayal — but as indictment. Of him. Of everything he thought he knew. His phone buzzed. He reached for it absently, then froze when he saw the sender. Zahra. He opened the message, eyes scanning slowly, as if each word carried more weight than the last: Aaric, I have been following the same thread you uncovered. The erasure runs deeper than history—it is in the soul, the very essence of the message. There is a reason we have been drawn to these fragments. It is more than coincidence. I think we are part of what must be remembered. Will you c...

As the night deepened, Zahra set down her pen, her fingers trembling slightly from the intensity of the work. The patterns, the codes—they had spoken to her heart, but also opened wounds she wasn’t sure would ever fully heal. She wiped a tear, took a steadying breath, and reached for her laptop. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard, then typed slowly, deliberately: “Aaric, I have been following the same thread you uncovered. The erasure runs deeper than history—it is in the soul, the very essence of the message. There is a reason we have been drawn to these fragments. It is more than coincidence. I think we are part of what must be remembered. Will you come with me? — Zahra” She hesitated, heart pounding, then pressed send. The quiet that followed was vast, but inside her, a spark had ignited. Together, perhaps, they could unravel the silenced truths — and maybe, just maybe, begin to heal what had been broken.

Zahra sat alone at her wooden desk, the faint glow of a single brass lamp casting warm pools of light over the scattered pages of the Qur’an and her notebooks. Outside, the world was hushed, wrapped in the cool stillness of night, but inside, her room pulsed with the quiet urgency of revelation. The scent of jasmine tea lingered in the air, mingling with the faint trace of sandalwood incense she had lit earlier—its smoke curling upward in slow spirals, a silent prayer rising with it. Her fingers hovered briefly above the ancient script before she touched the page, tracing the words of the Bismillah with deliberate care. The letters felt alive beneath her skin, as if whispering secrets only the soul could hear. Her breath steadied, slow and rhythmic, as she closed her eyes and sank into a meditative calm — a sacred space where time dissolved and only presence remained. When she opened them, the dim light seemed to dance off the ink, and she began the slow, painstaking work of counti...

The paper trembled slightly in his hand. Not from fear — from fury. Aaric walked through the old Cambridge house like a man seeing it for the first time. The heavy furniture, the clinical precision of the bookshelves, the silence thick as dust — all of it suddenly felt smug. Complicit. He found his father in the study, seated by the fire with a glass of something aged, the Times Literary Supplement folded neatly beside him. Aaric didn’t wait. He thrust the printed page forward. “Did you know this?” His father glanced at it. Then at Aaric’s face — calm, always calm, but now measured with caution. “You’ll need to be more specific.” Aaric stepped forward, voice low but trembling. “This manuscript was catalogued under your faculty’s oversight. Fourteenth-century Andalusi poetry. Dismissed as irrelevant. But it’s not just history. It’s our family.” His father’s eyes flicked back to the page, then away. “There are many such fragments. You’re making a leap.” “Don’t,” Aaric cut i...

It came as a whisper from an old professor neither of them particularly liked. A forgotten box catalogued under a misnamed shelf — mislabeled during colonial inventory. Found in a small private archive outside Seville, undergoing digitization. The staff didn’t know what they had. But the scanned documents hinted at something unusual. Fragments of poetry in Arabic, but with strange annotations in Latin. References to a “hidden line” — not of rulers, but rememberers . “Their tongues turned silent, but they did not forget. Their sons became priests. Their daughters carried verse in breath.” Aaric saw it first — a sample sent to him because of his previous writing on sacred memory. He stared at the digital file for hours. The script was Andalusi — unmistakably feminine in rhythm and formation. A woman’s voice. A woman writing through erasure. He traced the notes, the references to lineage, and something snapped into clarity: This wasn’t just historical. This was personal. It ...

It was held in Granada — not far from Córdoba, but enough of a shift to feel like a crossing. An interdisciplinary symposium on memory, loss, and sacred texts in postcolonial frameworks. Intellectually niche. Emotionally charged. The kind of event attended not for prestige, but because something within insisted. She was on the panel. Zahra sat at the far left, a simple scarf tucked at her neck, her voice clear but never performative. She spoke of Andalusia not as a lost paradise, but as a layered wound — one that still whispered in archives, in architecture, in the way history chose to forget. Aaric sat in the third row. He hadn’t known she would be there. Or perhaps some part of him had. He recognized her tone before her name was spoken. As she read a passage aloud — her own translation of a pre-1492 poem written by a Muslim woman in exile — something in his chest tightened. Not desire. Not even longing. Recognition. "My feet do not belong to me," she translated s...

Weeks passed. Aaric was back in Cambridge, surrounded by vaulted ceilings, unread books, and the kind of quiet that once comforted him. Now it unsettled. His lectures continued — sharp, structured, respectable. But his mind kept drifting. To Córdoba. To a glass case. To a woman who read without fear. He found her again in footnotes. Not deliberately — not at first. But there it was. An article published in a lesser-known academic journal on Andalusian epistemologies and gendered loss in colonial archives. The language was precise, yet it breathed. She had woven historical critique with sacred remembrance — unafraid to cite both Qur’an and resistance poetry in the same paragraph. He read it twice in one sitting. And then again. “We do not inherit only blood. We inherit silence, too — and the work of remembering what that silence once protected.” His breath caught. She had written that. Zahra. He didn’t reach out. He didn’t even know how. But he saved the article. Printed...

He leaves first. Aaric stepped away from the manuscript slowly, as though releasing something precious. He didn’t look at her. Not directly. Just enough to catch the soft curve of her expression — not curiosity, not discomfort. Something else. Something still. He turned and walked toward the exit, his footsteps careful against the worn stone floor. Outside, the late afternoon sun hit the limestone buildings with an ancient warmth. But he didn’t feel it. Inside him, a restlessness stirred. What are you doing? You don't know her. This is projection — the residue of a moment, nothing more. His father’s voice again — clinical, doubting, threaded with caution: “Longing is the enemy of clarity. Learn to master it, or it will master you.” Aaric tightened his jaw. She was a stranger. A scholar. A woman whose writing pierced more deeply than he was prepared for. And still… that verse. Her silence. The unwavering calm with which she had stayed . He paused on the narrow bridge...

The archival wing of the Córdoba museum was hushed,  She stood in front of a glass case displaying fragments of an ancient manuscript — Qur’anic verses in Kufic script, the ink faded, the parchment delicate with age. Her breath slowed. It was the kind of silence that teaches you how to listen. A slight shift — the sense of someone behind her. Not intrusive. Familiar, even. She didn’t turn. She didn’t need to. Aaric stood three feet away, his gaze not on her, but on the same display. As if they had both been drawn to the same sentence without knowing it. As if the page itself had summoned them. For a moment, nothing moved. His hands remained at his sides. He didn't speak. He wouldn’t dare disturb this fragile alignment. And she — She didn’t glance at him. But her body had already softened in awareness. The barrier that once guarded her solitude… no longer bristled in defense. She felt no threat in his nearness. Only reflection. Only gravity. On the manuscript, an ayah...

It was nearly Maghrib. The golden light spilled into the reading room of the library in Córdoba, casting long shadows over the table where she sat. Zahra had just finished reviewing an old translation of Ibn Hazm’s Tawq al-Hamama , when the title of a different paper caught her eye. Aaric Soler. The name rang like a quiet bell in her memory. She paused. Then clicked. The essay was dense — a philosophical treatment of inherited memory and post-faith identity in post-Enlightenment Europe. It wore the usual robes of academic detachment. Structured. Sharp. Almost too sharp. But Zahra had spent years learning to read beneath polished arguments. The piece was haunted. He was asking questions he hadn’t yet earned the courage to answer. It was in the spaces between citations, in the restrained tone — as if he feared the consequences of feeling too deeply about what he was writing. She slowed when she reached this line: “Much of the modern West suffers not from a lack of meaning, but ...

It was late. The kind of late where even the stone of Cambridge seemed to hold its breath. Aaric leaned back in his chair, the faint smell of dust and old leather grounding him. He hadn't intended to search for her. Not really. But he’d found her name in the reference list of a paper on Andalusian semiotics — a field she’d left subtle fingerprints on. Zahra El-Amin. He clicked. The essay opened with deliberate restraint — a study on epistemic silencing in historical narratives of Islam in Spain. Academic. Measured. But beneath the formal architecture, there was something pulsing. A boldness wrapped in discipline. A voice that knew how to carry weight without shouting. A woman who had, somehow, made silence into a form of resistance. One line arrested him: “To rewrite history is not always an act of conquest. Sometimes, it is the soul returning to itself — correcting what was severed by forgetting.” He sat still for a long moment. There it was — what he’d sensed in her...

Their words — essays, footnotes, marginalia, blog entries, papers in obscure journals — become a bridge. He begins with a footnote of hers, something she wrote in passing on the mistranslation of a Qur'anic metaphor in 19th-century Spanish Orientalist texts. It's precise but infused with quiet defiance, as if she's rewriting not only the past but reclaiming herself in the process. “The language of conquest hides behind grammar. But meaning, if you listen, always finds a way to breathe.” He reads it once. Then again. Who is she? Who taught her to write like this? And she? She stumbles on his older piece — an essay he’d written on ethical memory and post-religious identity in Europe. His tone is clinical at first, almost self-guarded, but something flickers in the conclusion — a question he doesn’t answer: “Can a society inherit what it has tried to forget?” Zahra reads it slowly. Then checks the byline. It’s him. She reads more — not just his formal work bu...

Zahra She traced a finger along the margin of her notebook, the quiet of her Cordoban room wrapping around her like a veil. The memory of him lingered — not even his face, but the stillness she felt when their eyes met. A recognition that didn’t need language. But as the moment faded, another voice pushed forward. “You are not serious enough,” her mother’s voice echoed from some hidden corridor of memory. “You always chase feelings. You can’t live life on instincts.” It wasn’t spoken aloud, but it landed in her chest with the weight of years. Her mother had never raised her voice — she hadn’t needed to. Her words were clipped, proper, British. And Zahra, in the name of being reasonable, had internalized every syllable. You’ll humiliate yourself. He’ll think you’re just another romantic idealist. You always take things too far. The voice wasn’t hers. But it sounded like truth, because it had been fed to her as love . And so she turned away from the knowing in her ches...

✧ Scene: The Whispers Within Zahra That evening, Zahra sat in her room overlooking the tiled courtyard of the old house she’d rented. Her notes from the symposium were open, but she wasn’t reading. She kept hearing her own words from earlier: "What if we are not imagining meaning into the architecture — but retrieving it, as those before us left it for us to find?" It sounded naïve now. Romantic. Even reckless. Maybe that wasn’t insight. Maybe that was just longing, dressed up in scholarship. Her breath shallowed. She remembered how her voice had trembled just slightly when she saw him. What if others noticed? What if he noticed, and thought you were one of those women who creates meanings where there are none? She closed the notebook. Folded herself into silence. And somewhere, faintly — not external, but not entirely her own — came the whisper: You misread everything. He didn’t come for you. He didn’t stay for you. This is only in your mind. Your work is not en...

Zahra didn’t look for him after the session. She stayed for the next panel. She even took notes — methodically, almost too methodically. But her mind spun like a prayer wheel. She had felt his presence before she saw him. The way someone feels the shift of gravity when another soul steps into the same field. But she told herself: You don’t know him. You’ve made him a symbol. You’ve projected a longing onto a man whose name you still don’t even know. And anyway — how often have women been punished for reaching first? How often had she been told her intuition was mistaken, dramatic, “too much”? So she chose dignity over desire. Stillness over speculation. If he sees what I see, he’ll return. And if he doesn’t… that’s still a kind of answer. Aaric had wanted to speak to her. His body even turned slightly in her direction. But years of discipline stilled him. He’d been raised not to act on impulse — Raised to believe restraint was a virtue, that depth required d...