✧ 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...
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