✧ Childhood Memory: The Whispering Walls

He was seven, maybe eight, running barefoot through the old quarters of Córdoba.

The sun warmed the whitewashed walls, and the scent of orange blossoms hung heavy in the air.

His grandmother — a quiet woman with eyes like deep wells — took his hand.
She led him to a forgotten corner of the Mezquita, where the shadows danced differently.

“Listen,” she whispered, her voice soft as the breeze.
“Can you hear it? The walls speak if you know how to listen.”

He pressed his ear to the cool stone, expecting silence.
But there was a rhythm there — a pulse, like a heartbeat beneath the dust.

“Stories,” she said. “Of those who built this place, who believed in things we cannot always see.”

He wanted to ask more, but his father’s voice cut through the memory like a sharp wind:
“Salvador!” his father called from the plaza, pulling him away.

Later, in the sterile halls of their Oxford home, the memory felt like a secret language he couldn’t share.

His father scoffed at the idea of the “whispering walls,” calling it superstition.
But Aaric held onto it — that quiet pulse beneath reason — even if he didn’t understand it yet.

---

This memory becomes the soft fracture beneath Aaric’s polished surface. It’s the ancestral inheritance not of logic, but of mystery — waiting to be reclaimed.

✧ Scene: Return to the Mezquita

The sun hung low over Córdoba, spilling gold into the narrow streets. Aaric stepped through the outer arch of the Mezquita, his footfalls muffled by centuries.

Tourists came and went with the rustle of maps and the click of shutters. But for him, time was peeling away like layers of dust.
He didn’t bring his camera. Didn’t pull out his phone.
He came alone, just as he had that summer as a boy.

The scent of old stone and orange blossom drifted faintly through the arches.

He passed beneath rows of red-and-white striped columns — forest-like, infinite. They’d always unsettled him. Not because they were foreign, but because they weren’t.
They whispered of something before him, something still alive beneath thought.

His hand brushed against a pillar.

Cold. Rough.
And then —
not memory,
but presence.

A flicker: his grandmother’s voice.

“The walls speak, if you know how to listen.”

He closed his eyes.
And in the silence, something rose up — not words, but a question, ancient and unspoken:

“Do you remember?”

The echo made his chest tighten.
Not with fear. With grief.
For the part of him that had been buried under Cambridge lectures and panel discussions. For the boy who once listened.

He stayed there, still, until the light shifted.

He didn’t pray.
But he didn’t speak either.
He simply stood in the center of all that had been forgotten — and for the first time in years, felt something like reverence.

---

✧ Scene: First Glimpse

He turned a corner near the old mihrab, where the light fell strangely — not bright, but translucent, as if the past shimmered through it.

She was standing there.
Not posed. Not waiting.
Simply present —
a woman alone, wrapped in quiet, her eyes lifted toward the layered calligraphy that curled like breath above the arch.

She didn’t move.

And neither did he.

Not out of hesitation, but recognition —
like hearing a chord struck that he hadn’t known he carried within him.

The air between them was neither invitation nor tension,
but alignment.

As if, for a moment, the pillars and arches bent slightly inward, acknowledging them both.

She did not look at him.
But she knew he was there.

And that was enough.

He lowered his gaze, stepped back, and left without a sound.