✧ Scene: The Room of Echoes

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 glimmered under the glass:

“And you were upon the edge of a pit of Fire, and He saved you from it.”
(Qur'an 3:103)

He read the verse and something caught in his throat.
Not because of its theology —
But because of the way she read it.

With stillness.
With reverence.
With something he didn’t yet have, but deeply wanted.

They didn’t speak.

But something passed between them — not a moment of recognition, but of acknowledgment. A kind of sacred nearness, unspoken and ungraspable.

They lingered — two figures, motionless in time, joined by the echo of a verse and the hush of something neither dared name.

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