Chapter 4 - The Sound of One God

The Silk of Fate

Chapter 4 – The Sound of One God

The palace had over a hundred rooms, but there was only one that ever felt like his.

It wasn’t even meant for living.

Tucked behind the northern pagoda, there was a disused observatory—a crumbling dome with moss-veined walls, its bronze armillary cracked and frozen mid-spin. No one came here. The court astrologers had long moved to a newer building, closer to the main temple. But Idran returned, day after day, like it was a second skin.

This was where he came to think. Or to feel, when thinking was too much.

That evening, the sky was draped in indigo, with clouds like bruises stretched thin across the horizon. Idran sat on the floor, legs folded beneath him, eyes resting on nothing in particular. A candle flickered near the broken sundial, the flame bending with the breeze.

In his lap was a palm-leaf manuscript—one of Karim’s.

Not translated, not explained. Just the Arabic, line after line. Fluid. Balanced. Like water given form.

He didn’t know all the words.

But he knew how it made him feel.

There was something in Islam that stilled the noise in his chest.

Not just the words—though the Qur’an felt like poetry carved from stars—but the concept of it. The singularity. One God. Not ten, not three, not a dozen names each with separate demands.

Just One.

Unseen. Unpainted. Unbargained with.

A God who did not need offerings of food or flowers, who did not reward the wealthy more than the poor. A God who asked only for sincerity. For submission—not to chains, but to truth.

Idran had grown up around altars and rituals. Ceremonies that dazzled the eye, incense that clouded the air, statues clothed in gold finer than what the people wore. But none of it ever reached his heart.

It felt transactional.

A trade.

But when he sat beside Karim, under a canvas roof by the docks, and watched the old man whisper verses into his palms before eating—

That wasn’t theatre. That was intimacy.

A direct line. A private surrender.

One night, months ago, Idran had asked Karim:
“Why do you believe?”

The old man had smiled, deep lines carving warmth into his sun-browned skin.

“Because when I bow my head, I no longer feel alone.”

And that was it.

That was the ache Idran had carried for years. The loneliness not of isolation, but of being surrounded by people who spoke at him, expected from him—yet never saw him.

He had friends. Servants. Tutors. Even lovers, once or twice, in fleeting arrangements.

But never—never—had he felt known.

Until now.

Until these verses, in a language not his own, opened a part of him he didn’t know existed.

Later that night, he returned to his observatory and laid a mat on the cold stone floor. He didn’t know the full prayer. Didn’t know the motions. But he tried anyway.

He bowed. He whispered.

His body trembled—not from fear, but from the strange, overwhelming calm that followed.

The stars were barely visible through the cracked dome above. But Idran stared upward anyway, and for the first time in a long while, he did not speak.

He listened.

And the silence answered back.