Chapter 6 - The Measure of Things

The Silk of Fate

Chapter 6 – The Measure of Things

There was a difference, Idran noticed, between silence and stillness.

He used to walk the palace halls and feel only silence—thick, ceremonial, often suffocating. But these days, after prayer, after verses quietly mouthed beneath his breath, the silence no longer felt empty.

It felt full.

As if the space around him now had breath of its own.

He began waking earlier—long before the temple gongs rang, long before the servants stirred from their corners. He walked alone, barefoot, in the mist-wrapped courtyards, whispering surahs he had half-memorized, his face tilted toward the fading stars.

He no longer asked for things in prayer.

He simply gave thanks.

Thanks for the sky.

Thanks for still being able to feel.

But it wasn’t just the mornings that changed.

It was the way he now saw people.

One afternoon, in the southern courtyard, Idran saw a guard strike a stable boy—hard, across the face. The boy dropped the water he was carrying, flinched, didn’t cry.

No one reacted.

No one ever did.

But Idran walked up.

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t strike back.

He asked only one question: “Did he deserve that?”

The guard stammered. “He—he spilled—”

“I saw,” Idran said. Calm. Clear. “But did he deserve that?”

There was no answer.

And so Idran knelt, picked up the empty bucket, and handed it back to the boy.

“Go on,” he said gently. “Try again.”

That moment spread like a whisper through the palace.

The prince, they said, now defended the servants.

The prince, they said, was no longer just quiet—he was watching.

And that scared them more than anger ever could.

During council meetings, Idran sat straighter now. Not because he wanted to rule, but because he began to care.

Not about politics—but about justice.

When advisors laughed at the rising prices of grain and dismissed the “commoner’s complaints,” Idran asked them to dine with the market sellers—just once.

None did.

So Idran went himself.

The market was chaos—spices, smoke, laughter. But Idran, veiled and cloaked, moved through it not as royalty but as witness. He listened to the way the sellers haggled. To how the old woman wept when her rice shipment was taxed twice in one day.

And when a merchant from Champa recognized him under the hood and bowed deeply, Idran only smiled.

“You’ve mistaken me for someone important,” he said. But the man shook his head.

“No,” he said. “You speak less than your brother. But we know who listens.”

That evening, Idran sat by his window as the call to prayer echoed faintly from a distant Muslim ship docked at the harbor. It wasn’t a grand call—just a low, nasal voice carried by the sea breeze.

But it reached him.

And as he bowed on his mat, he thought not of kingship, not of power, but of accountability.

How every soul will one day answer not for what they ruled—but for how they treated the ones they didn’t have to see.

Idran opened the Qur’an again.
His finger traced a verse Karim had marked:

“Whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it, and whoever does an atom’s weight of evil will see it.”

He closed the book, and whispered into the soft light:

“Let me weigh things rightly.”