The courtyard fell silent.
No birdsong. No call to prayer. No scream. No breath.
Just the faint sound of threads brushing stone, pulling taut across the broken floor like a thousand silk serpents. The golden strands that had once writhed with fury now hung suspended, humming with a steady, unnatural calm. In their glow, even the shadows dared not move.
Aarifa stood at the center.
She no longer floated, nor did she tremble. Her feet touched the earth like roots finding home, and around her, the Pattern pulsed with every beat of her heart. The woven blade still glimmered in the Speaker's hand, but Aarifa did not reach for it. She did not need to. Her choice had already been made.
Power radiated from her like heat. Not wild, not cruel, but measured. A force that had been claimed rather than gifted. She turned slightly, her gaze falling on the broken arch where the Saanjh now stood like sentinels reborn. They had come not to fight but to witness. She had chosen not to cleave the world in half, but to hold it together by its unraveling ends.
And yet, the damage had already begun.
Khurram struggled to stand. The threads that had nearly crushed him now slithered away, dissolving into the dust. He looked at her with awe and something more raw; grief. Aarifa had returned to him, but not whole. Or perhaps too whole. No longer a girl caught between fate and freedom. Now she was the Pattern incarnate.
"Aarifa," he said, not as plea but recognition.
She looked at him.
For a moment, a flicker of the woman he had held in moonlight returned to her eyes. But then it passed, replaced by something colder. Not cruel. Certain.
"The palace is bleeding," she said, not to him, but to the threads themselves. Her voice rippled through the stone. "It will keep bleeding unless we seal it shut."
Khurram followed her gaze.
The eastern wing was collapsing in slow motion. The walls wept golden thread, as if the looms hidden within had been shattered and their veins exposed. Servants stumbled through crumbling halls. Some ran. Some knelt. Others simply stared at her with vacant reverence, uncertain whether to fear or worship.
In the far distance, a different sound began to rise. Not bells, not screams. The hum of the city remembering. Waking.
Behind them, Mumtaz watched from the shattered threshold. Her veil had slipped back slightly, revealing eyes that burned not with anger, but calculation. She took one step backward, then another, her silks dragging the scent of crushed jasmine with her. She knew the tide had turned.
"You were meant to serve," she said softly. Not to Aarifa, but to herself. As if speaking the failure aloud might somehow undo it.
The Speaker of the Pattern turned.
"Mumtaz Mahal," she said, voice even. "You severed too many threads and now the loom rebels. There is no throne left for you here."
Mumtaz smiled. The sort of smile that carried weight, like a blade sheathed beneath silk.
"Then I will find another."
She dissolved into mist, her retreat seamless. The shadows swallowed her whole, leaving only the memory of her ambition.
Aarifa did not chase her. She merely lowered her hands. The threads followed suit, slinking back into the earth, into the stone, into the breath of the city.
"She will return," Khurram said, wiping blood from his mouth.
"I know."
Aarifa stepped forward. She no longer moved like a mortal. Each stride was deliberate, weightless, stitched into the world rather than walking through it. The Speaker inclined her head in silent reverence.
"You wove her undoing by existing," she said.
Aarifa turned to the Speaker. "I wove nothing. I simply did not break."
The younger Saanjh behind her exhaled, a breath that had been held too long.
Below them, the city began to shift.
Where once golden threads had scorched the streets, now green ones bloomed. Threads of remembrance. Of names never spoken. A widow watering her doorstep saw her rosebush grow three new blossoms where none had bloomed for years. A blind boy near the spice market laughed and pointed to the sky, though he had never seen it.
The Pattern was rebalancing.
But not without cost.
Khurram leaned against a cracked pillar. His limbs trembled, not from pain, but from the enormity of what he had seen. The woman he loved had become something else. Not a monster. Not a queen. A question. And he did not know how to answer her anymore.
She turned to him once more.
"You should go," she said. "This is not a place for rulers anymore."
He stepped toward her. "And you?"
"I remain."
He opened his mouth, closed it, then nodded. There was no victory to claim. Only aftermath.
A sudden gust stirred the courtyard. Above them, the sky no longer burned. Instead, it stretched like freshly dyed cloth, blue and soft, kissed by the first breath of dawn.
From the far gates of the palace, the Forgotten entered.
Their leader, the revenant with the falcon brand upon his chest, paused just inside the threshold. His followers moved like smoke behind him. The boy beside him stared in awe.
"You didn't destroy it," the revenant said, half to himself. "You wove it into something new."
Aarifa did not smile. But she bowed her head in acknowledgment.
"You were never forgotten," she said. "Just exiled by those who feared the Pattern might outlive them."
He stepped forward, lowering his head in return. "We came for vengeance. What we found was justice."
Around him, the remnants of the broken threads lifted, mending themselves midair. Not whole. But healed.
Khurram watched this with a soldier's eye. He had waged wars, quelled rebellions, written treaties in blood. But never had he witnessed a kingdom reborn not by conquest, but by thread and choice.
The Saanjh turned, vanishing back into the shadowed seams of the city. Their task was not conquest. It had never been. They came only to awaken what had been buried.
The Speaker lingered a moment longer. She reached into her sleeve and pulled forth one final thread. It shimmered with all the colors of dawn.
She placed it at Aarifa's feet.
"When the time comes," she said, "weave wisely."
Then she was gone.
Only Aarifa remained.
And Khurram.
He stepped forward, closing the final distance between them.
"Was it worth it?" he asked. Not accusing. Only needing to know.
She looked up at him, and for the first time, he saw the cost. In her eyes swam centuries of grief, memory, names she had never spoken but now could not forget. She was not the same.
But she was still Aarifa.
"I don't know yet," she said. "Ask me when the threads stop whispering."
He nodded, stepping back.
"I'll wait," he said.
She did not answer.
He turned and walked away.
Behind him, golden light fell across the palace ruins like a benediction. The threads no longer surged. They settled, curling into the cracks of the marble, mending not what had been broken, but what had been silenced.
Delhi did not roar that morning.
It breathed.
Softly.
Like something waking from a long dream.
And in the heart of it, a girl who had never asked for power stood wrapped in the Pattern, no longer bound by it.
Just holding it.
For now.