The sun wasn't a celestial body today—it was a white-hot brand pressed against her skull. Issa's vision fragmented into jagged shards: emerald lightning forks splitting cobalt voids, violets bleeding into screaming crimson. A kaleidoscope of agony scraping behind her eyelids. Sand fever, her fading reason diagnosed. Or the desert finally claiming its phantom.

Her cracked lips split further as she swallowed nothing. Copper-tanged blood mingled with the ever-present grit. Skin, once the deep umber of Saharan dusk, now burned angry scarlet beneath a lacework of blisters. Each breath rasped like stone against stone, her heart fluttering—a wounded bird trapped in a ribcage furnace. Hunger had abandoned her days ago. Only thirst remained, a ravenous jackal gnawing at her veins.

Tafukt's labored breathing snapped her back. The stallion's muzzle pressed against her shoulder, his dark coat lathered with sweat that evaporated before it could drip. "Steady, sun-steed," she croaked, the Tamahaq endearment ash in her mouth. Zufar's mission echoed uselessly in her pounding head. Follow the Star-Scar Canyon. Trade salt for information. A familiar path. A simple task. Until the gods, capricious and cruel, sealed the sky behind a haze of shimmering mercury, turning known dunes into a hall of mirrors.

She reined Tafukt toward a wind-sculpted ridge—dunes heaped like the burial mounds of giants. With stiff fingers, she unbound the dark tent-cloth from his saddle. The fabric felt alien, heavy as a shroud. "Set camp. Find the well." Logic warred with delirium. The indigo dye of her veil leached into sweat, staining her collarbone blue. A permanent mark. A permanent lie.

The cold came then. Not the relief of dusk, but a knife-edged chill slicing through her robes. It always followed the genie. She didn't turn. Didn't need to. That presence—like oil on water, like a scorpion's shadow—coiled behind her. Her Iblis. Seven years of that voice dripping venom into her dreams: "They see a warrior. I see the girl trembling in camel blood."

The genie's form shimmered at the edge of vision—a distortion in the heat haze, all sharp edges and mocking laughter. "Come to watch the vultures circle, shadow?" Issa's voice scraped raw. "Or have you finally brought water?"

Issa's hand flew to her sword hilt. Or tried to. Muscles screamed betrayal. Her vision tunneled, the kaleidoscope fracturing into blinding white noise. The world tilted—sand rushing up to meet her face. Tafukt's panicked whinny. The rasp of her own breath fading. The genie's sharp intake of breath—not mockery, but... alarm? Darkness swallowed the searing light. As consciousness bled away, a final, discordant sensation pierced the void: not the genie's taunt, but a desperate pull—like roots tearing from parched earth. And a thought, sharp and clear and utterly alien, flooding her fading mind: Not yet. You cannot die while I still breathe.