Soon it will be time, Melek.

Dawn enters the room before memory does. A single blade of light slips through the narrow window and finds the satchel where it waits beside him.

Melek wakes already reaching for the vial.

The oil has deepened again. No longer crimson, not yet amber. He uncorks it, breathes the words too quietly for the walls to remember, and watches the liquid answer. Another day's change. Another day's patience.

The herbs are nearly ready.

Soon it will be time.

Long habitation among borrowed lives had taught him little worth keeping. Names dissolved first. Languages followed. Even victories vanished. Only the oldest currents endured.

To remember required violence against forgetfulness.

The mind of each new host arrived crowded with its own fears, its own loves, its own unfinished grief. Those thoughts pressed inward constantly, demanding to become him. Yet beneath them another voice persisted. Ancient. Patient.

Like words returning through an endless stone passage, worn smooth by centuries of echo.

Sometimes he welcomed it, sometimes he feared that it welcomed him.

...

The bulbs would be ready now.

Summer had surrendered its strength back into the hidden flesh beneath the earth. The stalks had blackened. The blossoms had fallen. What lived above had withdrawn below.

Life always retreated toward its center before beginning again.

For several days he had guided the monastery's flock farther west along the river hills, pretending to seek better pasture while quietly marking the places where the roots slept beneath the soil.

This morning he carried no shepherd's staff.

Only the digging tools.

...

Nazil spoke softly as she rinsed the bishop's linens beneath the fading light.

"I dream of home."

The words seemed older than either of them. She spoke of roads filled with merchants, citrus blossoms carried upon warm winds, bright tents rising beyond the market square. She did not speak Hrant's name immediately.

When she finally did, it arrived like a wound reopening. Melek listened without interruption.

Something inside him already knew what she would ask before she asked it.

The answer had been waiting inside him long before the question. "Take me west."

"Yes."

That night he crushed the bulbs beneath the stone pestle until they surrendered into bitter pulp, He wrapped the mixture first in linen, then again in horsehide stitched with signs no monastery would willingly preserve.

One moon remained. By then they would be nearing Pazarköy.

Or Nazili.

He still could not remember why that second name seemed older than the first. Lying upon the floor, he surrendered to sleep where once more he walked among flowering citrus trees; once more he loved a woman whose face belonged equally to memory and prophecy.

Soon it would be time.