The city held its breath. By day, a frantic, hollow festival. By night, a silent, desperate race. The work on the walls was no longer just a race against the dawn, but against the dust cloud on the horizon. The Legion was now less than a week away, a fact that hummed beneath the city's skin like a fever. With every brick we laid, a question gnawed at me, a doubt that no amount of practical work could silence. Before the sun rose, I left the Captain in charge and made my way to the one place I might find an answer.
The air in the prison infirmary was thick with the smells of stale sweat and herbal poultices. It was a place of quiet suffering, but the sound that cut through the gloom was a dry, hacking cough, a desperate, rasping fight for air that seemed to shake the very stones.
Elias was propped up on a cot, frighteningly thin, a pale ghost in the lamplight. Mara sat beside him, wiping his brow with a damp cloth. Her usual cynical resilience, was stripped bare, revealing the grim lines of a woman watching a friend drown on dry land. She didn't look up as I entered, her focus entirely on the old man's struggle. He was the last anchor to the boy I had been, the one who had discovered a universe in a pile of discarded scrolls.
When the coughing fit subsided, Elias took a shuddering breath, a faint bluish tint to his lips. He saw me and managed a weak smile. "Nadim. Come. You look like a man trying to carry a mountain."
I pulled a stool to his bedside. The urgency that drove me on the walls felt useless here. "The mountain is heavier than I imagined," I admitted, my voice low. "We have a plan, Elias. A good one. But it is built on treason and lies. Every day, I make choices that could lead us to salvation or ruin. How do I know if they are just?"
Mara snorted, her hands never ceasing. "Justice is a full belly and a wall that holds," she rasped without looking at me. "The rest is just words for men who have time to write them. He's dying because of words he couldn't write and dust he couldn't avoid."
Elias placed a trembling hand over hers, a silent acknowledgment. He looked at me, his eyes, though clouded with pain, still held their familiar, piercing clarity. "She is right, of course. But you are asking a different question." He paused, gathering his strength. "Tell me, Nadim. When you look at the King, what do you see?"
"A fool," I said without hesitation. "A vain, foolish man leading us to slaughter."
"And when you look at Elder Theron?"
"A man trapped by his traditions, terrified of breaking an oath to a system he knows is corrupt."
Elias nodded slowly, a faint wheeze in his chest. "Good," he rasped. "Remember the day they brought you here, broken from the flogging? The King saw a thief who had touched his property. I saw a boy who had tried to save his sister. You see the man, not the title. That is the beginning of all wisdom."
He was interrupted by another wracking cough that left him breathless. Mara adjusted his pillow, her movements efficient but tender. When he could speak again, his gaze was distant, fragile, filled with a sudden, aching regret.
"These hands," he said, looking at his own stained fingers, "they wrote volumes about justice. But they never threw a brick. I saw the rot in the King. I saw the laws being twisted. I saw it all, and I cataloged it. I believed that naming the sickness was the same as curing it." He gave a dry, mirthless chuckle that dissolved into another cough. "Wisdom without action is just a finer kind of dust, Nadim. It settles on everything but changes nothing. This dust in my lungs… it is the price of my silence. I should have tried. I should have believed that knowledge could be a hammer, not just a record of the blows."
He reached out, his hand surprisingly strong, and gripped my arm. His eyes locked on mine. "You, Nadim… you have the courage to apply the lesson. I gave you the words from the scrolls you found in the dump, but you are the one who gives them meaning in the world. You are proving that a wise boy with a true foundation is stronger than an old and foolish king on a throne of sand."
His grip tightened, and he pressed something small, cool, and smooth into my palm. It was a lens, perfectly ground, clear as mountain water. It was nothing like the crude, chipped glass I had found in the dump. "I can no longer see the stars," he whispered. "But you must. Do not let the title of 'King' or 'Elder' blind you. See the truth of a man's worth. What you are building on the walls, in the public squares… that is real. That is just. Trust what you have built. Trust yourself."
It was not an answer. It was a release. A final, powerful mandate from the man who had built the foundations of my mind.
He sank back against the thin pillow, his strength gone. His breathing grew shallow, each inhalation a struggle, each exhalation a surrender. I sat with him in the silence, my fingers closing around the lens, holding his hand as the first gray light of dawn touched the high, barred window. Mara continued to gently bathe his face, her own breath catching with a quiet, suppressed sob.
There was no final gasp, no dramatic struggle. He simply… stopped. The quiet in the room was heavier, more absolute, than any sound.
Mara's hand stilled. For a long moment, she did not move. Then, with a tenderness I had never seen in her, she leaned forward and closed his eyes. She pulled the thin blanket up to his chin.
"The dust finally won," she whispered, her voice thick. She stood, her face once again a mask, but her eyes were shimmering with unshed tears. "Don't you dare waste it, boy. Don't you dare waste this."
Elias was gone. My moral compass, the man who had taught me to see the stars in a world of mud, was gone. The loss was a vast, hollow space inside me. But as I looked from his peaceful face to Mara's fierce, grieving gaze, and felt the cool, perfection of the lens in my hand, I did not feel despair. His last lesson was not one of sorrow, but of strength. He had passed his legacy to me, not in a book, but in a single, final command, sealed by the defiant love of a woman who refused to let his death be meaningless.
I walked out of the infirmary and into the growing light of a city at war, the lens cold in my palm, its clarity at odds with the blur in my eyes. The street beyond was already alive with the sounds of hammers and shouted orders, but they seemed distant, muffled. I had lost my father and my sister to the fever, and now Elias to the slow, grinding dust. Three pillars in the temple of my heart, each collapse leaving a space nothing could fill. The weight on my shoulders pressed harder, settling into old fractures. I carried it because there was no one else left to do so, but in that moment, I did not feel strong. I walked forward only because turning back would lead me to graves I could no longer bear to stand beside.