Loneliness did not come to Asher all at once.
It crept in quietly, a shadow at the edge of childhood.
He had once known laughter—warm kitchens filled with the smell of bread, his mother's soft hum as she worked by the window, his father's tired but kind smile when he returned from long days of labor. In those moments, life had seemed steady. Predictable. Safe.
But safe things rarely last.
The first fracture came when his father's debts grew too heavy to carry. Asher remembered the fights—hushed at first, then sharp enough to cut through the walls of their small home. His mother begging for more time, his father's voice cracking under the weight of helplessness.
Then came the day the debt collectors arrived.
They wore fine clothes and cruel smiles, stepping into their little home as though they owned it. Asher was only eight, but he could never forget the way his father's shoulders hunched, the way his mother shielded him with her body. They took everything worth taking—coins, silver, even the little wooden box where Asher kept his trinkets.
That night, his father broke. The kind man who had once carried him on his shoulders became someone else—silent, bitter, hollow. His smiles vanished. So did his laughter.
By the time Asher turned ten, his father was gone altogether, disappearing into the city with nothing but his shame.
And just like that, loneliness slipped through the door and stayed.
The years that followed carved sharper edges. His mother worked herself raw, stitching garments by candlelight until her fingers bled. Asher learned quickly to do without, to swallow hunger, to walk with bowed head so no one saw how thin he had grown.
Children whispered at school. They saw his worn clothes, the way he carried secondhand books until the spines fell apart. They laughed at the boy who always sat alone at lunch.
He laughed too, sometimes—out of habit, out of defense. But the laughter never reached his eyes.
The teachers pitied him, pressing apples into his hand or slipping him scraps of paper with kind words. But pity never filled an empty stomach.
By twelve, Asher had learned not to expect kindness from anyone.
Then came the illness.
His mother's cough began as a whisper, then grew into something that shook her body at night. He tried to pretend it wasn't real, that her thin frame and pale face were just the toll of long workdays. But when blood stained her handkerchief, there was no pretending left.
He remembered running barefoot to the apothecary, clutching the few coins they had left, begging for medicine that was too costly, too rare. The apothecary shook his head, pity etched into every line of his face.
By the time Asher returned home, the coins still heavy in his pocket, his mother was lying weak in bed, her lips curled into a faint smile.
"Don't cry, Asher," she whispered, brushing his cheek with trembling fingers. "You're stronger than you think."
She was gone by morning.
And then he was truly alone.
The neighbors helped for a while—bringing bread, offering odd jobs. But pity, he had learned, always ran dry. Soon, the whispers began again. The boy with no father, no mother, no family.
The boy with nothing.
By fifteen, Asher stopped attending school altogether. He worked where he could—sweeping tavern floors, carrying crates at the docks, mending torn boots for a cobbler who took him in out of reluctant kindness. He learned to live small, to keep his head down, to ask for nothing.
And most of all, he learned never to want.
Wanting only led to disappointment.
But loneliness is a cruel companion.
At night, when the streets quieted and his body ached from labor, Asher would lie awake staring at the ceiling. He would hear laughter from taverns, the echo of footsteps outside, the murmur of couples passing by.
And in the silence, the ache grew.
Sometimes he imagined another voice in the dark—someone to speak to, someone who would see him. Not for his poverty, not for his losses, but for who he was beneath it all.
The thought embarrassed him. Desire was weakness. He had no right to crave what he could not have.
So he buried it, deeper and deeper, until it became habit.
When he found the vessel years later, his fingers trembling as smoke poured from its mouth, Asher felt the past claw up his throat all at once.
Here was a creature who promised everything he had been denied—power, safety, even companionship.
But Asher knew better.
He had learned as a child that gifts always came with strings. That kindness was never free. That desire was a trap waiting to snap its jaws shut.
So when Zahran's molten eyes bore into him and asked for his wish, he said the only thing he could:
I don't want this.
Because to want was to suffer. And Asher had suffered enough.
The memory burned like fire in his chest as he sat on the edge of his bed that night, the vessel hidden in the drawer beside him. His mother's voice echoed faintly in his ears—You're stronger than you think.
But strength felt like emptiness now.
And loneliness… loneliness was the only constant that had never left.
Zahran didn't know any of this. Couldn't know. Asher had buried his past so deeply that even the Djinn's piercing gaze could not trace every scar.
But Asher knew. And every time he felt that haunting presence coil near, every time he heard the silky promise in Zahran's voice, his walls trembled.
Because some part of him—fragile, hidden, desperate—still wanted.
And that, more than anything, terrified him.