Chapter 178
"There it is," Arya said, his voice suddenly turning colder, tenser, like a rope pulled too tight, where even the slightest vibration felt as though it could snap at any moment. "Sleeping gas. From the smell alone, I can confirm that it came from the same source as the gas in Jerusalem. Great Abnormal didn't just kidnap the companions of the Messenger of Allah here—they used the exact same method they used there. Planned. Systematic. As if they had been preparing this for years, or perhaps for thousands of years, waiting for the right moment to act, waiting for a time when everyone would be busy preparing for war so that no one would notice that the very people who were meant to witness history were being taken from their homes one by one."
Nirma moved deeper into the room, following the source of the scent, which grew stronger as she approached a corner where a leather mat had been left untidily spread out, as though someone had just risen from sleep in a hurry—or as though someone had been forcefully awakened by another person and, in the confusion between sleep and wakefulness, had no time to tidy anything because only one thought occupied their mind:
"Who are you, and what do you want from me?"
But as her eyes adjusted to the dim light filtering through the cracks in the brick walls, Nirma saw something that made her breath catch in her throat.
Not the sleeping gas, not the untidy mat, but the objects scattered across the floor, on top of the mat, and in the corners of the room—objects that absolutely did not belong to the year 625 CE, objects that did not even belong to the same millennium.
"Arya," she whispered, her voice nearly breaking at the edges like cracked glass that had not yet fallen apart. "Look."
Hearing her, Arya stepped closer, and when his eyes fell upon what Nirma had seen, he could not speak for several seconds. He simply stood there, motionless, his invisible body feeling as rigid as a statue, because scattered across the damp clay floor before him were weapons from different eras.
There was a pistol whose design he recognized from twentieth-century archives. There was an assault rifle he had never seen in person, yet he knew from history books that it had only been developed in the 2020s. There was a tactical knife with a carbon-fiber handle, manufactured only in the 1990s by a company that went bankrupt before the new millennium arrived. Beside them lay even stranger objects—a digital wristwatch whose screen was still glowing despite its battery supposedly having died decades ago, a night-vision goggle with a cracked lens, and a portable radio whose frequency display continued to flicker as though searching for a signal that would never come.
"This... this is impossible," Arya finally said, his voice sounding unfamiliar even to his own ears, like someone trapped in a dream who could not wake himself because his subconscious insisted that the dream was real.
"These weapons come from different years, different centuries, different civilizations that should never have met in the same room. Some are from 1990, some from 2020, some from the year 4666—I can recognize the designs from the scratch patterns on their handles—and yet they're all here, in the house of Mush'ab bin Umair, in Medina of 625 CE, scattered around like children's toys left behind after playtime."
Nirma knelt beside an old pistol lying near the wall. Her invisible fingers carefully touched the cold metal as though handling a museum artifact, even though she knew this artifact should never have belonged in a museum because it was either too young, too old, or simply too different to be displayed anywhere.
"Great Abnormal didn't just kidnap Mush'ab bin Umair," she whispered. Her left eye darted rapidly from one object to another, noting details that others might miss: scratches on the pistol barrel indicating that it had been used rather than merely carried; the frequency settings on the portable radio showing that someone had attempted to contact something—perhaps headquarters, perhaps allies, perhaps only a distant voice that never answered; and handprints on the tactical knife's grip that were too small to belong to an adult, as though the weapon had once been held by children, or by someone whose hands trembled from fear, from cold, or from reasons she did not wish to dwell upon.
"They also left traces here. Traces they couldn't take away because there were too many of them—or because they deliberately left them behind as a message. As a warning. As something that says: we can come from anywhere, from any time, and no one can stop us."
Arya moved to another corner of the room, where his eyes caught sight of an object that made his heart beat faster.
An old compass with a cracked glass surface. Its needle did not point north but toward the eastern wall—the wall facing directly toward Masjid Nabawi, the wall where, if he knelt and pressed his ear against the cold bricks, he could hear the whispered prayers of thousands of people filling the mosque courtyard, preparing for the coming war, preparing to die for something greater than themselves.
"Nirma," he called, his voice quiet but urgent, like someone who had just found the final piece of a puzzle and could not wait to fit it together with the pieces he had been gathering for years.
"Look at this. This compass... its needle isn't pointing north. It's pointing east. Toward Masjid Nabawi. Toward the place where the Messenger of Allah and his companions are gathered right now, in the days before the Battle of Uhud, preparing their strategies, preparing their hearts, preparing for the deaths they know are coming but can never truly be ready to accept."
Nirma approached and stared at the old compass with an expression she could not conceal.
It was neither awe nor fear, but understanding—an understanding like lightning striking in the darkest night, illuminating everything that had previously existed only as a shapeless darkness within her mind.
"They didn't just leave weapons behind," she whispered. Her voice emerged from behind her veil with remarkable clarity, clear as water flowing over stones after a heavy rain.
"They left clues as well. This compass isn't an inanimate object—it's a message. 'To the east,' it says. 'To the place where the center of faith resides. To the place where, if we wish to undermine the foundations of belief, we must begin there—from its heart, from the people gathered around the one person we can never touch because we are unable to, but we can touch his shadows, we can kidnap those who love him, we can make them believe that between prayers and battles, there is one name they must remember: Sinta Melina Ningsih.'"
After standing in silence for some time—absorbing a silence unlike the one before, a silence that was not empty but filled with the presence of future objects scattered across the floor of a companion's house, a companion who was now gone, whose only remaining traces were the sleeping gas lingering in the air and the weapons that could tell no stories because metal, like stone, had never learned how to speak—Nirma and Arya exchanged glances.
To be continued…