Chapter 13: Our Truth

In the heart of the shadowed cave, they found the Sahir, slumped against the cold stone walls. His robes hung loosely around him, the vibrant threads now dulled with exhaustion. But when they entered, he didn’t rise, didn’t even flinch. Instead, he greeted them with a weary smile, as if they were old friends arriving for a casual visit, not the hunters who had pursued him across leagues of treacherous land.

They demanded answers, their voices sharp with the urgency of their quest. “What have you done with Solar? Why did you bring back Polaris?”

The Sahir’s tired eyes flickered with a strange, distant light. His voice, though drained, carried the weight of a truth he had long kept hidden. “Polaris tricked me,” he began, the words heavy with regret. “I was so close—just a strand of Solar’s hair away from restoring him. But Polaris… he was always the clever one. He saw what I was doing, sensed my desperation. And so, one day, he came to me, pretending to be Solar, offering a strand of hair from his head. I was blind, blinded by my need to bring Solar back, to correct my past mistakes.”

The Sahir’s voice wavered, each word an echo of his deep, gnawing guilt. “I didn’t realize until it was too late. The magic surged, the spell was cast… and when the smoke cleared, there stood Polaris, not Solar. The wrong identical twin, the one I was never meant to revive.”

The air in the cave grew heavy, laden with the weight of the Sahir’s confession. The walls seemed to close in, the darkness pressing tighter, as if the cave itself mourned the cruel twist of fate. Polaris had returned—but at the cost of his brother, his identical twin, who now remained lost to the void. And the Sahir, once a master of the arcane, had been reduced to a broken man, haunted by a mistake he could never undo.

“Polaris must be destroyed,” Prince Mehrajan said, his voice cold as the stone around them. Princess Amani stepped forward, her hand on her blade. “And to do that, we must kill you.” The Sahir’s eyes widened, his breath catching in his throat. He had expected anger, even hatred, but this… this was something else entirely. A cold, unyielding determination that chilled him to his core. He knew then that there would be no mercy, no forgiveness. His time had run out, and now, the very magic he had once mastered would be his undoing.

“Wait!” The word cut through the tension, freezing Prince Mehrajan and Princess Amani in place. “If you kill me, you won’t just destroy Polaris. You’ll doom countless others—your father, the king, included.”

They faltered, the cold edge of their resolve wavering. Prince Mehrajan’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about, Sahir?”

The Sahir swallowed hard, his gaze flickering between them, searching for any sign of understanding. “There’s something you don’t know, something the Supreme Court has kept hidden for years. Your father, the king—he is among those I revived. His life is tied to mine, just like Polaris’s, and like all the others who have been touched by my magic.”