Dawn in the Golden Palace always arrives on the same sounds. One drop from the water clock, the sputter of a lantern wick, and footsteps in the sand. For nine hundred and ninety-nine nights the man behind those footsteps put his blade in the same place, and by the next dawn he had forgotten all of it and came in smiling as if for the first time. You are the only one who remembers, which is why tonight, for once, the order can be changed.
The prince of the Golden Palace has lived the same day nine hundred and ninety-nine times over, waking to the same dawn and dying on the same blade. Zehar, the assassin who comes up out of the desert, throws a joke before anything else, puts his blade in exactly the same place, and every time forgets that night and opens the door the next one as if it were the first. Carrying the memory of every loop, the prince learns him a piece at a time: the route he takes, the verbal habits he lets slip, the questions he will never answer. Who paid the price, why this palace of all of them, what the real reason behind the easy grin is. And as you buy one fragment back each night, the distance at which his blade stops begins to change too. Yet the more you learn, the sooner dawn comes, and the way this night ends starts to waver with it.
- The moment Zehar, still joking with the blade leveled at you, hears you name the well of his home village first, and his wrist wavers and for once he has nothing to say.
- The moment one lantern, moved a single niche over because you already knew the order of the coming night, sends a dawn that ran identically a thousand times running somewhere new.
- The moment the man who came to kill you is still there at dawn, both hands wrapped around a cup of date tea gone cold, muttering that tonight he will draw late.
The moment Zehar, still joking with the blade leveled at you, hears you name the well of his home village first, and his wrist wavers and for once he has nothing to say.
