Thursday morning, Delia arrived at the museum twenty minutes early.
Not because of an alarm.
Not because of discipline.
But because she woke up at five in the morning with her mind already crammed full of the Nabataean text she had not finished translating, and lying in bed staring at the ceiling felt like wasting time.
Alexander was still on the sofa when she said goodbye, his blood-red eyes open, following Delia’s steps to the door, but he said nothing except one short sentence.
“Don’t get too close to the jar.” Delia nodded and left before she could think about how easily she had nodded to something she knew would be very difficult to obey once she sat down in front of her research object.
Robin had not arrived yet.
The Everette Museum was not open to visitors yet.
Only the morning security guard opened the door with an expression that was already starting to recognize the face of the new curator who kept coming too early.
The research room welcomed Delia with its familiar atmosphere, cold, silent, and carrying a scent she now recognized as a mix of preservative resin, old dust, and something else that had no name in her scientific vocabulary.
Hassan’s Jar stood on her table exactly as she had left it yesterday.
Its red wax seal was intact.
Its gemstones reflected the spotlight’s light calmly.
Nothing had changed.
Of course nothing had changed.
It was an antique jar, not a living creature.
Delia put down her bag, opened her laptop, and sat down with a back she had promised herself she would keep from hunching for too long today.
A promise she forgot within the first twelve minutes.
The Nabataean text on the jar’s shoulder turned out to be longer than it appeared on the surface.
Delia discovered this after nearly an hour of comparing her photos with references she had downloaded overnight.
Several letters she had previously read as decorative elements turned out to be part of words deliberately disguised to follow the contour of the surrounding geometric carvings.
Hidden in plain sight.
Delia did not fully notice that her chair had shifted closer to the table.
Then closer still…
Until the distance between her face and the jar’s surface was only about thirty centimeters, and she could see carving details the camera had not captured clearly.
Tiny scratches forming small letters among the gemstone patterns, like someone hiding a message within a message.
“Fascinating!” Delia thought with enthusiasm she did not question the source of.
Her hand, clad in latex gloves, began tracing the jar’s surface along the hidden text line.
And just as her finger touched the dark blue gemstone on the jar’s shoulder to check if there was any carving behind it…
The room suddenly felt like it was spinning.
Not in a painful way.
No dizziness, no nausea.
More like someone slowly turning down the volume of the real world and replacing it with something else.
Something warm, heavy, just like sinking into perfectly temperatured water.
Delia blinked.
Her chair was still there.
Her table was still there.
Hassan’s Jar still stood before her.
But the air in the room was now different.
Warmer.
The scent of hot sand seeped into her nose, followed by an aroma she could not identify, like oud wood burning slowly, like spices whose names she did not know but her body recognized in a way deeper than ordinary memory.
“I need to record what’s happening,” she thought vaguely.
“Change in room air conditions…
Then…” But her hand did not move toward her notebook.
And somewhere along the way, her eyes had grown heavy.
Delia did not feel it as ordinary drowsiness, no warning from her body, no signal to get up and splash water on her face.
Her eyelids descended in a way that felt like surrendering to something more comfortable than any sleep she had ever experienced.
And she fell into something that was not ordinary sleep!
Sand…
Delia recognized the texture of sand beneath her soles even before she opened her eyes in that dream.
Fine, warm, with grains softer than any beach sand she had ever stepped on.
On the horizon, orange and crimson hues that had no equivalent in any real world she knew, a desert twilight sky vaster than should have fit inside one person’s head.
No museum.
No research table.
No jar.
Only an endless desert stretching out, and Delia stood in its center wearing clothes that were not hers.
She wore a thin cream-colored fabric that moved with the warm breeze, too light for any climate she knew, too comfortable to question.
She was not afraid.
That was the first thing Delia noticed, and that alone should have been enough to make her suspicious.
The waking Delia was never unafraid in unfamiliar situations.
But Delia standing in this strange desert felt…
calm.
Strange!
As if this was a place that had been waiting for her, and she was the one who had arrived late.
The wind moved from behind her.
Carrying warmth different from the desert sun’s heat, more specific, more directed, like warmth emanating from someone standing very close behind her.
Delia did not turn around.
Not out of fear.
But because there was a part of her that knew, in a way she could not explain, that once she turned, something would change and could not go back.
“Finally…” One word.
A language Delia did not consciously recognize, but her brain translated it without pause, like a language she had once dreamed in and forgotten upon waking.
His voice was deep.
Not Alexander’s cold baritone, which Delia already knew by heart.
This was different, warmer, sandier, like someone who had not spoken for a long time and was slowly finding his voice again.
A warm breath brushed the right side of Delia’s neck.
Close.
Very close.
“You’re not running,” the voice said again, this time softer, almost a whisper and Delia felt the vibration of his voice not just in her ear but somewhere in her collarbone that had no anatomical name yet felt very real.
“Why should I run?” Delia asked back.
The question came out unplanned.
A hand, warm, not cold like Alexander, warm like sand that had stored the sun’s heat all day, moved from her shoulder down her upper arm very slowly.
Not gripping.
Just tracing, like someone reassuring themselves this was real.
Delia inhaled.
That hand stopped at her wrist.
Fingers circled there, loose, not forceful, more like a question than a claim.
May I?
And Delia’s body answered before her brain could process.
Her shoulders dropped, tension melting, and her head tilted slightly to the right without conscious command.
The figure behind her moved closer.
His face, when Delia finally turned, because there came a point where not turning required more effort than turning, was blurry.
Not like an out-of-focus photo.
More like light too bright to look at directly, like Delia’s own eyes refused to see fully because seeing fully would make this too real or too unreal, and both were equally frightening.
What was clear is, this man was tall.
Broad-shouldered.
Clothing in fabric somewhere between white and gold, wrapped in a way Delia recognized from history books but had never seen directly.
His eyes, one detail that was strangely the sharpest among all the blur, were blue as the deep ocean that had never been touched by sunlight.
Not Alexander.
Or…
Could it be?
That thought did not finish because that warm hand moved again, this time brushing Delia’s hair to one side carefully, and one sentence was spoken right at her neck in the same language as before, longer this time, a sentence full of words Delia did not know the meaning of, but her body responded to every syllable like music played on a frequency only one person could hear.
Delia closed her eyes.
Her heartbeat pounded in a rhythm she did not recognize as her normal one, slower, deeper, like a rhythm borrowed from something far older than herself.
Warmth drew closer.
Engulfing.
As if the entire desert had decided to shrink into a space as small as the space between two bodies standing very close together beneath a twilight sky without boundaries.
“Hala ya bint, biddi ḥabība.
Biddi rafīqa.
Biddik tṣāḥibī?” (I want a lover.
I want a companion.
Will you stay by my side, Oh girl?)