rotarygun
[ 18th century Egypt, desert magician AU ]
tw: angst, mild violence (I say mild but then people always get shot), mentions of slavery, rape, race-related violence, and abuse
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Cairo in the day is a bustling place, full of men and women clad in bright, flowing fabrics. The streets are littered with vendors and fortune tellers, some mad, some cunning, all of them beckoning you close with smiles on their faces and knives underneath their cepkens.
At night, the city is a different place. Its darkest corners are riddled with traps and men you teach your daughters to keep away from even in the day.
She had been one of these daughters, once, in a different life.
And him: he was the man who even the nobility refused to name; the man about whom only rumours survive, traded in hushed whispers between the most desperate of men and women. The uwrakil aemaa, they called him. The blind oracle.
Alkharab nafsuh.
Ruination itself.