The Borders in Our Veins

"They say the war freezes and thaws. I wish I never met you when it was frozen. Because you'll hate me someday, and I won't bear it. Is it crueler for the prisoner to have once known pastures?"

In this fictionalized setting, childhood best friends Anya and Ahmed grow up with bright horizons sloped towards modernity and hope, believing the scars of their parents' war are far behind them. Amidst shifting political tides, they are only 15 when they are torn apart by a resurgence of the centuries-long ethnic conflict, their families splitting once again along the two sides of a thin ethnoreligious border. Anya is sent to a village in the East, an increasingly radicalized rural pocket formed around a monastery; and Ahmed joins the army in the West, promising to die for his country when the war comes.

When their paths cross again, Anya has been married off to a military official, and Ahmed is deployed as an undercover spy in his regiment. The war has taken everything from them; but there might still be flickers of who they once were deep inside.

Throughout this story that spans a decade, Anya and Ahmed lose every piece of home they ever had, except the one they found in each other. Can the gulf between them, that seeping blood stain of generations, ever be bridged? Can they reattach the scorched roots of their soil to one-another - to find a home in their own veins?