Zaynab hadn't come to her Jaddoo's library—her grandfather’s—for answers. Only to sit with his absence awhile.
The desert wind still carried his scent, oudh clinging stubbornly to woolen abayas and the sharp tang of his inkwells. But the library stood frozen, every manuscript and moth-eaten volume holding its breath. Dust motes danced in shafts of light that cut through mashrabiya lattices, painting the Persian carpets with geometric ghosts.
She ran her fingers along the shelves. Each spine whispered under her touch like a jinn sighing. After the janazah, the women had come with ma'amoul and empty platitudes, the men with Qur'anic verses they had never seen him read. Only here, among his books, could she grieve properly.
Then she saw it.
Tucked behind Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah, a volume bound in cracked leather the color of drought-parched earth. No title. Just an embossed hilal, its curve barely visible.
The moment she touched it, warmth radiated through her palms. Impossible, given the library's eternal chill. The first pages were barren.
Until page seventy-three.
There, in ink that shimmered like wet wadi stones, was a verse:
ما يموت حق وراءه مطالب
(No truth dies if someone still demands it.)
The air thickened with the scent of za'atar and something older. The brass lantern's flame stilled. Even the call to prayer from the distant masjid seemed to pause mid-aya.
Then, slowly as date syrup dripping, the next line appeared:
"You are the seventh to find me. Will you be the first to listen?"
Her throat tightened. She whispered, "Man anti?"
The response bloomed in crimson ink, like pomegranate seeds bursting:
"The story your grandfather buried with his silence."
A brittle envelope slid from the pages. Her name—زينب—written in Jaddoo’s precise naskh script.
Inside, a confession:

Ya ibnati,
This book belonged to Sitt Maryam al-Zahra, your great-grandmother. The French called her a poetess. Our people called her 'al-Katiba al-Khafiya'—the Hidden Scribe.
During the occupation, she mixed saffron, Damascus rosewater, and her own blood to make ink that would only speak to her descendants. I spent forty years trying to make it answer me. It never did.
But when you were born, she visited me in a dream. 'The girl will finish what we began,' she said. I did not understand until now.
Bismillah, little scribe. The desert is listening.

Zaynab’s tears fell onto the page, making the ink swirl like dervishes. She turned to find the margins now filled with Ghabati poetry—verses her Teta used to sing while kneading dough, songs that made her feel both held and haunted.
As she read on, more pages revealed themselves. Star maps annotated in Kufic script stretched across the paper like constellations stitched with ink. Lists of names followed, each one marked with a small word beside it—some read ناجي, survivor, and others شهيد, martyr. There was even a child’s sketch of Palmyra’s arch, its arches drawn with uneven strokes. Underneath, someone had scrawled لن نموت. We will not die.
It was not just a book. It was an archive of resistance.
In the back, a wax seal stamped with a thumbprint waited like a final gate. When she pressed her own against it, the wax dissolved, warm to the touch, like ghar melting into hot milk.
Inside was a miniature muraqqa, a stitched booklet of vellum pages filled with coded messages disguised as love poems. Each line swayed between beauty and instruction. Tucked between two pages was a small portrait, the image faint but sharp enough to recognize. A woman with fierce kohl-lined eyes stared ahead, her jaw set, her expression full of storm and softness. Underneath was written: أم الثوار. Mother of Rebels.
For weeks, Zaynab deciphered Sitt Maryam’s ciphers. Some messages only revealed themselves when the book was held beneath the moonlight. Others needed the recitation of specific verses from the Qur'an. One page, sweet with the scent of jasmine, unlocked when she softly whispered the first line of Surah Al-Qalam. The house around her began to feel animated, not haunted, but consecrated.
The ghosts were not frightening. They were watchful. When she discovered a record of arms smuggled through Deir ez-Zor in 1936, the air filled with the scent of orange blossoms. As she traced the names of children who had once studied at the secret Al-Zahra School, a cold draft curled around her ankles. In her mirror, her reflection sometimes shifted. The girl looking back at her wore a serious calm, and now and then, just above her left temple, appeared a sliver of silver hair.
A memory surfaced. She had once asked Jaddoo, when she was ten, why he never let her play near the back of the library. He had looked away from her and said quietly, "Some stories take time to want you."
Now she understood.
On the fortieth night, she climbed to the roof just as he used to. The adhan for Maghrib swelled across the desert, pulling light from the sky. The book lay open in her lap. On the final page, a sentence formed in deep ink, unfurling like a flag in wind.
الحق سيفي
Truth is my sword
And then, beneath it, in ink darker than before:
"Now it is yours, ya warthati."
The sky above Al-Kharj felt endless. Not empty, but expectant. Not silence, but reverence. For the first time, Zaynab saw the stars not as distant lights, but as eyes watching her gently, nodding in approval.
When she returned to Dubai, the city felt louder than she remembered. The buildings too bright. The roads too sharp. Everything moved quickly, without memory. But something inside her had stilled.
She kept the book wrapped in Jaddoo’s old ihram cloth, placing it beside her prayer mat. Each night after Isha, she unfolded it slowly, the way one opens a letter from someone long gone but never truly absent. The pages still shimmered sometimes. Some nights they remained still, waiting. Other nights, they offered new verses. Always soft. Always deliberate.
One evening, while adjusting her scarf before bed, her assistant paused behind her and spoke with startled reverence.
"Miss Zaynab… your hair."
Zaynab turned to the mirror.
A single streak of silver shimmered at her left temple.
She reached up, brushing her fingertips across it gently.
It was not grief she felt.
It was recognition.
Not an ending.
A returning.
And for a woman who had found the ink of her ancestors still wet beneath the sand,
That was home.