27°16'28.1"N 13°25'41.8"E

  Fezzan, Libya

  13.05.2024 - 00.00 UTC +02.00

  My head rang as the world around me spun. A bright light dissipated as the horizon gradually took shape. A mix of a cold wind, of a sandstorm, and eventually the galaxy’s light in a moonless sky meeting the land at the horizon. The spinning slowed down, as a far-off voice warned me.

  Bring him back, Khalida.

  Whose voice was that? Where was I?

  My feet touched the sand. My hands felt the familiar breeze of the desert, and, somehow, I was sure I was not far from home.

  The earth kept spinning like a turning wheel, but then I noticed: the sky was stable. The night stars, light years away, brought me back to the present, like a man by the fire narrating a story of old. I saw the shape of At-Tinnin, the Draco, right on the sky’s zenith. Its head looked outwards to the waves of the Galaxy, a river so bright and white its swirling waves drowned out the darkness of the sky. The Draco’s tail moved and wrapped around the na?ve and playful aldubu al'asghar, Ursa Minor. The little bear cub at the heart of the sky, guided by a lack of options, was ensnared by Draco and pulled to the river, doomed to drown by the Galaxy’s vastness. The same voice beckoned:

  In N’Djamena, Catastrophe will find you.

  The words signaled that it was the land’s turn to come to a halt and piece together a new landscape. I pulled my attention away from the doomed bear cub in the sky and sought to orient myself. All I could see around me was endless sand, and as much as void of clues that it was, it was my home and hunting grounds. The Sahara, in the middle of the night; that’s where I was, and I was finally standing still.

  The twinkling stars revealed their colors as the Galaxy behind them burned brighter. The desert was still alive and warm, not by the sun’s decree, but by the stars.

  You have to go to N’Djamena first and bring him back.

  Was this a dream? An omen? I looked around me: there was no one with me, and I had no recollection of how I found myself there. I then tried to look at my hands. They seemed almost as they should, but not entirely. They were unstable, trembling, and almost floating.

  I looked away. If this were a dream, I risked waking up before deciphering it. I had to remain as lucid as I had.

  In N’Djamena, Catastrophe will find you.

  Whose voice was that? It seemed familiar, commanding, and soothing at the same time. It was a woman’s voice, a woman who maybe used to be my friend or a long-lost relative, a woman I felt I had to acknowledge as kin even though I never knew her.

  In N’Djamena, Catastrophe will find you.

  I always knew I was Cursed. But this was different. I was not hearing the Nabd. I was not hearing people’s hearts. I had never heard of anything like this before, and I had studied through hundreds of books and old scrolls. There was only one explanation.

  This is the Calling.

  The voice explained. My head rang again, and all the stars burned brighter. All I could do was watch as the night sky turned brighter and brighter.

  The bear cub was not alone. Aldubu al'akbar, Ursa Major, was frozen in the sky, unable to save her kin from Draco, enchanted by its long tail. She watched as her younger and clueless counterpart was dragged to the river that the Galaxy was.

  The world started spinning again. I had overstayed my welcome in this dream. I was supposed to wake up.

  I was drenched in sweat, and tears ran down my cheeks.

  “N’Djamena. Catastrophe. Bring him back.” I shouted.

  I breathed in sharply. My eyes opened, confused that I was no longer in the vastness of the desert, but in the safety of my bedroom.

  I could hear them coming, my mother, my father. She had sensed my distress, and her heart was coming closer. I had to choose my words carefully. My life was about to change. I had just woken up in a reality starker than my nightmare.

  I was Cursed with a Calling.

  ? ? ?

  The off-road car struggled when we opted to go through the dunes, even though that was exactly its purpose. Its wheels spun, meeting resistance from the blistering hot sands of the Desert.

  “Others got a Calling, sister, but not like this,” Qadir said, sitting next to me in the car. He had not shied away from expressing his worries about the quest I had decided to accept, and this was not the first time he had voiced them.

  “We are not that far, baby brother; you can still get off and run back to Sabha, maybe catch a ride back home.”

  “And leave you on your own? You’re joking.”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  He was Cursed, like me, a young man able to hear the Nabd. It was a common Curse in our homeland – a Curse that passed on from protector to protector of the area, allowing us to hear the blood of others. Seek our enemies’ pulse and, if necessary, hunt it or avoid it. Each of us had a different aspect of it and experienced it differently. Most, like my brother, were trained to develop it as a natural sixth sense, never letting their guard down. They excelled at protecting our family’s land. I was not like that. I was more of a seeker than a guardian.

  “I will not ever be on my own again. No matter if I look so,” I said.

  In a few rare cases, the Curse of the Hearing would evolve into a Calling. I was one of those cases, as I had learned in a dream of an omen almost a week ago.

  “That’s bleak, sis,” Qadir said. He mumbled something else, but I could not hear him over the radio chatter of our driver, talking with the rest of the convoy.

  “How far, Walid?” Qadir asked the driver.

  “They confirmed the route to Waw al Kabir. We can stay the night there.” The radio chatter echoed his confirmation: voices were coming in through the communications and confirming the plan.

  Qadir looked at me, waiting for my direction. I nodded – although I could only guess what the Calling wanted. All I knew was that it had summoned me to N’Djamena, but getting there meant a dangerous crossing to Chad first.

  Luckily, we had Walid’s convoy of mercenaries to take us through all these territories. The Khamsat Banadiq, the Five Guns, were a group of Libyan mercenaries often hired by the Fezzan Houses for protection while travelling. They were trusted by all the Houses, including ours, Ashour, although their allegiance was mostly to dinars.

  Our family had enough connections in Fezzan to ramp up proper custody for me during the trip. They provided an ambitious budget for Qadir and me, a promise of riches and power to the Banadiq, as well as a handsome upfront payment. The Banadiq assigned Walid’s entourage to the task, a thirty-something-year-old unassuming man with terrifyingly good manners and a soft voice.

  Rumor had it he had killed more than a hundred men in his career.

  “That works just fine, Walid, thank you. Waw al Kabir it is,” I confirmed.

  “I hope there is a decent place to stay there,” Qadir added.

  I smiled, although I doubted that. It would not compare to our family’s house or the luxury of our life back in Fezzan. My initial hesitation to embark on this journey was entirely about that: a trip of almost two thousand kilometers through the desert did not sound fun or easy. But the house of Ashour would have none of it. A Calling was a chance of a lifetime for any family, and my family had not had any recorded Calling in recent centuries. I was the first Ashour to ever be Cursed with a Calling, as far as records showed, and that excited our parents more than anything else I could have achieved without it.

  I could not match that excitement, but I was compelled to agree by my Calling, regardless. When the Calling overwhelmed me, my whole existence and purpose were aligned with it, and I never had a choice but to obey its direction. This was the way Callings worked for all that bore that Curse.

  “Excited? First stop of our trip,” Qadir asked.

  There was a limit to how much excitement I could have when I was but a vessel.

  “Maybe,” I answered him, “this whole thing will probably be nothing. Remember Munya? She said she had the Calling. She went away, all the way to Tripoli, only to come back later just a bit richer. Well, a lot richer.”

  “Well, that would not hurt,” Qadir said. We stayed silent for a while. A Calling to Tripoli was not that hard to fulfill, and there were quite a few mystical stops on the road to Tripoli, mapped by other Cursed to share knowledge. A Calling like mine, crossing multiple different states of central Africa, felt more like a suicide mission.

  Qadir scooched over and leaned on his side of the passenger seat, brought out his smartphone, and locked onto its screen. There was no consistent reception, but maybe he sensed I needed some space to think.

  I leaned onto my side, letting my eyes drift over the endless golden brown of the desert’s dunes.

  It was a suicide mission. I had been reading through the journals my mother provided me with. Books inherited by Cursed generations of the wisest Fezzan scholars. I always studied hard. But over the past week, I studied as if my life depended on it. I skimmed through books to choose the ones to carry with me, and others with information I could memorize, I left behind.

  I had to prioritize and study the dangers that one could face, chasing a Calling. There were tips and tricks about handling the Calling while in battle, or how to harness it to access it during your dreams. One of those books was now lying on my lap, and I had a few others in the trunk. However, the scariest thing I had pored over was the existence of Nitaq.

  “You have to be a special kind of Cursed to be able to form a Nitaq, a domain. It is a one-in-a-million kind of Curse that shapes countries. Continents, even,” Omar, a grey-bearded tutor hired by my parents, had said. In the years past, he had helped me harness the Hearing, but the past week, he had reluctantly expedited and expanded the curriculum. By my mother’s decree, of course. “Cursed leaders able to expand such spheres of influence eventually shape the fate of whole civilizations.”

  I had never heard of such a thing before. But I immediately understood that passing through a Nitaq with a Curse as uncontrollable as a Calling, I would ruffle feathers. And with a snap of a finger, owners of Nitaq could stop my life and my quest.

  ? ? ?

  The burning sun’s light was quickly replaced by shadow, as fast-moving clouds passed on top of us. For a few brief moments, I saw my reflection on the window’s glass. My eyes looked tired, and my hair was tangled and messy. I locked my gaze right into the reflection of my eyes.

  Since the Calling had appeared, I wondered if my reflection was mine or the Calling’s. Whatever that meant.

  As unique as it was, a Calling was not stronger than any Nitaq, but it did bear its unique plans. If these plans were clashing with the wishes of any other Cursed in my way, and I stepped into their Nitaq, who knows what could happen. To make matters worse, the plans of my Calling were unclear. I only knew that as long as I was travelling to N’Djamena, it did not compel me to change direction. And as I chased its direction, I could only guess what its purpose was.

  The clouds quickly passed over us – or we passed below them, I could not tell who was faster – and the sun’s light vanquished my reflection.

  “Khalida, get out of your head,” my brother said, “it will be fine. Have some sleep, I will be on the lookout.”

  That, I could trust. He might have been young, but his Hearing of Nabd was more than enough to protect us from immediate danger.

  “Thank you,” I said. I leaned the opposite way of the window and my unfamiliar reflection and lay my head on his shoulder instead. He was quite younger than me, almost seven years, but still, it felt like he was the only one I could rely on for protection.

  “You know, come to think of it, Munya did not have a brother, did she?” I asked.

  Qadir chuckled. “Exactly. You got me, sis. Take it easy.” I slept like a log. No dreams, no Calling.