Chapter 55Seven Years of Watching

In the first year Ardeshir announced a sign and was wrong. A prince had been born in Armenia, not the Restorer. He wrote his error on the public wall before anyone could preserve it as mystery.

In the second year Roxaneh lost her brother to bandits and mistook grief for a command to travel west. The others kept her from making pain into prophecy.

In the third year Mehrdad treated a Roman merchant who mocked Persian religion. The healer saved him anyway and said, “Asha does not ask the wounded for agreement before closing the wound.”

In the fourth year Parisa calculated a rare meeting of lights and refused to call it divine. “Wonder is already enough,” she said.

In the fifth year they found a fragment describing the final Helper as victorious. They argued for months over whether victory required defeat of persons or defeat of the Lie within every person.

In the sixth year a child in the village asked why a universal savior would need permission from Persia. No scholar answered quickly.

In the seventh year the sky offered a pattern none of them could dismiss and none could fully explain. Their agreement was not certainty. It was a shared willingness to risk being corrected by the road.

They packed no crown. “If we find a king who needs our gold to become king,” Parisa said, “we have found the wrong child.”