Unlike those timid touches of shadow bounded around concrete blocks— disturbed by shining factories and city lights—a flickering dark has become a true fall of day; fully capturing the hills in its intoxicating embrace, deep into the countyside.

Amidst these long stretches of intense dark, warm lights captured by short glances did not disturb the night’s reign over the hill tops.

The contrast of archaic oil lamps merely shed a light on the intense darkness of night.

The intense summer heat had dried up the small spring, leaving the river banks towering over deep caves spread all around old Cider. Almost as if those pockets of darkness served as a reminder that even darker realms lay beyond the hill tops.

The omnipresent darkness, overwhelming to a mere citydweller like me, went by unnoticed by the town folk.

Such was night time in old Sider, along the dead Kert river.

Modernity.

Inspired by a tweet on fiction writing, I have attempted to write an introduction to a short story about an ancient demon that has been kept imprisoned by pious men of the Atlantean Zawiyya in the Algerian atlas mountains.

An Atlantean secret

Circling upwards through the dense pine forest, I had surrendered to the weary calmness of this remote country town. The narrow dirt road—so narrow that when another vehicle approached, we were forced to halt entirely—hemmed us between the shadows of the forest below and the rocky hill looming above.

It allowed no sound to reach us, no whisper of the world beyond to breach the many rows of pine-bearing trees that stretched endlessly into darkness.

The four of us had set out on this final journey, a pilgrimage to bid farewell to a place that had once been home—a place we had abandoned decades ago. At first, our conversation flowed easily, but with every mile, the words grew sparse, dwindling to occasional remarks that might once have sparked a lively exchange.

Now, even the wittiest comment could only muster a hollow gasp in reply. Enshrouded in near-complete darkness, the miles ahead seemed endless. The headlights illuminated mere inches of the road, leaving the curves of the mountain pass treacherous and unseen.

Then, sudden and sharp, something stirred—attended only by my most primitive senses, a vibration both faint and undeniable. Whether it was a feeling or a sound, I could not tell. It seized me, pulling me from my drowsy stupor, my eyes snapping to meet the upward brow of the commander seated beside me.

What could we do? Suspicion alone was no reason to stop on this desolate stretch of mountain road, enveloped in the ominous dark.

And then, across the beams of the headlights, it came—a shadow, swift and sudden, gliding across the road without sound. What could it be, this thing that moved so fluidly, leaving no trace, no echo in its wake?

None of us spoke of the shadow. We left the matter as it was, each of us consumed by our own unspoken fears.

We were not deceived by our senses. We had been warned.

It is very ironic that the Persianate inclination towards women has become the paradigmatic image of the "Arab" religion in the minds of secular-liberal agents clinging to an imagined Persian age of glory. The Arabs were far more lenient towards the role of women in the public sphere as mirrored in the Maliki and Shafi'i madhabs.

The future has to be imagined first before it can be experienced.

This really feels like stepping into the wilderness, wondering about like the new nomads, from place to place in the cyberspace until we reach a destination for a new civilization to grow. This will be a time of experimentation and growth through different projects. But whatever you may do, stay SAIF.