Chronicles of Sha'Lazar

The once-mighty caravan of Alai Karzi, feared across the Acacus Desert, was a vast procession of over 5,000 slaves, thousands of mounted warriors, guards, mages, and pack animals… laden with goods, gold, and weapons. It was both a mobile empire and a symbol of Karzi’s dominance.

But everything changed when the great sandstorm struck. From the Shadows of the Sands... Summoned… some say by fate, others by the gods… it tore across the desert like divine wrath. Despite the desperate magical efforts of Karzi’s conjurer, more than four-fifths of the caravan was lost. Thousands buried alive, scattered, or vanished in the storm's fury.

What remained was a shattered remnant… Karzi, a fraction of his warriors, his exhausted mage, the bound green Djinn, and 1,000 surviving slaves, including the newly captured Leelah.

From the wreckage, Karzi began to rebuild… not as the conqueror in full command, but as a warlord tempered by loss, surrounded by whispers of rebellion, prophecy… and the stirring shadow of change.

The desert had never been so silent. For after the storm, the world felt peeled back and raw, as if the gods themselves had scraped their fingers across the skin of the earth. The Karzi stood amidst the wreckage of his once-glorious caravan, the wind brushing sand over corpses and broken wheels. Five thousand slaves… lost to the storm, to chaos, to rebellion. Yet a thousand remained.


Before the storm…

She had lived in a modest village … a place of stubborn beauty…, known for its gardens and open wells, where music drifted with the scent of myrrh and the people took pride in their freedom. She was a healer’s daughter, or so the elders claimed, and sang in the mornings as she gathered water, golden curls catching the sun like fire. But peace does not last on the edges of power.

Leelah’s descent into slavery was as swift as it was brutal. Ahhh… but first we must now we peel back the true veil.

Leelah’s presence in that modest border village was no accident… but neither was it entirely understood, even by her. She had always been different. The old women whispered it, and the children who played near her said she "glowed" when the wind was right. Some claimed she had no mother… that she’d appeared as a babe on the stone steps of the healer’s hut during a meteor shower, wrapped in silk that shimmered like starlight. Others insisted she was the healer’s daughter, born in secret from a lover who vanished with the morning dew.

But no one remembered her growing up. One day she was a child, singing lullabies that no one had taught her. The next, she was a maiden dancing under the palms, her laughter leaving even the dates blushing on the trees.

In truth… Leelah was a fallen echo… a ripple in the veil between the divine and mortal worlds. Perhaps once, long ago, she had been something more… a celestial Apsara who loved too deeply and descended too far. Or a Zarayin, a sky-dancer cast from the heavens for choosing the world of mortals over the stillness of stars.

But memory is a fragile thing when one crosses from heaven to sand.

Whatever her origin, the village took her in… not as one of their own, but as a cherished mystery. She lived simply. Carried water, sang to the sick, danced in secret when the stars called her name. And though the earth knew her footsteps, the gods had not forgotten her.

It is often the way of such beings… to live hidden, half-dreaming, until fate calls them forward again.

And fate, it seems, came wearing the face of Alai Karzi.



For one night, under a moonless sky, Karzi’s raiders struck. It was not war… it was an erasure. Houses burned before alarms could rise, and screams echoed off sandstone walls. The village fell before the hour turned.

Leelah was caught… the story, rumored or fact, depended upon the witness…

The air had shimmered with something more than heat. Even amidst the battle’s din… sand flying, blood spattering, blades screaming against bone… Karzi could feel the distortion. Not of war, but of something else. A rift. A divine pulse threading through the chaos like a silver chord.

And then he saw her. Not running. Not hiding. Moving …with a grace that mocked the laws of mortals. She was too fast, too precise. His men fell like reeds before a flood, not by brute strength, but by a force older than steel. Her hair flew wild behind her like a standard of rebellion. Her bare feet barely kissed the sand, yet the dunes shifted at her will. The way she looked at his soldiers… both sorrowful and wrathful… unnerved even the most loyal of them.

It was not a girl he was watching. It was a Zarayin. And the battlefield had become a shrine.

He did not speak, but the mage felt it… sensed it in the warlord’s breathless stillness, in the clutch of his reins. The old conjurer turned from the ridge where he stood, and raised both hands to the sky.

Wind stirred, slow at first, then building with a pulse. Lavender petals… impossible in the desert… bloomed from the air around the mage’s wrists, conjured from old blood rites and starlit incantations. They spiraled outward in ghostly tufts, riding the wind like smoke, their scent sweet and deadly. “Ruh ash’Zivara…” the mage intoned, voice low and trembling, “...descend and soften her flame.” The lavender mist drifted toward her… soft as sleep… seductive as a forgotten lullaby. Leelah faltered. Not suddenly… but like a wave folding gently into itself. Her movements slowed. Her breath caught. Her strike… meant for another soldier’s throat… landed only shallowly, and her hands began to tremble. She blinked, lashes fluttering. The storm in her eyes dimmed with every inhale of that enchanted haze.

And then Karzi gave the signal.

From the scattered remnants of his fallen men, the mage knelt by a broken sword… its hilt split, its blade twisted and cracked from the heat of the storm. He whispered to it in the ancient tongue, feeding it spells older than memory. Gold bled from the iron, reshaping, melting not with fire but intention. Runes carved themselves into the forming ring, pulsing with holy and unholy light alike. A collar… Intricate. Gleaming. Wide enough for a goddess, yet light enough for a girl.

Karzi dismounted and approached her. Slowly. Reverently. Leelah… no longer a tempest, but a dream fading in morning light… stood swaying as the petals continued to fall around her. Her lips parted as if to ask a question, but no sound came. Her golden curls clung to her skin, dewed with sweat and ash. And he was before her now. He looked into her eyes… those storm-washed skies… and for a moment, something faltered in him. Not pity. Not mercy. But wonder. Even broken, even dazed, she was divine. He lifted the collar with both hands, and spoke low enough only she would hear.



Then he placed it around her neck. The moment it touched her skin, the lavender vanished. The storm within her stilled. Her body slumped into the arms of the guards behind her… not fallen, not unconscious, but subdued. Contained.

His men watched in silence. The girl who had danced like thunder had been quieted. But Karzi… he was not victorious. Not yet. He had caught a falling star. And now, he had to decide if he would try to possess it… or learn how not to be burned.


His men dragged from his side with her hands still bloody from those she had killed… her voice hoarse from pleading. She fought. Bit, kicked, cursed in a dozen dialects. But she was small, and untrained. Bound with coarse rope and slung over the back of a horse, she was taken… not for gold, but by gold, not as a spoil of war, but for the rare bloom she was.

Karzi did not see her that night. She was just one among hundreds, raw and unbroken, wrists still bleeding when the storm came.
And it was in the wake of devastation... when sand swallowed all but a thousand... that her true story began. Not as a free girl of the border, but as a slave... under the gaze of a warlord who should have forgotten her. And yet, he didn’t.

Karzi did not mourn in the way other men might. He moved through the remnants of his caravan with a quiet, terrible focus. Orders barked, fires relit, ranks reformed. He did not weep for the lost or curse the heavens… he rebuilt. Those who remained would become the foundation of his resurgence. The survivors, be they guards, servants, warriors, or slaves, would see a different side of Karzi... not the conqueror at the height of his power, but the phoenix in its smoldering nest.

They gave her a hundred names, as though mere syllables could tame something so wild. Leelah, they called her. The Desert Flower. Lily of the Dunes. The girl who made the wind hold its breath.

Karzi had seen beauty before. Bought it, sold it, broken it. He’d watched noble daughters crawl through the dust, seen queens beg for water. Beauty was a currency, and he had spent it all. But this girl… she was something else. Something the desert itself had whispered into being.

She stood small, no higher than his shoulder, but her presence disarmed even the fiercest of men. A ripple of gold spilled from her scalp to her hips… hair like sunfire, untamed and mocking. Her skin was kissed bronze, unmarred despite the chains she now wore. And those eyes… blue, endless, as if a piece of the sky had been stolen and lodged behind her lashes. Not the eyes of the defiant or the broken… but of someone who belonged to no one. Not even to herself.

When she moved, it was not dance. It was worship. It was memory. A thing older than language. It reminded him of incense spiraling in temple air, of myths told in silence, of women who could coax the divine from the soil with nothing but rhythm.

She flirted without meaning to. Smiled like secrets were too soft to keep. And yet, there was a distance in her… some veil he could not tear down, no matter how he stared. She was no simple slave. No pampered jewel plucked from a palace. She had the soul of a zarayin… that sky dancer, or worse, a myth walking in mortal flesh.

He had taken her in the chaos, a blurred face among a thousand. One more body to trade. But the storm had stolen his army, drowned his ambition in sand and wind. And when the silence fell, only a thousand remained… and she among them.

Now, each day she lives under his command, she unravels him. She sings with the tenderness of rain, cries for beasts broken under burden, and touches flowers like they whisper her name. Her kindness is not weakness. It is defiance of another kind… one he can neither conquer nor command. Karzi does not believe in gods. But sometimes, when he looks at her, he fears they have sent her not to tempt him… but to change him. He does not yet know if that terrifies him… Or if he welcomes it.