The moon hung like a silver coin bitten by doubt, its light spilling over Shahryar’s palace gardens. Shah Zamán stood at the lattice window, his breath fogging the marble. The physicians had left him hours past, their leeches and bitter tonics as useless as prayers to a deaf god. His body felt hollowed, a shell filled with ash. But his eyes burned.

He rose from his bed, sleep a phantom that dissolved at his grasp. Drifting through the palace’s black veins, he moved like a pale specter, each step guided by the faintest whisper of cool air—a fragile hope against the fever’s claws. His path led him to a veiled archway, where twin eunuchs stood sentinel. Their bare torsos glistened like oiled bronze, scabbards gleaming like shark teeth at their hips. They stiffened as he neared, scimitars hissing from sheaths—until moonlight spilled over Shah Zamán’s face, bleaching their resolve to nothing.

The two stared at him, then each other, then back at him. Shah Zamán opened his mouth to speak, but the clatter of steel against marble drowned his words as the guards fled into the shadows like rats scattering from a torch. He lingered, brow furrowed, until a sudden gust tore the curtain aside—a cold breath carrying the promise of revelation. Stepping into the antechamber, he found himself bathed in the ghostly silver of moonlight spilling through balustrades, its pale fingers tracing the floor. He gripped the cold ebony railing, inhaling the night’s sharp embrace. For a breath, the air soothed his fevered pulse. Then he looked down. And the world unraveled.

The gardens below were a feast for the damned.

A figure emerged first—a concubine with hair the color of burnt sugar, her gait a sinuous sway. She peeled off her silk shift, revealing flesh smooth as polished amber. Ten white slaves awaited her, their bodies glistening with oil. One knelt, his tongue darting out to lick the inside of her thigh. She laughed, a sound like wind through dead reeds, and straddled him, her hips rolling in a rhythm that made Shah Zamán’s teeth ache.

“More,” she hissed, clawing at his back. “Like the Nile in flood!”

The others followed. A loose-limbed slave with cheeks dusted in gold powder bent over a pillar, his ass a tight rose parted by a man’s thickening member. A concubine with hair like spun gold jade knelt before another, her mouth working with the precision of a weaver’s shuttle. The air thickened with musk and the metallic tang of arousal.

Then the queen appeared.

Shahryar’s wife was a vision of ruinous beauty, her skin the pale gold of honeyed dates. She wore nothing but a girdle of rubies, each stone a drop of blood clinging to her hips. Her laughter rang clear as a blade being drawn from its sheath. “Saeed!” she cried, and the trees seemed to shudder.

He dropped from the branches like a thing of nightmares. The blackamoor—Saeed—was a mountain of muscle, his body sheathed in sweat. His eyes were rolled back, white as a dead man’s, his cock a serpent poised to strike. He seized the queen, lifting her as if she weighed nothing, and drove into her with a guttural roar.

“Harder!” she screamed, her voice a whip. “Like the storms that drown villages!”

The slaves and concubines mirrored their frenzy. A eunuch with a silver tongue swallowed a man's length against a fountain, his thrusts sharp as a scimitar’s edge. A concubine mounted a slave girl, their tongues dueling as their hips circled. The queen’s moans crescendoed, raw and hungry, while Saeed’s body trembled like a bowstring near breaking.

Shah Zamán’s cock stiffened.

“No,” he hissed, pressing a palm to the window’s cold stone. But his body betrayed him, his breath syncing with the queen’s ragged cries. “Lies,” he spat. “All lies.”

The garden became a tableau of betrayal. The queen’s thighs were spread wide, her flesh glistening with Saeed’s seed as he collapsed. She wiped her mouth, her smile a blade. “Again,” she whispered to the next slave, her voice a serpent’s hiss.

Shah Zamán’s vision blurred. He saw his own queen’s face superimposed over the queen’s, her lips moving the same words, her legs wrapped around the cook’s sweating body. The rot in his soul festered, a wound that refused to scab.

What hope is there? he thought, the words a knife twist in his chest. Even kings’ wives are whores. Even the purest blood runs black.

He stumbled back from the window, his knees buckling. The physicians’ potions sloshed in his belly, bile rising. He retched into a vase of lilies, the flowers’ perfume now cloying and sickly.

Shahryar found him at dawn, still in the window’s shadow, his face gray as a grave’s soil.

“Brother,” the elder king said, his voice a velvet cord. He knelt, fingers brushing Shah Zamán’s brow. “You’ve been here all night.”

Shah Zamán recoiled. “All men are fools,” he thought, but his tongue was lead.

Shahryar’s gaze narrowed. He smelled the bile on Shah Zamán’s lips, the stench of despair. “Tell me,” he pressed, his hand closing around Shah Zamán’s wrist. The emerald serpent on his dagger gleamed in the light.

The younger king’s breath hitched. “The garden,” he whispered. “The queen… the slaves…”

A beat. Shahryar’s fingers tightened.

They hid that night behind a tapestry embroidered with peacocks. Shahryar’s breath was hot against Shah Zamán’s ear as the concubines emerged once more, their laughter a chorus of sin. The queen stood atop the fountain, her body glistening, and called Saeed’s name again.

This time, Shah Zamán watched with the detachment of a corpse. The queen’s betrayal was no longer rage—it was proof. A verdict.

When Saeed mounted her, his eyes still rolled back in ecstasy, Shah Zamán whispered, “See? Even your own flesh denies you.”

Shahryar’s face paled. He gripped Shah Zamán’s shoulder, his touch unsteady. “We flee,” he hissed. “Now. Before the rot consumes us.”

They rode until the sun bled into the horizon, the desert swallowing their shame.