Mumin had been home for several minutes, yet he had not taken off his shoes. He stood just inside the front door with one hand resting against the wood, listening to his own breathing. In. Out. In again. He tried to slow it, but his chest kept rising as if he had run all the way from the sand field.
The street was behind him now. The inner world was waiting.
He crossed the room. The curtains were drawn, leaving the walls in a dim, bluish half-light. A tube light burned overhead, as it always did. He kept it on even in the morning. Darkness made the fire easier to imagine; in the dark, every corner seemed to hold something he could not name. He knew those fears could grow larger than the room itself. Knowing that had never made them leave.
He was afraid. He was almost always afraid, though he had learned to hide it behind silence.
Mumin sat on the edge of the bed and took out his phone. The unknown number's message remained on the screen: You fought the battle well. But that was the first. There are more.
He checked the time. 8:17 a.m. The figures looked ordinary and certain. For a moment, he held on to them. The battle in the sand field belonged to a memory from when he was eleven—or to a dream that had borrowed the details of that memory. He was twenty-two now. Eleven years stood between the boy and the man, yet the message treated the battle as if it had happened today, as if someone had watched it from just beyond the edge of sight.
Which part of the morning could he trust? The walk? The field? The fire-sword that had seemed to fit his hand? The message? Had he remembered an afternoon from childhood, or had he somehow stepped back into it? Mumin pressed his fingers to his temples. The questions crowded together until he could no longer separate one from another.
Then he looked at the western wall.
The marks were there, as they had always been: a scatter of shallow craters and fractured patches in the plaster, some no larger than a coin, others wide enough to show the pale grit beneath the paint. The oldest had turned yellow around the edges. Higher up, the newer ones were still nearly white. There were more than he cared to count, a private record written in blows instead of words.
He stood and approached the wall. When he laid his fingertips over the rough surface, the plaster scratched his skin. Each mark held a piece of his history. Each was a day he could not explain properly. And, in one way or another, every story led back to the same name.
Musa.
The oldest mark was about fifteen years old. Mumin had been seven, a first-grade pupil whose schoolbag always seemed too large for his narrow shoulders. He spoke little in class and spent most of the tiffin break alone. He was slow at running games, awkward with a ball, and so easily startled that even a shout from the corridor could make him flinch. Other children did not need to hate him to leave him out. They only needed to choose someone else first, again and again, until loneliness felt like something he had earned.
One afternoon, several older boys found him near the classroom door. They had seen him murmuring to himself while he waited for the bell. One boy leaned close and asked, "Who are you talking to?"
"No one," Mumin answered.
They laughed. "You always talk to yourself. Are you crazy? Have you got an imaginary friend?"
Their words were not clever, but they found the place where he was most vulnerable. Mumin could not make himself answer. He stared at the floor while the boys walked away, repeating their laughter in exaggerated voices. He carried the sound home with him.
That afternoon he shut his bedroom door and sat on the floor. He did not cry at first. He simply watched the light crawl across the tiles and tried to understand why being himself seemed to make people uncomfortable. The shame slowly hardened into anger—anger at the boys, at the school, and most of all at the small, frightened person he believed himself to be.
Then something shifted inside him.
It began as pressure behind his ribs, followed by a strange distance between his thoughts and his body. His fingers curled before he had decided to move them. He watched his own hand rise, as if he were seeing it from the far side of a pane of glass. The next instant, he was no longer the one directing it.
Musa stood up.
He did not speak. He walked to the western wall, planted his feet, and struck it with his fist. The blow landed with a blunt, startling crack. Dust shivered loose from the plaster. He struck again, then again, each punch driven by a fury Mumin had been unable to express. His knuckles split. Pain flashed through his hand, but Musa did not seem to notice. He hit the wall until his arm trembled and his breath broke into harsh gasps.
Mumin watched from somewhere inside himself, desperate to shout, Stop. Please stop. The words never reached his mouth. He could feel the impact but could not call his body back. When Musa finally sank to the floor, exhausted, control returned all at once. Mumin stared at his swollen, bleeding hand and began to sob.
The mark on the wall remained after the pain in his hand had faded. Mumin understood very little that day, but one truth settled in him with dreadful clarity: when he was overwhelmed, something inside him could take control. It could act while he watched. He began to think of that presence as Musa. In his mind, that was the day Musa was born.
Years passed. At first Musa was only an impulse—anger, strength, movement arriving before Mumin could think. Later, Mumin began to hear a voice inside his head. It started faintly, like a sentence he had almost thought himself, then grew clearer until he could hold conversations with it. Sometimes Musa warned him. Sometimes he mocked him. Sometimes he sounded like the only person who understood him.
Mumin learned little rituals to keep himself steady. When he sensed his thoughts speeding up, he recited a dua or quietly repeated verses from the Qur'an. He took slow breaths. He kept the lights on. He tried to name the things he could see and touch. If he could interrupt the rising anger early enough, Musa might stay where he was. But when panic, humiliation, or loneliness overwhelmed him, the boundary between them seemed to thin. Musa acted; Mumin returned to himself afterward and faced the consequences.
The wall kept the evidence.
When Mumin was in the fifth grade, another incident happened at school. It was not the battle of giants he had later remembered in the sand field; it was a separate, far more ordinary event, at least at first. Three boys from an older class cornered him after the tiffin bell in a narrow corridor behind the classrooms. They had been teasing him for weeks—about his silence, about the way he sometimes seemed to answer a question no one else had heard, about how he looked away whenever they approached.
That day, one of them caught Mumin by the collar and shoved him against the wall. Another stood in front of him, blocking the way out. The third tapped two fingers against Mumin's forehead and asked whether his imaginary friend had come to rescue him.
"Let me go," Mumin whispered.
The boy holding his collar laughed and tightened his grip. Mumin's mind filled with too many possibilities: if he pulled away, they would hit him; if he shouted, more students would come to watch; if he stayed still, they would keep humiliating him. His thoughts ran in circles so quickly that his body seemed to lock in place.
Then Musa took over.
The change was not theatrical. There was no sudden roar, no grand gesture. Mumin's shoulders settled. His feet shifted a few inches apart. His frightened, unfocused stare became still and precise. The boy holding his collar gave one last tug—and Musa moved with it instead of fighting against it. He turned his wrist inward, caught the boy's thumb and hand at an awkward angle, and stepped off the line of the shove. The grip broke. Before the first boy could recover, Musa drove a short, compact strike into his chest, not wild enough to waste movement, but sharp enough to knock the air from him and send him stumbling into a row of desks.
The second boy lunged from the front. Musa did not retreat straight back. He pivoted to the side, let the rush carry the boy past him, and used a forearm to deflect the swinging arm. Then he swept his foot behind the boy's ankle and turned his shoulder. The boy hit the floor hard, the impact rattling the desk legs and sending a notebook skidding across the corridor.
The third hesitated. That pause was all Musa needed. He stepped forward, forcing the boy to give ground, then caught the next clumsy swing on his forearm and redirected it past his head. He struck once at the body, then drove a shoulder into the boy's chest, pinning him briefly against the wall. The boy struggled, tried to grab him, and received a fast, controlled blow to the side that folded him over and left him gasping on his knees.
The first boy had got back to his feet. He came at Musa again, angry now, his fists swinging in broad, unbalanced arcs. Musa slipped inside the first swing, struck him across the jaw with the heel of his palm, and turned him away with a sharp shove. The boy crashed shoulder-first into a desk. Before he could rise, Musa had stepped clear and was facing all three again, balanced, breathing hard but not scattered, as though the corridor had become a narrow field whose exits and distances he knew by heart.
The whole fight had lasted less than a minute. It felt longer to Mumin, who watched from behind his own eyes without being able to intervene. Musa's movements were frighteningly economical. He did not waste punches on empty air. He did not chase a retreating opponent. He waited for weight to shift, for an arm to overextend, for a foot to land badly, and then he acted. The boys had been larger than Mumin, but for those few seconds they seemed unprepared for the cold, efficient force that had taken his place.
A teacher's voice rang out at the far end of the corridor. The boys froze. One held his chest and struggled to breathe normally; another sat on the floor with his wrist clutched to his body; the third leaned against the wall, eyes wide with shock. Musa stepped back at last. The instant the danger passed, his certainty vanished. Mumin returned to himself as if surfacing from deep water.
He looked at the boys. He looked at his own hands. He could not remember choosing to strike any of them. The teacher was demanding to know who had started the fight, but the words reached him as fragments. He could offer no explanation for the way he had moved, nor for the terror on his classmates' faces. The school dealt with the incident in the usual way: questions, reprimands, a call home. None of that explained the missing stretch of time inside Mumin's memory.
That evening, shaken by what Musa had done, he struck the wall again. The new mark appeared above the older one. His knuckles swelled. For days, he carried the bruises beneath his sleeves and the fear that he might lose himself again without warning.
The sand-field battle belonged to another corner of that same childhood. In that memory, loneliness and fear had taken the shape of fire giants, and the imagined Mumin had been given a weapon with which to fight them. He had thought of it as a victory. Now, standing before the wall, he could not decide whether it had been a simple fantasy, a dream that had attached itself to a real wound, or a memory altered by years of fear. The edges would not stay still long enough for him to know.
By the time Mumin reached the ninth grade, nights had become a different kind of battlefield. It was not a devil waiting in the room. It was the machinery of his own thoughts: every awkward conversation replayed until dawn, every mistake enlarged, every possible disaster examined as though worrying long enough might prevent it. When he finally slept, the dreams were often violent and vivid—corridors with no exits, faces appearing behind doors, fire moving silently along the walls. He would wake with his heart racing, unable to tell for several breaths whether he had escaped the dream or only changed rooms inside it.
He tried to calm himself with prayer and recitation, but exhaustion made his thoughts more difficult to control. One night, after hours of waking and falling back into another nightmare, Musa took over. Mumin remembered only a sense of pressure, a sudden movement, and then a blank space. In the morning, his hand was badly swollen. A doctor later told the family there was a small fracture in one of the bones. A fresh mark scarred the wall. Mumin had no memory of making either the wound or the mark.
A few months ago, Zara stopped replying. The silence between them had started with a misunderstanding and a few words neither could take back. Mumin sent apologies, questions, and pleas for an answer until he could no longer tell whether he was trying to reach his wife or quiet the panic inside himself. One night, after another unanswered message, Musa came forward. There was a blow against the wall. In the morning, Mumin found a new crater in the plaster and swelling across his knuckles. There was no reply from Zara. There was only another mark.
Whenever Mumin became too frightened, too ashamed, or too alone, Musa seemed to move closer to the surface. Afterwards, Mumin found the same evidence: a wounded hand, a damaged wall, an interval of time he could not reconstruct. He had learned to fear not only what might happen to him, but what he might do while absent from himself.
Now he stood with his palm against the plaster, tracing the edges of the old damage.
"Musa," he whispered, "why did you come today?"
Musa's voice answered from the familiar darkness inside his head. "You were hurting. Out there in the field, you were back inside that old loneliness. I felt it. I thought you needed me."
"But you didn't take over. There isn't a new mark." Mumin looked along the wall, searching each pale patch. "My hand isn't swollen. I didn't lose time."
Musa fell silent long enough for Mumin to hear the ceiling fan turning above him.
"I didn't take over," Musa said at last. "Do you know why?"
Mumin shook his head, though he knew Musa could not see the gesture in any ordinary way.
"Because you fought the battle yourself. The giants were in your imagination, but you stayed there and faced them. You were frightened, and you kept moving. For once, I wasn't needed to move your body for you."
Mumin stared at the wall. "But it wasn't real."
"You were real," Musa replied. "Your fear was real. Your choice to stand up was real. You don't have to make the giants real for the courage to count."
The words settled inside Mumin slowly. He had spent so long believing courage meant becoming someone else that he had never considered the possibility of acting while still afraid. Tears blurred the marks. He leaned forward until his forehead rested against the cold wall, feeling the cracks of the plaster against his skin.
"Shukriya," he whispered. "Alhamdulillah."
Then he remembered the message.
He drew out his phone and opened the unknown number's text again: You fought the battle well. But that was the first. There are more.
"Musa, who sent this?"
For a long time, Musa said nothing. When he finally answered, his voice had lost its usual amusement. "I don't know. But whoever it is knows about us. They know I am here. They know about the giants, about the marks, about the moments when you lose time—and the moments when you don't."
A cold pressure spread through Mumin's chest. "I never told anyone. No one knows these things except you and me."
"Then someone has been watching," Musa said. "Or someone knows things they should not be able to know. Either way, we don't understand the rules yet."
Before Mumin could answer, a sound rose beyond the window.
A school bell.
It rang bright and clear, followed by the noise of children pouring into a courtyard—shouts, laughter, footsteps, the slap of a ball against concrete. The sound was so familiar that Mumin's body reacted before his mind did. His shoulders tightened. His mouth went dry. For one impossible instant, he was seven again, waiting by a classroom door while older boys laughed at him.
He crossed to the window and pulled the curtain aside. The street was empty except for the houses, the trees, and the same dog sitting at a distance. There was no school nearby. The building where he had studied stood far away, in another part of the city; its bell could not possibly carry this clearly through the morning air.
But the sound continued. Children calling to one another. A bell ringing again. The quick, bright clatter of a world that had ended for him fifteen years ago.
Mumin clapped both hands over his ears. The noise seemed to come from inside his skull rather than through his palms. He squeezed his eyes shut and began reciting Ayatul Kursi, then Surah Al-Falaq and Surah An-Nas. His voice shook, but he kept going, one verse after another, until the bell began to fade. The children's voices thinned into a distant murmur and then stopped altogether.
He stood still, listening to the silence that followed.
"That was a hallucination," Musa said quietly.
Mumin opened his eyes. "You heard it too."
"We experienced it," Musa replied. "But that doesn't mean it came from the street. Look outside. There is no school, no children, no bell. The sound arrived when your mind returned to the old classroom. It grew stronger when you tried to fight it and faded when you steadied yourself. It was a hallucination—not a school from the past breaking through the walls of time."
"Then why did it feel so real?"
"Because your fear is real," Musa said. "Because memory can borrow the shape of a sound and make it feel as if it is happening now. I can't tell you why it happened today. I can only tell you that the street was silent."
Mumin looked at his phone. It was 8:24 a.m. Only a few minutes had passed since he had begun staring at the wall, though it felt as if he had crossed years and returned. He checked his hand. No swelling. No blood. The wall held only its old marks. Nothing new had been added.
For the first time that morning, he did not feel the fear of an unseen takeover. He had heard something that was not there, but he had remained himself. He had breathed, recited, waited. He had endured it without disappearing.
He lowered himself to his knees and went into sujood. Tears slid toward the floor.
"Alhamdulillah," he whispered. "Ya Allah, give me strength. Give me strength to remain myself, and to keep Musa calm."
Musa did not answer. Yet Mumin felt the presence of his voice waiting behind his thoughts—not gone, not defeated, but quiet for now.
The phone vibrated again.
The same unknown number.
You fought well today. On your own. But Musa will not leave you. Neither will I. See you very soon.
Mumin lowered the phone as if its screen had grown hot. He read the message once more, then set it face down on the bed.
Inside his head, Musa spoke in a low voice. "Who is he?"
Mumin had no answer. He stared at the wall—the witness that had kept his history when he could not. Every mark held fear, anger, shame, and some moment he had survived without understanding how. The wall offered no explanation. It only stood there, silent and rough beneath his hand.
He closed his eyes and began to recite a dua again.
Outside, the sun had risen fully. The day was underway for everyone else. For Mumin, it had begun in front of the wall tha
t knew him best—and still could not tell him who, exactly, had been writing his history.