“Oasis of Little Birds, my ass. More like a trap for timeline-jumpers.”
Zerzura is the legendary white dove city of desert explorers. Our writer takes the myth seriously, and she doesn’t trust it.
“No Oslo chase. Write him here. Tangier. Your Montblanc, red ink.”
Wolfgang’s advice on how to reach someone lost between worlds. The writer’s pen isn’t a metaphor in this series.
Field note from Quantum Gravity.
What if you could write a man out of a frozen corridor between worlds, and he showed up for breakfast?
In this chapter, dawn finds our writer in Choukri’s silks in Tangier. Wolfgang can’t stop shifting, and she can’t stop plotting. Her laptop holds the fragments of Zerzura, the legendary “white dove city,” along with Almásy’s desert hunts, Bedouin tales of a carved heron door, and a rough lattice of coordinates running from Gebel Uweinat to the mazes of Ennedi. She wants to bring back Mikhail, the survivor who strode across eras before his god was even a myth. Wolfgang tells her not to chase him to Oslo and to write him here instead, in red ink.
She does. The page warms, a rift hums like a giant’s footfall, and Mikhail steps from the balcony shadows.
Then comes the table at the Kasbah, with mint tea, msemen, an old jealousy, and one idea nobody wanted to hear: the universe has locked their nemesis Tarmo behind Zerzura’s door. He is now Ra, and he carries every patriarch the story has ever produced.
“Mikhail has always answered to your script.”
Wolfgang’s advice on how to reach someone lost between worlds. The writer’s pen isn’t a metaphor in this series.
So I did. Crimson ink, one fresh page, and a rift humming like a giant’s footsteps.
Minutes later, an ex-KGB archangel was sitting across from me at the Kasbah, stirring his coffee as if he had never been gone.
“My liege,” he said.
Then I told the table where I think the universe has locked Tarmo. Nobody liked the answer.
“Jealousy doesn’t suit an archangel, Mikhail. I hold the beast; you carry the divine.”
Two kinds of power sit at one breakfast table, and neither one is calm.
“Gods below, sometimes you give me the creeps.”
Said to a man who has just turned from wolf to human in her lap.
“My liege.”
Two words from a man who was supposed to be gone.
Author’s note
A note for those who haven’t read Zavet.
You have just met a man called Mikhail. In Zavet he is Mikhail, and he began as an ex-KGB operative who believed that control and survival were the same thing. The images are his story in four frames: the man who contained everything, the road where he once more met Elena, the notebook that betrayed him, and the night he knelt in the dust.
The twist is in the third picture. The notebook says Elena, and Elena is blond. The woman walking away is not blond. She is the one holding the red pen.
I’ll leave you to decide what that means. I will say that anthropologists spend their lives observing other people, and sooner or later one of them gets observed back. Mikhail’s problem was never a lack of evidence. He simply stopped being objective, and in my experience that is the most honest thing a character can admit.
If you’ve read Zavet, you already know what the pictures cost him. If you haven’t, you now have enough to follow the chapter, and not enough to ruin the book.
Irena Phaedra
© 2026 I.Ph. de Lange. All rights reserved. Published by CYcrds OÜ.
