You can already see the pillory and the crowd gathered ahead when a single shriek rises above the clamor: “He was with them! I saw him arrive in the caravan with them!”
Only then do you realize the gravity of your mistake—born from the naïve purity of your foolish heart, the very heart that a frenzied mob is now eager to tear out. You spur your dromedary and turn tail, fleeing your assailants. By sheer luck or will, you manage to leave them behind.
You ride through a haze of sand, barely discerning the horizon. The dromedary seems to know its way back home, so you allow it to trample its heavy hooves in the direction it prefers. You’ve left those poor men escape with their lives, but who are you to judge them? Life isn’t fair—or at least it wasn’t to you.
You’re looking for something, but what? All you know is that you need to reach Zalenica as soon as you can. There’s something waiting for you there, though you’re not sure whether it’s good or bad. ‘Maybe happiness is in the journey, not the destination,’ you think, smiling sarcastically at your own inanity. You only know that life propels you, just as it propelled your parents to bring you into existence, and just as it propelled your friends to turn their backs on you. That’s the price one must pay for staying true to oneself. That’s the price you paid. You’re alone in the world, and what better place to exemplify that than a desert.
You’ve abandoned them—just as you were once abandoned. “Fairness starts at home,” or so they say. But does it? You hesitate. You don’t know what to do. Suicide was never an option for you, but those men—those accomplices in a murder—saved your life. Will you now let them die at the hands of an angry mob? Correction: a justifiably angry mob. They had taken part in the killing of the only man who might have saved a whole nation. What could you even do if you went back? And why are these thoughts crowding your head now, of all times? You have something to do, somewhere to be. Let the world arrange itself… or should it?
You suddenly pull on your dromedary’s rein and, turning it around, spur it back towards the city.
Your doubts dissipate. You know what you must do. You ride on.
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