Who am I?
Who am I...
Who am I, truly?
The room was split, tension drawn tight as a blade.
On one side of the duelling pit stood the conspirator and his rabble — restless, murmuring, hungry. On the other, the Pharaoh's loyal subjects gathered in rigid lines, faces hard, hands curled into fists.
The air was stale with uncertainty.
At the centre of it all, the Pharaoh sat upon his golden throne.
His royal navy cloak spilled across the armrests, ruffling faintly at his collar. His expression was carved from stillness. Beside him stood his Champion.
She breathed in. Slowly. Carefully.
Her body was perfectly still, trained for patience, but her eyes moved — counting faces, marking threats, tracing the sharp lines of mouths mid-argument. Their voices blurred together, rising and falling like children squabbling over a toy.
That's all this was. A playground squabble.
She hated it here.
These meetings were nothing but people arguing, shouting, and fighting amongst themselves. Nothing was ever achieved — everyone was too stubborn to budge from their ideals. No one wanted to work together. Nothing was ever resolved.
All they wanted to do was get themselves or someone else so angry that a challenge was issued.
A duel. A fight.
This is what it boiled down to. A need to fight, to show supremacy.
A primal instinct, wrapped in the silks of politics.
No one tried to mend the fractures.
No one except Father.
The only man who attempted to state the growing anger with neutral words and calm tones. A man trying to hold peace together with his bare hands.
Down here, it was politics. There was little for her to contribute.
No bones to break. No faces to rearrange.
She wondered, bitterly, why she ever craved to be a part of them. She was not needed.
Redundant.
And it was only her first meeting.
Then it came — exactly as she knew it would.
A challenge.
The words cut through the chamber, sharp and deliberate, silencing every other voice.
There wasn't a quiver of movement from the Pharaoh.
No flicker crossed his face at the challenge. No shift in the air that she could sense. If this was a show of control, he played it flawlessly. Only Zahra felt it — a faint vibration through the stone beneath her feet as he leaned forward, just barely.
He had told her everything.
The Shadow games. The duelling monsters. The Shadow Realm.
For him to trust her with all of this, she had never felt closer to someone.
Her throat tightened.
As Champion… would she be expected to duel in his place?
Her chest stuttered, breath threatening to falter as images of the Shadow Realm clawed their way into her thoughts — endless suffering, eternal darkness, punishment without end.
She understood duelling now. The rules. The stakes.
But could she face off against someone like Bakura?
Or a follower hellbent on making his ideals a reality?
The challenger looked towards the throne with a frenzied look in his eyes.
At her. He wanted her, as champion, to step up
Dread crept in, cold and unfamiliar. She drew in a shuddering breath.
Then the crowd parted.
Her world tilted.
Her father stepped forward. Head held high. Spine straight. No hesitation.
"As the Pharaoh's loyal servant," Tadal declared, voice steady, "I will duel in his stead."
"I see." The challenger sneered. "Having one of your mindless servants duel in your place? How noble of you, Pharaoh."
Zahra's knees trembled as her father crossed the floor toward the pit.
"Do not let them see your weakness," the Pharaoh murmured, low enough that only she could hear.
She didn't look at him — but she saw his hand. It gripped the armrest of his throne, turning his caramel fingertips pale. He was just as on edge as she.
Her head dipped. Her jaw clenched.
One distraction. That was all she needed. One opening — and she could reach the pit, snap the challenger's neck, end it before it began.
Let's see him duel after that.
The thought burned hot and vicious.
But then – what?
Chaos. Carnage. A stampede that would likely claim any number of lives as they ran for safety.
As they ran from her.
Here, there was magic.
Here, the untold darkness was boundless.
A darkness without a physical body, that would dissipate around her, flips and kicks. At this moment, as she watched her father ready himself and take the first turn. She had never felt so defenceless.
Now she truly understood what the Pharaoh had said before. These days, fights are not fought with mere fists alone.
As her father took his place and prepared the first move, she realised with sickening clarity how defenceless she truly was.
The duel began.
Stone tablets moved. Their wake blew her braid from her neck.
Monsters tore their way into existence. Magic flared. Traps snapped shut with invisible teeth. Power cracked through the air hard enough to whip her braid loose from her neck.
Zahra had never seen her father like this. Focused. Ferocious. Brilliant.
He fought not with desperation, but with precision — every move calculated, every summon a deliberate refusal to yield. He fought like a man who knew fate had marked him and chose to spit in its face anyway.
Her chest ached with pride.
He was winning. He could win.
For a moment — a dangerous, fragile moment — she believed it.
Then the duel shifted.
A counter. Then reversal.
The challenger smiled.
And summoned his most powerful monster.
The creature clawed its way into the pit, darkness folding around it like a living thing. At the sight of it, she heard the Pharaoh breathe a single word under his breath.
The creature clawed its way into the pit, darkness folding around it like a living thing.
Fear. She felt it from the Pharaoh. The same thing that shot through every fibre of her being.
Burning her neck and soles of her feet.
Zahra twitched ever-so-slightly.
Something held her back.
When she confided in her father what the Pharaoh had told her about the games, he admitted he had never wanted her to know about them. Confessing he had feared exactly this moment. Her short fuse. Her reckless loyalty.
He was right.
She hated that he was right.
She had never wanted to be Champion.
When his desperate words, that he wouldn't be around forever and wanted to make sure she would be looked after and protected, fell on deaf ears, he played on her love of the thrill of the fight to get her to agree.
Yes, her loyalty to the Pharaoh was fierce.
But her love for her father eclipsed everything.
"Compose yourself, my Champion," he whispered through gritted teeth.
Compose myself?!
Her stomach twisted. Her hands shook.
Another attack would end it. He won't survive another turn.
Why wasn't the Pharaoh stepping in?
Surely, he wouldn't allow this. Tadal was his most trusted advisor and his father's friend.
No… he wouldn't.
The command rang out. The command rang out.
He couldn't…
Zahra let out a soft cry as the blow landed. The most pathetic sound she had ever made.
Because that's what she was.
Pathetic.
Her father dropped to one knee. His life points depleted to nothing.
She waited.
A trap. A spell. Anything!
Nothing came.
As the Shadow Realm opened, the chamber fell away.
There was no crowd. No throne. No Pharaoh.
There was only her. And her father.
Zahra's feet tensed, ready to launch.
"Zahra! Stay back!"
The Pharaoh surged to his feet, flinging out an arm to block her path.
Zahra nearly struck him. So consumed by fear and hesitation.
Darkness — purple-black and alive — coiled around his body.
She tried to move.
She couldn't.
Darkness — purple-black and alive — coiled around Tadal's body.
No… not fear. Memory.
The same helpless stillness she had felt when her mother left.
You're stronger than this! She screamed it inside her skull.
Her body did not listen.
The darkness climbed. It began to envelop him.
No. The word tore through her mind as her mouth fell open in a silent scream. Tears burned her eyes.
As the smog crept over his body, he turned his head to her. Agony twisted his face — but he smiled.
For her.
"Zahra," his voice brushed her mind, faint and strained. He gave a soft nod.
It was all the crushing darkness would allow.
His final farewell.
Then his face vanished into the smog.
The Shadow Realm closed.
Nothing remained.
Her eyes rippled with pain.
She collapsed, shaking her head again and again as if refusal alone could undo what she had seen.
The world had ended.
Grief detonated inside her — hot, violent, unbearable.
Power surged up from her feet, flooding her veins with something wild and dangerous. Her heart thundered in her ears, dragging her back from the stillness she had nearly fallen into.
She turned to the Pharaoh.
He froze.
When he met her gaze, she poured everything into it.
Her grief. Her fury. Her devastation.
And the knowledge that something sacred had been torn away forever.
Applause broke out.
Not cheers of victory — but celebration. Voices rising, hands clapping, laughter echoing off stone walls that still smelled faintly of shadow and smoke.
Zahra felt a red mist descend.
For a heartbeat, the world narrowed to a single, unbearable truth:
They were celebrating her father's death.
Something hot and blinding surged up from her chest, flooding her vision red. Her fingers curled, nails biting into her palms as her body leaned forward, every instinct screaming to strike, to tear, to end someone—
A hand seized her arm.
She barely felt herself being dragged from the chamber, her feet stumbling as the Pharaoh pulled her through the doors and into the corridor beyond. The sound of celebration cut off abruptly as the stone shut behind them, leaving only the echo of her own breathing — ragged, broken, too loud.
Then he released her.
"Control your emotions," he said.
The words landed like a slap. She stared at him, disbelief hollowing her chest.
"Control…?" Her voice came out thin, strangled. "Did you not see what happened?"
"Did you not watch as my father was taken from me?"
Silence.
Then he looked away.
That was it.
That single movement — that refusal to meet her eyes — shattered whatever fragile thing was still holding her upright.
"So you don't care," she whispered. Not a question. A conclusion. "After all the years he stood beside you. After everything he gave — to your rule, to your throne, and to your fathers."
Her voice rose, splintering under the weight of everything that came crashing on the surface. All those times she had rejected her father. Disobeyed him. The cut pieces from her.
It had been his idea that she become Champion.
Perhaps if she were a better daughter — if she had chosen him instead of power, if she had been better when her mother died — he wouldn't have buried himself in his work, in the Pharaoh. He would have been home with his family, where he belonged.
The realisation struck with brutal clarity.
"This is your fault."
The words escaped her before she could stop them, soft and trembling and lethal.
"If it weren't for you, he would have been with me. We would have been home. We would have been poor — but we would have been together."
Her breath hitched.
"All of us."
Her mother's face rose unbidden in her mind, and Zahra squeezed her eyes shut as if that might keep the memory from breaking her apart. If only she had been more like her. Softer. Kinder. Less sharp-edged and violent.
But she wasn't.
She wasn't her mother.
She wasn't her father.
No, she was nothing like them, and could never hope to be.
She was something else entirely — something forged, honed, sharpened until there was no room left for softness.
"Pharaoh," there was so much venom in that title. "You can have the sound of thousands of voices calling your name. The Gods themselves, bathing you in grace."
A hollow laugh tore from her chest.
"But I see nothing."
She gestured at him, at the throne behind him, at the world he ruled. The world that had devoured everything she loved.
"What you hold in your hands is nothing. And in the end, palaces crumble. Kingdoms fall. And all that's left of them is nothing… but sand."
The truth settled heavily in her chest. Brutal and absolute.
She was only a weapon.
A filthy weapon tarnished by blood and undeserving of love, from anyone. Just a trophy to stand by the Pharaoh, strike fear into his enemies and remain unmoving and unflinching while innocent souls were dragged screaming into a darkness she couldn't even comprehend. A darkness she could never fight with fists or steel.
Why had she ever wanted to stand in those meetings?
Why had she ever believed she belonged there?
Why?!
"Zahra, I'm so-"
"I hate you."
The words burned as they left her, incandescent and final. They tasted like ash and grief and everything she would never be able to take back.
Fire burned in her eyes, her fury too vast to contain, too sharp to survive near him any longer.
She turned away before he could say another word.
Before he could try to explain.
Before she could weaken.
She stormed down the corridor like a prowling reaper, grief and rage entwined so tightly they were indistinguishable.
Her anger was infinite.
And someone will pay.
They will pay dearly.
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Hello reader!
Are you still with me? Amazing!
Thank you again, I really appreciate you.
I'd like to apologise for taking longer to upload these days. Back to work and all...
Tell me your thoughts!! How are you finding Zahra's story so far?
Lots of love,
Lauren xxx