(continued from previous scroll)
We sat together without speaking. The air was heavier now, not just with heat but with silence. A silence filled with things unspoken.
Daniel stood. “Tomorrow, I will speak of a king who was brought low, and what it means to eat grass like an ox.”
I watched him go. His shadow stretched long beneath the colonnade.
That afternoon, I walked the southern arcade of the House of Tablets. The outer court smelled of ink and baked clay. Bel-iddin sat hunched over a clay slab, carving names with deliberate force.
“I heard,” he said, “that the old man’s friends faced the furnace.”
“They did,” I said.
“Did they run?”
“They walked.”
“Did they burn?”
“No.”
Bel-iddin looked at me. “So now fire listens to prayers?”
I shook my head. “No. But it obeys something greater.”
He scoffed. “You believe all of this?”
I hesitated. “I believe that men have bowed for less than life. And stood for less than death.”
He pressed his stylus harder into the clay.
“You’re changing,” he said.
“Am I?”
“Yes,” he said. “But into what, I can’t yet tell.”
We sat in silence for a while. Then Bel-iddin spoke again.
“I once watched a man sentenced to the furnace,” he said. “Not for idolatry, but for speaking against the king’s tax edicts. He trembled as they led him away. He begged for mercy. No one stood with him.”
“What happened?”
“They fed him to the flames. No miracle. Just fire.”
“Would you have stood for him?” I asked.
“I did not,” Bel-iddin said. “I only watched.”
He rose and left without another word.
Though it was night, I walked the eastern garden alone. The stars above the palace were sharp, unmoving. The same stars my father had charted. The same ones I had learned to read. But they no longer whispered certainties. Only silence.
I sat beneath a tree and drew circles into the sand.
The image of the fourth figure haunted me. Not for its power, but for its presence. Whoever he was, he stepped into fire without fear.
I whispered Daniel’s words: “But even if He does not…”
And I felt the heat of the furnace.
But also, the freedom of the flame.
I imagined the moment the guards fell, the heat swallowing them before they even finished their step. I imagined the three bound men falling into that blaze. Then standing. Then walking.
And then—the fourth.
A figure who needed no introduction. Who came not with rescue, but with presence. Who stood in fire not to extinguish it, but to say, “I am here.”
I felt something stir in me—not a belief, not yet, but a possibility.
And I did not bow.
Later that night, I sat alone in the scriptorium, the oil lamp casting flickers over the clay tablets stacked like bricks around me. I opened the wax again and reread my record of the morning. The words felt heavier now. I smoothed a line, sharpened a curve. Then I added one more detail:
He did not save them from the fire. He joined them in it.
I etched it deep.
For the first time, I closed the tablet without sealing it. I left it open—unfinished. Waiting. As if the words weren’t done with me.
Outside, the furnace fires still burned. But now, I no longer feared the heat.