He was tall by local standards, broad-shouldered without exaggeration, the kind of build shaped by routine discipline rather than vanity. His skin carried the muted tone of someone who had spent years under open skies. His face—sharp at the jaw, steady in the eyes—rarely betrayed what he was thinking, though those who paid attention noticed the habit: the pause before he spoke, the way his eyes lingered on details others ignored.
The war college sat on the outskirts of Islamabad, orderly and imposing, framed by hills that had watched empires come and go long before concrete and glass claimed the land. Inside, the classroom was cold, both in temperature and temperament.
"Captain," the instructor said, glancing up from the console, "your assessment."
He stepped forward, eyes briefly scanning the projected terrain. Mountains. Narrow passes. Long supply chains stretched thin across hostile ground.
"We delay," he said.
A cadet near the back laughed softly.
The instructor raised an eyebrow. "Doctrine suggests pressure."
"Doctrine assumes certainty," he replied. "And certainty doesn't exist here. Their logistics depend on one corridor. They advance because they think we'll panic. If we don't, they bleed themselves dry."
Silence followed.
One of the cadets—the son of someone important, everyone knew—leaned back casually.
"That's cautious."
He looked at him. "That's patient."
The instructor nodded once. "Continue."
He spoke without flourish. Attrition curves. Morale collapse. Political fallout. He ended with projected casualty numbers—lower than anyone else's.
The room was dismissed without praise.
Outside, a batchmate caught up to him, adjusting his uniform with the easy confidence of someone who had never doubted his future.
"You're too good for this place," the man said.
"No," he replied. "I'm exactly right for it. That's the problem."
Graduation came and went with ceremony and applause. His rank was announced. His name was near the top.
His posting was not.
A respectable position. A quiet one. Important enough to look good on paper, insignificant enough to be forgotten.
He did not complain. He had long understood how things worked. Competence mattered—up to a point. Beyond that, lineage spoke louder. The system claimed to be national, but its real loyalties were scattered elsewhere.
Weapons. Promotions. Training doctrines.
Decisions were shaped with foreign reactions in mind, not local consequences. Everyone in uniform knew it. Few said it openly. Fewer still resisted it.
He had served long enough to see patterns repeat.
Joint exercises. Foreign instructors. Exchange programs. He had trained with Americans, Europeans, East Asians, Middle Eastern officers. He had shared meals, arguments, jokes. He had learned from them—what worked, what failed, what they misunderstood about this part of the world.
Some became friends. Real ones.
From them, he learned that people everywhere were similar at the core. It was systems that differed. Institutions. Incentives. Historical baggage.
At night, he read history.
Not romantic history. Not heroic tales meant to inspire pride. Administrative history. Governance records. Legal reforms. Tax systems. Why empires rose. Why they fell. Why ordinary people suffered in the space between ambition and collapse.
A true lover of history, he believed, never wished to change it. History mattered because it was permanent. Because lessons could only be drawn if events remained intact. Erasing the past meant erasing understanding.
And yet—he was still human.
The subcontinent had always paid the price.
Too many languages. Too many identities. Too many fault lines—religious, ethnic, linguistic—layered one over another. Every empire that arrived exploited them. Every ruling elite learned to profit from them. The people remained divided, poor, endlessly mobilized against each other.
Colonizers left. Brown colonizers replaced them.
He hated how accurate that old British leader's words were. He hated that history kept proving them right.
He believed Islam could have been different here.
Not as a banner of conquest, but as a civilizational framework. A unifying order. One law. One ethical structure. One shared language—Urdu, born from the soil of North India itself, blending local tongues with the script and scholarship of Islam.
A bridge, not a blade.
He had once taken a genetic test, mostly out of curiosity. Punjabi roots—deep, agricultural, stubborn. And traces of something older and farther west. Roman markers. Mediterranean.
It didn't make him feel superior.
It made him restless.
Those people built roads, laws, cities. They stayed and governed. In the subcontinent, Islam had arrived differently—carried by Central Asian Turks, men of discipline and courage, yes, but also men who knew conquest better than coexistence.
Bloodthirsty, in the way warriors often were. Violent, in the way history remembered them.
He respected what they brought. He respected that they carried Islam into the land.
But he could not ignore the cost.
Faith arrived wrapped in fear, not trust. Law followed the sword, not the people. Islam became associated with invasion rather than integration. The opportunity to heal the subcontinent—to close its fault lines rather than rule over them—was lost.
If Islam had come through locals…
If it had grown patiently…
If it had unified instead of dominating…
He never finished those thoughts aloud.
During a multinational training cycle, foreign officers arrived. Among them was an East Asian woman—precise, reserved, observant. They worked together during simulations, often paired because both finished early.
"You see too far ahead," she said once, watching the screen reset.
"And you don't?" he asked.
"I see just enough."
He liked that.
They spoke about history. About languages. About how beauty standards were strange things—constructed, enforced, repeated. He knew what the world admired. Height. Skin tone. Hair color.
He also knew what he found beautiful.
Nothing came of it. It couldn't.
Some connections were never meant to survive institutions.
The overseas exercise was routine. Mountain terrain. Night movement. Vehicle coordination.
He was in the lead vehicle when the signal crackled.
"Hold position—repeat—hold—"
The ground collapsed.
The vehicle slid sideways. Metal screamed. Someone shouted his name.
He reached for the harness.
Impact came hard. Crushing. Final.
As consciousness slipped, there was no prayer, no vision, no voice.
Only a clear, burning thought:
He had seen the flaws.
He had understood the systems.
He had respected history too much to rewrite it.
But if—just once—he were given the chance to build, not erase…
Darkness closed in.
This time, it did not feel empty.
It felt like a door finally opening.