After 11:00 p.m.
By the time Mumin's eyes finally closed, it was well past eleven. The day had left him with too many questions and no answers sturdy enough to hold them. Imollodia. The Royal Intelligence Corps. The weapon they wanted to build. Musa's impossible mind. The words from the classified file still seemed to glow behind his eyelids, even after he had placed his phone face down on the mattress.
The ceiling fan turned above him with its familiar, uneven click. The tube light remained on, laying a pale wash across the room and leaving the corners faintly grey. Beyond the curtains, the neighbourhood had settled into the quiet of late night. A motorcycle passed somewhere far off, then faded. A dog barked once. Mumin listened until even those small sounds disappeared. At last, exhaustion drew him down into sleep.
But sleep did not bring silence.
At first, the sounds were distant and shapeless: a low rumble, a sharp crack, the rush of water against something hard. Then came a metallic groan, as though a vast door were being forced from its hinges. Somewhere glass shattered. Someone screamed. Another voice cried out in terror. Through it all came the unmistakable words, "Allahu Akbar"—sometimes far away, sometimes so close that Mumin felt the syllables strike the inside of his skull.
He turned from one side to the other. The sheet twisted around his legs. His fingers curled into the pillow, and his breathing grew shallow, but his eyes would not open. His body seemed trapped beneath a weight heavier than sleep. The noise kept gathering, overlapping until he could no longer separate the roar of water from the crackling of fire, or a human cry from the tearing sound of stone.
Where was Musa? Could he hear this too? Mumin tried to call his name, but even inside the dream the words would not rise beyond his thoughts. There was no answer. No familiar laughter, no warning, no sharp remark. Only the terrible chorus of breaking things and distant voices, moving closer with every passing second.
Then, without warning, every sound stopped.
The silence that followed was not peaceful. It pressed against his ears until he could hear a thin ringing deep inside them. Mumin opened his eyes slowly, unsure whether he had awakened or merely fallen into another layer of the dream.
He was in his bedroom. The tube light was on. The bed, the wardrobe, the laptop table and the western wall all seemed to be where they belonged. Yet the room felt strangely hollow, as if its contents were only the scenery of a place that had been abandoned. He looked toward the curtains. A late-afternoon glow should have been pressing through the fabric. In the dream, he was certain it was afternoon; the sun should have been high, and the street should have carried the ordinary noise of the day.
He checked the clock. 4:10 p.m.
Outside the window, however, there was no afternoon. Darkness filled the street from one end to the other—not the familiar darkness of an ordinary night, but a dense, almost solid blackness that swallowed the outlines of the houses. The trees stood like cut-outs against it. The sky had no clouds, no stars, no moon. It looked as if the sun had vanished long ago and left no trace of its passing.
Mumin sat upright. He picked up his phone. The screen showed 4:10 p.m. He locked it, waited a moment, and checked again. The same four digits. He looked at the wall clock; its hands stood still. He returned to the phone, refreshed the display, and watched the seconds fail to change. No minute passed. No time moved. Everything had stopped at 4:10.
He went to the window and pulled the curtain aside. The road lay empty. No pedestrians, no vehicles, no lights in the neighbouring homes. The trees did not stir. Even the dog that usually watched the street from the pavement was gone. Mumin pressed his fingertips to the glass. It was cold enough to make him draw back, but the world beyond it seemed colder still—a world that had forgotten how to move.
Five minutes passed, or seemed to. Then ten. He watched the darkness for what felt like half an hour, but the clock refused to count it. Mumin could not tell whether the waiting itself had any meaning when time would not move. He recited a dua beneath his breath, then Ayat al-Kursi. The familiar words gave his mind something to follow, a narrow path through the growing panic. He repeated them again, more slowly, trying to hold on to the certainty of each syllable.
"What is happening?" Musa whispered at last. His voice sounded unusually far away, as if it had to travel through a long corridor before reaching Mumin.
"I don't know," Mumin answered. His own voice seemed small in the dead room. "Time has stopped."
Musa said nothing more. For once, Mumin could not decide whether the silence meant that Musa was afraid, thinking, or simply unable to explain what they were seeing.
Then the darkness broke.
Light burst over the world in a single, impossible leap. It did not creep across the horizon or soften gradually into dawn. The sun seemed to switch on all at once, flooding the street with a brightness so fierce that Mumin threw up his arm and squeezed his eyes shut. For a heartbeat, the darkness was gone. The room, the trees, the houses—everything stood sharp and exposed beneath the sudden blaze.
The ground lurched.
At first it was a small shudder beneath his feet, like a heavy vehicle passing under the house. Then the floor rolled sideways. The wardrobe slammed against the wall; books slid from their shelves and scattered across the tiles. A glass rattled, tipped, and shattered. The window frame jerked violently. Mumin caught the wall with both hands as the building groaned around him, its structure complaining in long, deep sounds that seemed to come from beneath the earth.
The window exploded inward. Shards struck the floor and skittered across the room. His laptop slid from the table and hit the tiles with a hard crack. The tube light flickered, went dark for an instant, then flared again. Dust sifted from the ceiling and hung in the air, turning the sunlight into a pale, choking haze.
"Get outside!" Musa shouted.
Mumin stumbled toward the door. His hand closed around the handle, but the frame had twisted. He pulled once, then again, harder. The door would not budge. His heart beat so fiercely that each thud seemed to shake his ribs. The floor bucked beneath him. He planted his feet, tried to wrench the handle down, and felt the wood shudder without opening.
Then another sound rose over the earthquake—a roar so vast that, for an instant, it seemed to erase every other noise. It was the sound of water, but not water as Mumin had ever heard it. It carried the weight of an entire ocean, a deep, continuous thunder that seemed to come from beyond the limits of the world.
He turned toward the broken window.
At the far edge of the horizon, the ocean had risen into a wall. A tsunami, impossibly high, filled the distance from one side of the world to the other. Its surface was black—not the blue-green of deep water, but a terrible, lightless black, as if the sea had swallowed the sky and returned it without a single star. Its crest climbed into the clouds. White foam clawed along its upper edge, and the mass beneath it rolled forward with the slow certainty of something that could not be stopped.
It was coming toward the houses. Toward the sand field. Toward him.
Mumin tried the door again. His hands slipped on the handle. He could hear the wave now, a succession of enormous impacts—boom, boom, boom—each louder than the last. The air trembled. His chest tightened until he could barely draw breath. He had nowhere to run. The door remained shut, the stairs were beyond it, and the black wall of water swallowed more of the horizon with every second.
He squeezed his eyes shut. "Allah!" The name tore from him as a cry, not a thought.
A new crack split the ground outside.
The street opened. The earth buckled, and the asphalt broke apart in jagged seams. Great slabs of rock heaved upward from below, carrying soil, trees and broken foundations with them. Mumin opened his eyes just as the first dark ridge rose in front of the houses. It climbed higher, shedding boulders that tumbled down its sides, while more stone forced its way out of the earth behind it.
The mountain kept rising.
It grew beyond the roofs, beyond the clouds, beyond any scale Mumin's mind could make sense of. Its vast face swallowed the sunlight. Its ridges reached toward the sky like the spines of a sleeping world. It was larger than Everest—or so immense that the comparison became meaningless. The mountain did not seem to belong to the earth at all. It stood there as if it had been waiting underneath the world for centuries, summoned now by a force no one could see.
The tsunami struck it.
The impact shook the dream from edge to edge. Black water rose in a towering burst, wrapped around the mountain's lower slopes, and broke into white walls of foam. For one suspended instant, the wave seemed to challenge the stone. Then the water split, rolled back on itself and began to recede, dragged away by an unseen pull. The roar diminished into a vast, grinding hiss. The houses stood beyond the mountain, untouched—yet no relief came to Mumin.
He looked around. Mountains rose in every direction, closing the world into a ring of stone. Was he dead? Had the dream carried him somewhere beyond the world he knew? The questions came, but none could explain the impossible landscape. The sun had disappeared behind their peaks. Shadows gathered between the ridges, turning the ground a dull, lifeless grey. There was no road out, no open horizon, no familiar street. The morning had never come. Light had appeared only to be taken away again.
Mumin sank to his knees. His whole body trembled, and he could not tell whether he was cold or burning with fear. "La ilaha illallah," he whispered. Then again. And again. He held on to the words as the only thing that had not changed shape around him.
"Get up! Run!" Musa called from somewhere behind him. "You have to get out!"
"Where?" Mumin tried to shout, but the word came out broken. There was nowhere to go. Mountains blocked every direction; the sky had become a narrow strip between the peaks. He bowed his head and repeated the declaration of faith, each repetition quieter than the last.
A hand settled on his shoulder.
The touch was gentle, almost ordinary. Mumin flinched and turned. An old man stood beside him, dressed in white. His beard was white as well, his face lined with age, his eyes calm. He seemed strangely untouched by the mountains, the darkness, and the shattered world around them. He looked at Mumin and said only, "It's time for prayer."
The words had barely reached him when the dream broke apart.
Mumin's eyes flew open. He was back in his bedroom, lying crookedly across the mattress. The tube light still burned overhead. There was no mountain outside the window, no black ocean, no earthquake. Only the familiar walls and the broken, uneven sound of his own breathing. The room was dim, but beyond the curtains the darkness had begun to thin into the grey of the early morning.
For several seconds, he did not move. Sweat covered his forehead, his neck and his back. The sheet clung to his skin. One hand was gripping the blanket so tightly that his fingers hurt. He looked toward the window, half expecting to see the immense mountain blocking the sky. Instead, a narrow strip of the ordinary street showed through the gap in the curtain. A tree moved slightly in the early breeze. Nothing else was wrong.
The clock read 4:52 a.m.
A moment later, the Fajr adhan began to rise from the mosque, faint at first, then clearer as the call travelled through the sleeping neighbourhood. Mumin sat on the edge of the bed and tried to steady his breathing. The dream was over. The old man was gone. He had not left behind a name or an explanation, only the words he had spoken.
Mumin stood, washed his face, and went to make wudu. The tap coughed once before the water ran in a clear stream over his hands. Cold. Real. He washed slowly, paying attention to each step, letting the familiar sequence hold him to the present. Yet even after he had dried his hands, he could still feel the pressure of the mountain in his chest, as though some part of the dream had followed him out of sleep.
He went to the mosque. The street was waking by degrees. A few lights shone behind curtains; a distant gate rattled open. The air carried the damp, cool smell of the night giving way to dawn. He kept his eyes on the path. Every so often, the immense black wave appeared behind his eyelids, and the ground seemed to shift beneath his feet. He slowed, took a breath, and continued.
Inside the mosque, he joined the rows and stood for Fajr. The recitation moved through the prayer hall, calm and measured. Mumin tried to keep his attention on the words and on the solid floor beneath him. When he went into sujood, the last of his strength seemed to leave him. He pressed his forehead to the ground and whispered, "Ya Allah, what was that dream? What are You trying to show me?"
No answer came. The prayer continued around him, steady and familiar. He did not ask the question again. He remained in sujood a little longer than usual, listening to his own breathing and the faint rustle of clothing as the others shifted beside him.
After the prayer, he made his way home. The eastern edge of the sky had begun to pale, though the sun had not yet cleared the rooftops. The ordinary world returned slowly: a bird calling from a wire, a door opening somewhere down the street, the distant sound of a vehicle starting. Each detail should have reassured him. Instead, he felt as if he had returned from a place where time had been broken and brought a fragment of that brokenness back with him.
His phone vibrated as he entered his room.
One new message. The same unknown number.
How was the dream? We saw it. Your fear. Your hope. Your mountain. We know everything. Wait.
Mumin stared at the screen. The words blurred, then sharpened again. He read them once, twice, a third time. The mountain had been inside a dream. The tsunami had been inside a dream. The old man had spoken only a few words. How could anyone else know what he had seen? Was the message a threat, a trick, or proof that someone had found a way to reach even the private territory of his sleeping mind?
He flung the phone onto the bed. It bounced once against the blanket and came to rest near the pillow. Mumin stepped back as if it might ring again. His fingers shook. He wanted to turn the device off, break it, throw it out of the window—anything that would make the words disappear. But he knew that destroying the phone would not erase the message from his mind.
Inside his head, Musa began to laugh. It was a slow, quiet laugh, almost without amusement.
"They won't leave you," Musa said. "They won't leave me. We belong to them."
Mumin closed his eyes. "No," he whispered, though he did not know whether he was answering Musa or the people behind the message. He began to recite a dua again, softly, until his breathing eased. Outside, the sky continued to brighten. The world moved toward morning as if nothing had happened.
But inside Mumin, the dream had not ended. He could still see the mountain rising from the earth, the black sea breaking against it, and the sun vanishing behind the peaks. The morning had appeared and disappeared in a single instant. He had woken, yet some part of him remained kneeling beneath that mountain, surrounded by darkness, unable to find a road home.
He forced himself to look around the room, naming what he could see: the tube light, the wardrobe, the laptop, the western wall, the narrow gap in the curtains. Each object stayed where it belonged. Yet the certainty did not last. Behind the familiar walls, he could still imagine a mountain tall enough to swallow the sky. The nightmare had ended, but its fear had crossed the boundary between sleep and waking and settled quietly among the ordinary things in his room.
He stayed seated until the distant call faded into the waking street. The phone remained where he had thrown it, its screen dark and harmless-looking. He did not pick it up. For now, he wanted one thing that no message from Imollodia could give him: a few quiet minutes in which the room was only a room, the sky only a sky, and the morning belonged to him.
He did not know when he would feel completely awake again.