Sorkh Andaz

She was born in a saffron field at the hour the sun gives up its colour to the earth. The women said she would burn through anything gentle, and they were right. Where she walked, roses smoked. Where she paused, the air grew dense with oud and black pepper, and men forgot the sentences they had begun.

She was not cruel. She was simply incandescent, the way certain stars are, the way certain afternoons in the desert refuse to cool. To stand near her was to feel your own edges grow warm and uncertain.

They tried to name the thing she carried. Heat, they said. Fury. But the perfumers who came later knew it was something stranger, a brightness that does not consume but transforms, leaving the room one degree warmer forever after she has gone.