Author: Majoki

“It was the most beautiful thing ever crafted.”

“I’m sure it was, Akharini. But how can we steal it if it was destroyed almost seventy years ago?”

Akharini stared at Nur. Though the hour was late and time was short, he wanted to tell him so much about the minbar of Saladin, of the pulpit that commanded the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem for eight centuries until a so-called Christian radical torched it in 1969. A madman who incinerated the world’s finest piece of woodworking. Nearly 6500 pieces of pine wood, mother-of-pearl, ivory, and ebony fastened by ta’shiq, an interlocking technique that required no metal nails, no glue. Assembled as if by magic.

And more than magic.

That’s what Akharini really sought. Not the minbar itself. He could visit the reconstructed replica in al-Aqsa anytime he wanted to feast on its intricate arabesques, gilded muqarnas, and delicate mashrabiyas. But that was like looking at a picture of the original. Because, Akharini knew, the replica was just a three-dimensional picture of the real minbar of Saladin.

Akharini had discovered the secret. The minbar of Saladin was four-dimensional. That was its real beauty, its real magic. It took the form of a staircase with a door at the bottom and windowed booth at the top. But the two-paneled door carved with intricate geometric patterns featuring six-pointed stars was far more than a decorative entrance, it was a portal to other times, other worlds, other realities.

Face-to-face on a storied but now empty street in the Old City, he wished he could confide in Nur, but you just don’t trust a common thief with the keys to interdimensional travel.

“Most of the minbar was burned, Nur. But some of the original pieces survived and are safeguarded near Haram al-Sharif. That is what I aim to reclaim.”

“A few sticks of old wood. Why? What are they worth?”

One’s sanity, Akharini reckoned. Isn’t that why a madman had tried to burn the minbar? As a young man, Akharini had learned about the destruction of the minbar many years before and became obsessed with the arsonist. Why had he done it? Why had he set fire to such divine beauty? For decades Akharini studied the case, the minbar and the man, and it led him to the truth about both. The minbar was not just a sacred and glorious pulpit. It was a space-time portal. And the arsonist was not just a religious madman.

He was a temporal terrorist. A space-time traveler who’d become hellbent on preventing our world from reaching his reality through the minbar portal. And almost succeeded, but Akharini had painstakingly deciphered the cryptic scripts, glyphs and verses that activated the interdimensional gateway and now believed he could reopen it once he possessed the relics from the original.

“What’s left of the minbar is priceless, Nur.” He took from his pocket and waved a worn little notebook wherein he kept all his most closely guarded secrets on reactivating the portal. “With it I will have the power to move worlds.”

Nur stared at Akharini. There was so little he could tell him about how the world really worked. But, even a petty thief could recognize a golden opportunity. He headbutted Akharini, grabbed his notebook and fled down the infamous street, holding the key to a wildly misunderstood door of possibilities.

On the Via Dolorosa, dazed and bereft, Akharini wept.