The Desert Prince

ACT III: THE CHOICE

Chapter Five: The Weight of Mercy

Instead I remembered Niko’s voice: “There will be a choice.”

I did not choose blood. The realization came like cold water: killing a man who had been made by fear would not repair the hole in the palace. It would only feed the structure that created him, prove that violence was the only language power understood. I had learned in the desert that the root of rot is not always the person you can see. Sometimes it’s the soil itself.

I chose to capture and to bring back witnesses. Trade-masters who’d seen bribe exchanges, their ledgers still ink-fresh with evidence. A soldier who traded information for coin, his loyalty purchased for less than a decent horse. I let the caravan travel on and I followed, not as a prince with an army but as a man with a purpose and a ragged retinue of truth.

I gathered them over days, patient as a hunter. Some I convinced with promises of protection. Others I threatened with exposure. One, a merchant named Doros, I simply appealed to, showing him the knife meant for close work and asking him to imagine a kingdom where such knives were unnecessary.

“You’re mad,” Doros said, but his eyes held something else. Hope, perhaps, or the memory of a better world.

“Probably,” I agreed. “But I’m also right.”