The early morning haze had long burned away, and the sun had started to rise and sat heavily in the sky when Helios reappeared in the streets of Agrabah.

  He stepped from a dark corridor tucked behind a tapestry vendor’s stand, emerging into the light with practiced ease. The city buzzed with early-morning energy—shopkeepers shouting from stalls, spices swirling in the warm air, and the ctter of sandals on sandstone paths.

  Helios walked.

  There was no purpose in his stride. Not visibly. He passed a tea merchant haggling with the son of a rich house, a pair of kids racing a goat through an alley, and a fortune teller who blinked once, stared at him, and then refused to speak a word due to fear as he smiled at them.

  Time passed.

  An hour, maybe more.

  Then, finally—he felt it.

  Not an aura. Not a spell.

  A gaze.

  Sharp. Focused. Watching from behind a fruit stall across the way. The angle was too subtle, the tension too calm to be anyone but one of Jafar’s tails.

  Helios smirked, just slightly, and took a seat at a shaded table outside a rundown eatery. He ordered nothing. Said nothing.

  He waited.

  Across the pza, the tail moved. A lean man in yered wraps of sand-colored cloth, his face shadowed beneath a cowl. He didn’t approach. Instead, he knelt by a tethered falcon perched near the well.

  He tied a scroll to the bird’s leg.

  With a whisper and a toss, the falcon took to the sky — circling once before disappearing toward the upper towers of the pace.

  Helios leaned back, exhaling through his nose.

  “That should keep him distracted.”

  Elsewhere, high within the pace’s eastern towers, Jafar stood on a stone balcony as the falcon nded on his gloved arm.

  He untied the message with long fingers and read it with a sneer curling across his face.

  “Found again, boy? Predictable.”

  He crushed the parchment in his hand and let it drift into the wind.

  “I thought you clever,” he murmured. “But it seems it was only luck.”

  He turned from the view and swept down the corridor, robes dragging like whispers of smoke behind him.

  He didn’t head toward the throne room. Nor toward his visible chambers.

  Instead, he passed into the eastern wing, where the white marble of the pace began to darken — veins of bck stone creeping across the walls, swallowing light and life. The air turned cooler, heavier. The mps lining the corridor dimmed as he passed, their fmes bending away as though recoiling from his presence.

  Guards stationed nearby didn’t salute.

  They didn’t speak.

  They averted their eyes and pretended he didn’t exist. As he had paid them to do. Most of the guards in the castle served him, but those in high positions still served the Sultan and Rani. He would need to fix that if he wished to take over the pace and take the Rani as his wife.

  At the far end, behind a curtain of red and bck silk, Jafar stepped through an arched doorway.

  A hidden chamber sprawled out before him.

  The ceiling rose into darkness, lost to sight. Bookshelves floated in midair, suspended by invisible chains. Ancient scrolls and inkless quills hung like sleeping bats. Lanterns of green fme drifted around the perimeter, their light flickering as if in protest.

  At the center of the room sat a long obsidian desk, its surface crowded with open grimoires, cracked crystal spheres, and glowing diagrams that shifted as if breathing.

  Jafar stepped forward and pced the parchment scroll onto the table, but it began to unfurl itself — the magical map Helios had refused to accept.

  The edges fred with red glyphs, pulsing as if hungry.

  Jafar stared at it coldly.

  “I see you already thirst,” he said, addressing the map like a living thing.

  He pced both hands beside it and muttered a spell under his breath — not one for activation, but for stabilization.

  The map did not close.

  Instead, a single glowing line traced a half-circle along the parchment’s edge. The glyphs flickered angrily.

  Jafar gritted his teeth.

  “So, you won’t yield to me directly… not yet.” He straightened, pacing slowly around the desk, one hand stroking the cobra head of his staff. He attempted the spell again, and only then did the map close.

  “This map wasn’t made for men of ambition.”

  His voice was dry as the desert.

  “It was a trap made for fools. Street rats. Ones desperate enough to pay the toll without knowing what it costs.”

  He turned toward a side table where a rge golden scarab fragment rested in a bed of bck silk. It pulsed faintly with ancient light.

  “Soon,” Jafar said. “Soon, your other half will be mine. And then…”

  His gaze narrowed.

  “I will deal with the boy.”

  His footsteps echoed as he ascended a small ptform behind the desk, where three mirrors were suspended in a triangur formation. Each mirror swirled with shadow — scrying magic. In the center of the triangle, an enchanted brazier burned with a pale, sickly blue fme.

  Jafar waved a hand over it.

  The fmes parted just enough to show a blurred glimpse of Helios, still seated casually in the city square, watching clouds and birds as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

  Jafar sneered.

  “Go on, act calm. Act clever. Let me see how long you dance before the fire reaches your feet.”

  He extinguished the fme with a whisper, then turned back to the scarab and the map.

  “Enjoy your moment, boy,” he muttered. “Your death is already plotting its course.”

  Back in the square, Helios stood and stretched.

  The sun was beginning its slow descent, and he could no longer feel the gaze of the man nor the magic that had appeared midway. This meant he no longer needed to waste time watching the sky, although he quite enjoyed taking a day to rex and do nothing.

  He turned toward the western market street and walked into the coming twilight.