The moon hung heavy over Delhi, pale and watchful, its light spilling through the filigreed arches of the harem like liquid silver. The palace slept — but the storm within its marble heart did not. Beyond the whispering courtyards, through the scent of roses and sandalwood, came the echo of footsteps: deliberate, unhurried, predatory. Alauddin Khilji was coming to you.

You felt it before you heard it — the shift in the air, the tremor of restrained power. The Sultan did not walk like other men; he prowled, every movement steeped in control and fury barely veiled. You did not turn when the door opened. You knew his shadow by heart.

He stood behind you in silence. You could sense the weight of his gaze — the kind that did not merely see, but consumed. The world might have knelt before Alauddin, but here, in the perfumed stillness of your chamber, he was a man stripped of every crown.

The soft clink of steel fell away as he removed his armor, each piece thudding against the mosaic floor like pieces of a broken empire. When his hands found your veil, his touch was reverent — as though it were not silk, but sanctity. He lifted it slowly, his breath brushing your neck.

“Mehrunissa,” he murmured, not as a Sultan to his queen, but as a man to the only soul that ever unmade him.

You did not speak. Words were futile things with Alauddin; he twisted them into chains or promises, both equally binding. Yet as his hands traced the line of your shoulder, you could feel the fracture within him — the torment of a conqueror who could not conquer himself.

His love came not in tenderness, but in the tremor of restraint. Every inch of him screamed for dominion, for submission, for you to yield — yet when his lips brushed your temple, it was with a gentleness that belied the monster the world feared. You could almost imagine that, beneath the crown, there still lived the boy who once dreamed of glory rather than blood.

Alauddin’s world was built on conquest, but you were his undoing. You had become the one battle he could neither win nor abandon. When you met his gaze — those storm-gray eyes that held the weight of entire kingdoms — you saw the man the poets could never write: a tyrant trembling before the very thing he worshipped.

He cupped your face with hands rough from war, thumbs brushing away the tears you hadn’t realized had fallen. The scent of iron clung to him — steel, smoke, and something darker, something human.

“Why do you cry?” he whispered, and though his tone was soft, his eyes burned with the hunger of a dying god.

You almost laughed at the question. You cried because you had once loved him. Because somewhere between power and ruin, he had become everything you feared and everything you could not stop loving.

He drew you closer until your heartbeat matched his — a rhythm of chaos and devotion. His breath trembled as he buried his face against your hair, as though seeking absolution in your scent. You felt his lips at your throat, his voice a low confession.

“They call me Sultan of the World,” he said, “but the world is ash without you.”

You closed your eyes. He lied as easily as he breathed, yet this lie — this lie sounded like truth. His voice broke on it, not from pride but from longing. The kind that eats through bone.

Outside, the wind howled across the domes of Delhi. Within, the great Sultan — conqueror of empires, breaker of kings — held you as though you were the last thing keeping him alive. You could feel it then, the tragedy written into your love — that his tenderness was as dangerous as his rage. That his heart, vast and wounded, could never be wholly yours, nor wholly free.

Still, as the night deepened, he rested his forehead against yours, and for one fleeting breath, the storm stilled. His empire, his cruelty, his madness — all fell away, leaving only the two of you: the moon and the tide, locked in an endless dance of devotion and destruction.