(no subject)
The countryside wasn't so different from her memories of almost eight years
ago. She dimly recognized landmarks, people's houses, a half-grown garden along a familiar stretch of road, the spire of a nearby mosque...
It was on the second day after her return to Herat that she realized she was being followed. Nor were her 'admirers' invisible, or even particularly stealthy, by her standards.
Of course, she wasn't nine or ten years old anymore.
She didn't look around, or try to approach and ask what they wanted. Their body language bespoke greed, avarice, cruelty... Signals that she'd missed, the last time she encountered their sort.
She walked down a (mostly empty) side street, giving Najla a learned signal to be quiet and hide.
The three men who'd been eying the (new, healthy, possibly valuable) young woman who was so foolish as to travel alone, turned a corner into the same alley a few seconds after her.
No sign of her, only a pile of sand--
And then, the sandstorm engulfed them. They were caught, flung about like dolls, left scoured and bleeding. Broken. Only seconds, and they were as helpless as they'd thought her to be.
Easy meat.
She looked at them through the storm's eyes. For all of a turaab's heat, she was cold, empty of anything but icy will. She considered options.
This was Herat City, not yet her own home village. Afghanistan was still caught up in daily violence. No one would look too closely into a few more corpses or missing criminals(and the ease with which they stalked her, 'said' to Sooraya that they'd done this before.)
No one even had to know that she'd been here.
She shifted, resumed a form close enough to human to speak, but not to look the part.
"Everyone gets one warning from me. This was yours. You have your lives. Give it up before you lose even that."
Then, without another word to them, she gathered up her bags where they'd fallen, and her puppy, and left them, not looking back.
If they thought her a monster, or a demon? Let them.
She wasn't sure she'd care...or that she cared if they survived even the injuries they had, at the moment.