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 on warm air, and the clatter 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 plaza, the tail moved. A lean man in layered 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 palace.
Helios leaned back, exhaling through his nose.
"That should keep him distracted."
Elsewhere, high within the palace's eastern towers, Jafar stood on a stone balcony as the falcon landed 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 palace began to darken — veins of black stone creeping across the walls, swallowing light and life. The air turned cooler, heavier. The lamps lining the corridor dimmed as he passed, their flames 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 palace and take the Rani as his wife.
At the far end, behind a curtain of red and black 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 flame 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 placed the parchment scroll onto the table but it began to unfurl itself — the magical map Helios had refused to accept.
The edges flared 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 placed 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 large golden scarab fragment rested in a bed of black 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 platform behind the desk, where three mirrors were suspended in triangular formation. Each mirror swirled with shadow — scrying magic. In the center of the triangle, an enchanted brazier burned with a pale, sickly blue flame.
Jafar waved a hand over it.
The flames 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 flame 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 relax and do nothing.
He turned toward the western market street and walked into the coming twilight.