Prologue

"Sh-Shabina," Alizeh uttered the last syllable, the name of his significant other, before submitting himself to the onyx darkness that filled his anatomy as his vision blurred and then, at some point of time, closed.

"Let's go brother. He is dead," A raspy voice spoke.

Alizeh could still faintly hear their voices, but after a few unbearable seconds of painful, shallow breathing another fist landed over his skull. 

A white noise followed the excruciating hit -- Alizeh was sure his thick, crimson blood was oozing out and gathering into a pool near his head.

"C'mon, let's go," the other sepoy harshly enunciated.

Alizeh was certainly, very tortously, concious but his limbs, fore and back, were not responding. They were numb from being stomped upon many a times and his left elbow was seemingly broken.

He could not breathe.

 He tried to open his mouth a little which ached with discomfort as he widen the surface area for absorption of air, but the gash near his cheekbones prevented optimum usage of his F-cells, which ultimately blocked his respiratory system from actively working. His body was going into the anaerobic respiration phase which could, if not treating immediately, lead his body into a comatose sleep.

He lied there in utmost pain whimpering every now and then with agony, both physical and mental. He tried to call for help, but he was helpless.

"Don't...Shabina...live," he kept chanting over and over in his head while forcing his eyes to stay open for as long as he could. He was desperately trying not to succumb into the anaerobic phase.

He had to save her.

He couldn't afford to lose her.

The bright, vivid image of those plump, pastel pink lips that smiled with compassion and love at every creature and those eyes which twinkled with delight as it helped and supported the needy, made Alizeh's pain significantly less. The way those alabaster cheeks dimpled and a hearty laugh softly reverberated after his pathetic attempts at cracking, jokes pulled up his own lips into a small, almost non existent upward curve. He was crazy to still keep smiling, even when he was on the brink of being dead, but he didn't mind going through the pain to smile at her memories -- the memories that they shared together. He was crazy to remember every moments that they claimed with each other by their side. The way she bit her lips when she was deep in thought or the way a little triangle of her tongue poked out from the corner of her lips when she was cooking was, in every form, the most cherished and important memories of Alizeh.

He loved her with his heart and soul, but he couldn't save her. The agonizing look in her jasper eyes and a crease of worry upon her forehead had Alizeh clicking his jaws in rage and anger. No, she was his and he was her -- they had vowed to stay together till death did them apart.

He had to save her.

He was uncertainly sure, from the beginning, that the coin was going to bring them trouble, but Sabina was very hard to coerce, she was as stubborn as the Lone Mountain itself. The challenge that the coin posed for her was very insignificantly thought to be so devastating by either of them. They had thought that the unraveling of the hidden message in the coin was a good experience at solving universal puzzles, but they had been proven wrong in worst ways possible. They had no idea that anything, apart from a little frostbite or dehydration, would be so painstakingly troublesome for them.

And now, she was held captive by some hunky muscular male, addressed as 'my lord' by his goons while Alizeh was beaten into a pulp and left to bleed to death by the sinewy sepoys of the said 'lord'.

Alizeh did not realise how soon his happy, cherished thoughts transformed into grievous flashbacks of what had happened just a few hours ago. Shabina was forced into a covered wagon after being forced to sniff some sort of drug which transported her intelligence into an ambiguous and perplexed state of mind.

He was sore from all the treking so he had let Shabina go ahead of him -- she was extremely excited to finally deduce the last mystery that the coin lead them to. He did not, in an any strange thought, imagine a lord of some shabby to place abduct Shabina, but that was what had happened. He did not know, or else he would have never let her take up any such adventure or taken upon himself to chaperone her to places that the coin suggested they go.

If only he had restricted her from taking that challenge up.