The Sanam Chronicles

Chapter One: The Road to Rahzan

On the ninth day of Khordad, 1398, I left Tehran with three friends.

Hossein was driving.

Hassan sat beside him, talking almost nonstop.

Sajjad was in the back with me.

We left around ten at night.

At that hour, Tehran was still awake. The streets were full of lights, cars, voices, and the familiar noise of a city that never seemed to sleep.

None of us knew that, before sunrise, we would be standing beside a mountain reservoir beneath a sky full of stars.

None of us knew that one of us would find something there.

And none of us knew that years later, that discovery would still be waiting for me.

We were heading toward our friends' village.

The first part of the journey passed quickly.

We talked.

We laughed.

Music played through the car speakers.

Every now and then, someone would make a stupid joke and the whole car would laugh.

It was an ordinary night.

At least, it felt ordinary.

Around two in the morning, we reached Arak.

The lights of the city slowly disappeared behind us.

We continued toward the refinery.

About twenty kilometers later, we reached a road where the first exit led toward Khomein.

We crossed a bridge.

After that, the road became darker.

The streetlights disappeared.

The buildings disappeared.

Even the sound of traffic disappeared.

There was only the road.

And the mountains.

I was sitting in the back seat, looking through the window.

The full moon was bright.

Its light touched the mountains and the plains, turning parts of the landscape silver while leaving other parts completely black.

I looked to the right.

The land stretched into darkness.

Then I looked to the left.

Mountain slopes disappeared into wide green plains.

Every five or six kilometers, a small village appeared.

Maybe twenty houses.

A few warm lights.

Then darkness again.

I remember thinking how strange it was.

How could people live so quietly in places like this?

No traffic.

No noise.

No buildings covering the horizon.

Just mountains, fields, water, and stars.

I didn't know it at the time, but that was the first moment I felt something I would later recognize.

The feeling of being far away from the world I knew.

After about thirty kilometers, we passed a sign.

WELCOME TO KAJARESTAN.

Beyond the village, the road entered the mountains.

We kept going.

Eventually, we reached a downhill road.

At the bottom was a small village surrounded by curved hills.

A sign stood at the entrance.

WELCOME TO DAREH GARM.

Below it was another number.

Population: 41.

Forty-one people.

For some reason, I remembered that number.

The village had around twenty-five houses.

A reservoir lay nearby.

The moon was reflected on its surface.

So were the stars.

I stared at it through the windshield.

For a few seconds, nobody spoke.

Then Hossein pointed toward a house near the water.

"That's ours."

We stopped.

The air was cold.

Much colder than I expected for the beginning of summer.

We carried our things inside.

Someone turned on the heater.

We sat together and talked.

Later, we went onto the balcony.

Someone brought drinks.

The night became quieter.

Around five in the morning, everyone had gone to sleep except me.

I stayed outside.

I put on Ramin Djawadi's music from Game of Thrones.

"Goodbye Brother" was playing.

I smoked quietly.

The reservoir was almost completely silent.

Every few moments, I could hear frogs near the water.

Above me, the stars seemed impossibly bright.

I don't know how long I sat there.

I only remember thinking that I wanted to remember that night.

The cold.

The music.

The mountains.

The moon.

The strange silence.

Then the sky began to turn gray.

I finally went inside.

A few hours later, the smell of breakfast woke us.

Hossein and Hassan's aunts had arrived.

They had brought fresh goat milk, wild honey, local butter, cheese, and warm bread.

We ate together.

The village slowly came alive.

Someone mentioned the plains.

I immediately became interested.

"Let's go see what's around here."

Hassan laughed.

"Where?"

"Anywhere."

A short time later, Hassan, Sajjad, and I left on two motorcycles.

The dirt roads crossed the plains and moved toward the mountains.

The landscape looked different in daylight.

It was green.

Open.

Almost endless.

After a while, Hossein mentioned that there was a lot of rhubarb near the mountain foothills.

So we changed direction.

The motorcycles could only take us so far.

We continued on foot.

It took around thirty minutes by motorcycle to reach the area, then more than an hour of walking to reach the higher foothills.

We found some rhubarb.

Not as much as we expected.

Sajjad and Hassan stayed lower on the mountain.

I kept looking upward.

The higher parts of the mountain were covered by clouds.

Sunlight broke through them in long, pale beams.

There was something about the mountain that pulled at my curiosity.

"I'll go a little higher," I said.

They shouted something behind me.

I don't remember exactly what.

I kept walking.

The farther I went, the quieter it became.

Eventually, I heard my phone ringing.

It was Hassan.

"Where are you?"

"Up here."

"We can't see you."

"I'm taking a picture."

"Don't go too far."

"I won't."

I turned around.

The view behind me was enormous.

The plains looked small.

The village was barely visible.

The motorcycles were tiny dots beside the road.

I took a photograph.

Then I stood there for a while.

The clouds moved slowly over the mountain.

The sunlight came and went.

I thought about climbing higher.

Just a little higher.

Then I saw something lying between the stones.

At first, I thought it was a dry branch.

I took another step.

Then I realized what it was.

A snake's shed skin.

I froze.

My heart suddenly started beating faster.

I looked around.

There was nobody nearby.

The motorcycles were perhaps twenty minutes behind me.

The road was even farther.

For the first time that morning, I thought:

What if there is a snake here?

Then another thought came.

What if it isn't alone?

I almost laughed at myself.

But I didn't move.

I stared at the dry skin.

My imagination started working against me.

I imagined a snake hidden beneath a rock.

Then another one behind me.

Then I imagined being bitten somewhere up there, with no one close enough to hear me.

I knew most of these thoughts were irrational.

That didn't stop them.

I took a slow breath.

"Enough."

I turned around and started walking down.

A few minutes later, I stopped on a flat stone.

It was roughly forty centimeters wide and eighty centimeters long.

I decided to record a short video.

I took out my phone.

Then I noticed the larger stone beside me.

I stopped recording.

Something was carved into it.

I moved closer.

There it was.

A heart.

Not a perfect heart.

Not something carved by a machine.

It looked handmade.

Old.

Weathered.

Inside the heart were two tiny dots and a small curved mark.

Two eyes.

And a mouth.

I stared.

For a few seconds, I couldn't understand why it affected me so much.

It was only a carving.

Someone had carved a heart into a stone.

That was all.

But why here?

Why on this mountain?

Why so far from the village?

And why did it look almost like a face?

I touched the carving.

The stone was cold.

I pulled my hand away.

I looked around.

Near the foothill stood an enormous rock, perhaps six meters across and five meters high.

I used it as a landmark.

Then I looked back at the heart.

A strange thought entered my mind.

What if this isn't the first thing carved here?

I looked at the ground.

There were stones everywhere.

Some were small.

Some were enormous.

I started imagining what the place might have looked like hundreds of years earlier.

Maybe there had once been a road here.

Maybe people had crossed these mountains.

Maybe caravans had stopped somewhere nearby.

Maybe someone had lived here.

Maybe someone had died here.

My mind kept going.

I imagined horses climbing the mountain.

Men carrying heavy bags.

Merchants traveling with their families.

A caravan disappearing into the valley.

Then I imagined another possibility.

Bandits.

An ambush.

A traveler running through the mountain.

Someone falling.

Someone being buried.

I looked at the heart again.

The thought became stronger.

What if there is something underneath this mountain?

I immediately rejected it.

It sounded ridiculous.

Still, the thought wouldn't leave.

I began looking at the ground differently.

Every stone seemed suspicious.

Every gap between the rocks looked like it might hide something.

I walked a few steps.

Stopped.

Looked back.

Walked again.

Stopped again.

My friends called from below.

I could hear their voices.

But for a moment, I didn't want to answer.

I wanted to stay.

I wanted to understand the stone.

That feeling frightened me more than the snake skin had.

Because I couldn't explain it.

It wasn't a voice.

It wasn't a vision.

It was simply a strange certainty that I had found something I was not supposed to ignore.

Eventually, I forced myself to leave.

I looked at the heart one last time.

Then I walked down toward my friends.

When I reached them, Sajjad looked at me.

"Why are you so quiet?"

"I'm tired."

It was only half the truth.

The rest of the truth was still sitting inside my head.

On the way back, I barely spoke.

I kept replaying the scene.

The stone.

The heart.

The face.

The mountain.

The possibility of an old road.

The idea of a burial.

Then I thought about the snake again.

What if I had continued upward?

What if I had gone farther?

What if I had not turned back?

And then another thought came.

What if I had never noticed the stone?

That question followed me all the way back to the village.

Everyone else was laughing.

People came and went.

Food was served.

Stories were told.

I smiled when I was supposed to smile.

I answered when someone asked me something.

But my mind was somewhere else.

That night, I opened the photograph again.

I zoomed in.

The heart became larger on the screen.

I stared at it.

Then I searched the internet for similar carvings.

Hearts.

Ancient symbols.

Mountain carvings.

Caravan routes.

Burial sites.

Old mountain passes.

The more I searched, the more possibilities appeared.

And the more possibilities appeared, the more questions I had.

I began creating stories in my head.

Maybe the stone marked a grave.

Maybe it marked a place where someone had stopped.

Maybe the person who carved it wanted someone to remember them.

Maybe it wasn't a heart at all.

Maybe I was seeing what I wanted to see.

That last thought bothered me.

I put the phone down.

A few minutes later, I picked it up again.

The photograph was still there.

I couldn't stop looking.

When we returned to Tehran the next day, I showed the photograph to a couple of friends who were interested in archaeology and history.

Their reaction was different from mine.

They didn't laugh.

They studied the photograph carefully.

One of them asked:

"Exactly where did you find this?"

I told him.

He asked about the mountain.

The direction.

The distance from the village.

The shape of the valley.

Then he started talking about old caravan routes.

Travelers.

Mountain passes.

Bandits.

Burial sites.

He suggested that the area might have been used centuries ago as a route between settlements.

Perhaps an important traveler had died there.

Perhaps someone had been killed.

Perhaps the person had been buried with belongings.

There was no proof.

It was only a theory.

But for me, the theory changed everything.

Because suddenly the heart was no longer just a strange carving.

It had become a question.

And questions are dangerous things when you are the kind of person who cannot leave them alone.

I called Sajjad a few days later.

We talked about the mountain.

About the stone.

About the possibility that something might be buried nearby.

Finally, he asked:

"Would you go back?"

I looked at the photograph on my phone.

"Yes."

I didn't know it then, but that answer would change my life.

We would return.

We would search.

We would dig.

We would find another stone.

And eventually, years later, I would return to those mountains again.

But the most important thing we would find there would not be gold.

It would not be the grave of a forgotten prince.

It would not even be the thing we were looking for.

It would be a door.

And on the other side of that door was a world that should never have been connected to ours.

At the time, however, I knew none of this.

I was simply a young man staring at a photograph of a heart carved into an ancient stone.

And somewhere beneath the mountains of Rahzan, something was waiting.

Something that had been waiting for a very long time.