They called the city a furnace with streets. Kilns ringed the markets like open red mouths, and clay figures cooled on racks—lions with human eyes, queens with crescent crowns, gods whose smiles never learned to move. Ibrahim had shaped so many idols that even in sleep his hands remembered heat. His master, the old craftsman Azar, liked to say, "A good god stands straight. The world needs something that never trembles." Ibrahim steadied the new figure and stayed silent. At night, he climbed to the flat roof and watched the procession of lights: the scattered nails of stars, the polished coin of the moon, the sun that arrived like correction and left like habit. They were dazzled, they ruled and they went down. 

"I will not bow to what lies down," he whispered to the wind. Harvest festival came. Torches stitched a fiery seam around the square, drums turned dust to rhythm, and people marched before their quiet gods the way a river glides past its own stones. When the singing reached its highest mark, Ibrahim slipped inside the temple. No one saw him go. When the doors reopened, the idols lay in ruin; faces powdered, shoulders crushed. Only the tallest remained, an axe glinting on its arm. And only one man was missing from the crowd. Azar gripped Ibrahim's sleeve. "Who did this?" "Ask the one with the tool," Ibrahim said. The city held trial by fire. If he walked through unburned, truth would protect him. He crossed the flames and lived. But a city of kilns does not trust a man who fire refuses; exile was the safer cure. 

He took his wife Hagar and their small son, whose hands clung to him like a warm hook. They walked until the map ended, and the earth became a book no one had learned to read. Thorn, stone, old seas that still remembered themselves. They reached a barren valley where Ibrahim began to build a home, not a temple, nor a mosque, nor a synagogue, but a square of stone open to the sky. Hagar ran between two ridges, seeking water for the child. She ran seven times. Foot, breath; stone, breath, until the heat cracked with a sound like a jar's seal breaking. A dark seam split the sand. Water was shouldered up and spoke in its clear, persuasive tongue.

 "Why no roof?" she asked. "So, the house remembers who covers it," Ibrahim said. With each row of stones he murmured, "If there is acceptance, accept this. If there is refusal, teach our hands to try again." He did not know who listened, but speaking steadied him. He told himself; I have journeyed within; from creed to creed, from faith to faith. Now I journey through dust with those I love. He wondered: Will my children remain? Will blessing remain? A voice inside asked, "Do you not believe it?" He answered, "I do! But I want my heart to rest." He was still walking between doubt and faith. Days burned like brass; nights opened cool and blue.

 For his little son, he told stories he had learned to mistrust; gods that ate smoke, kings who married their own names, towers taller than their reasons. The boy-built caravans of pebbles and asked, "If we forget all stories, will anything be left for us?" "It means," Ibrahim said, "we stop kneeling before our escape routes." The truth lay under his tongue like a stone, heavy and clean. "We still draw water and bake bread. But we choose not to live as if the door behind us were half-open." Word of the roofless square traveled farther than the birds. Men from his tribe arrived—Azar among them—each demanding the same thing: "Finish what you've started. Give it a name." "I'm not making a god," Ibrahim said. "I'm making a place to stand when I remember that I am not one." Azar touched the wall, fingers still smelling of smoke. "With a capstone, it would be finer, a proper end." "It would be finer," Ibrahim replied, "and smaller." 

A bright bird flashed above the crown and vanished, refusing to live inside any emblem. When they left, work returned to the valley. Hagar tended the fire and bread; Ibrahim lifted the last stones and left the middle open. At dusk, the wind rearranged the sand into letters, spelling a language no one yet could read. He climbed the ridge and looked east, where kilns and towers slept beneath their own smoke, and west, where the earth unrolled to an impossible blue. He thought of the bright things that ruled and fell, and of people faithful to what could be carried out. He returned to the open square. "This place was chosen for me," he said, softly, for Hagar, for the child, for the water and the birds and the stones still warm with the day. The words were not defiance; they were agreement, with the road that brought him here, with the faith that lived inside his walking. Above the house without a roof, the sky held. Ibrahim raised his face to what did not fall and in that openness, he went all in.