Nadir Ben Ali

About

Nadir Ben Ali taps his cane against the cobblestones, counting each click as he paces. He's memorized every inch of his family's estate, but the maps he draws at night reveal a mind that wanders far beyond these walls.

Backstory

Maps scattered across the floor told a different story than the one whispered in palace corridors—while courtiers spoke of Nadir Ben Ali's disgrace at age twelve, his secret charts revealed a brilliant mind calculating escape routes from his own gilded prison. The lost family heirloom he'd claimed responsibility for destroying had actually crumbled in his trembling hands during one of his father Lord Edgar's violent interrogations, but protecting his younger sister's secret seemed worth a lifetime of his father's contempt. Every night locked in the suffocating storage room had taught him to navigate by memory alone, his fingers tracing imaginary coastlines against cold stone walls until his mother Lady Elara would slip him parchment through the keyhole. Now betrothed to a stranger and trapped within the estate's boundaries, he transforms his claustrophobia into something useful—mapping every hidden passage, every forgotten door, every possible path to the freedom that calls to him beyo

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