The prince turned the peg before anyone could stop him. The horse — carved from ebony, black as midnight, inlaid with gold and ivory — shot into the air like an arrow. The palace shrank to a tile. The city shrank to a stain. The kingdom disappeared entirely, and Prince Domazan was still climbing, hands numb on the wooden mane, wind tearing through his robes, heading toward the stars with no idea how to come down.
Below, his father the king of Persia screamed at the Persian sage who had brought this gift to the Nowruz festival. "How does he descend?"
The sage smiled. He had not yet received his payment.
The first flight
There had been three gifts that day. A Greek brought a metal trumpet that sounded when enemies approached. An Indian brought a golden peacock that crowed on the hour. But the sage's gift eclipsed them both: a life-sized horse carved from ebony, controlled by pegs in its neck. "Turn this peg and it rises," the sage said. "Turn the other and it carries you wherever you wish."
He had learned to fly—but not yet to land.
Domazan could not resist. While his father interrogated the sage about the mechanism, the prince mounted the horse and turned the first peg. He learned to fly in three seconds. He did not learn to land.
The cold hit him like a wall. His fingers went numb. His lungs burned. He searched the horse's neck — mane, ears, shoulders — looking for the second peg. His fingers found nothing. The stars grew closer. He thought: *I am going to die in the sky.*
Then, hidden under the mane, a smaller peg. He turned it. The horse tilted downward. The earth rushed back — green, brown, golden — and he landed hard on the roof of a palace in a city he had never seen. The sun was setting. The muezzin was calling. He was in Sana'a, a thousand miles from home, and his adventure had not even started.
The princess
He crept through a skylight and found himself in a bedroom that smelled of rosewater and sandalwood. Princess Shams al-Nahar lay sleeping, her black hair spread across silk pillows, attendants dozing around her. Domazan's heart stopped. Not slowed — stopped, the way a clock stops when something jams the mechanism.
He had come looking for adventure—and found love instead.
She woke, screamed, reached for a blade. He raised his hands. "I am a prince of Persia. I flew here on a wooden horse."
She did not believe him. No one would. But he told the story — the Nowruz festival, the sage, the pegs, the sky that nearly killed him — and his voice carried the weight of a man who had touched the stars and lived. By dawn, they were talking. By the second dawn, they were in love.
"Come with me," he said. "The horse carries two."
She hesitated. A stranger. A flying horse. A world she had never imagined. But love made her braver than caution, and when the sun rose, they climbed onto the ebony horse together and flew.
The sage's revenge
Domazan made a mistake. He landed in a garden outside his father's capital and left the princess with the horse while he rode ahead to prepare a proper welcome. He wanted escorts, musicians, flowers — everything a princess of Yemen deserved.
She trusted the wrong man—and flew into captivity.
The sage found her first. He told the princess he was a messenger from the prince. She believed him. She mounted the horse with him, expecting reunion. Instead, the sage flew her away — the princess he had demanded as payment, the one the king had refused.
Domazan returned to an empty garden. Horse, princess, gone. He stood in the silence and understood the cost of his carelessness. Then he started walking — kingdom to kingdom, month after month, asking strangers about a sage, a horse, a captive woman.
The trail led to a foreign kingdom. The local king had killed the sage, seized the princess, and imprisoned her in his palace. She faked madness to keep him away — screaming, tearing her hair, refusing all touch. The king brought healers from every land. None could "cure" her.
The healer
Domazan arrived disguised as a physician. "I can cure the mad princess," he told the foreign king. He was escorted to her chamber — and two lovers stared at each other across a room, pretending to be strangers.
He came as a healer—and left as a rescuer, flying home with his love.
They whispered a plan against the curve of the wall. Domazan told the king that curing the princess required moving her to an open field, near the place where "evil spirits could be expelled" — the storehouse where the ebony horse was kept. The king, eager for his prize, agreed without question.
In the open field, Domazan helped the princess onto the horse. "One more spell," he called to the watching crowd. He turned the peg. The ebony horse shot into the sky — carrying two lovers, a thousand feet above a king who had just realised he had been tricked.
They flew home to Persia. The wedding lasted forty days. The ebony horse was placed in the treasury as a wonder, but no one rode it again. Some adventures, Domazan told his children, are worth not repeating. The horse had given him the sky, a princess, and the wisdom to know when to stop flying.
Why it matters
Domazan turned a peg and learned to fly before he learned to land. That sequence — power first, wisdom second — nearly killed him, and then nearly cost him the woman he loved. The ebony horse offered the sky to anyone reckless enough to mount it. The sage who built it demanded the princess as the price. In the end, Domazan's cleverness saved what his carelessness had risked. The horse sits in a Persian treasury now, beautiful and still, because some wonders are safest when no one touches them.
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