Love Above the Clouds

Love above the Clouds by Zahir Shah

Where Rivers Touch Sky

A Romance in the Northern Mountains

Beneath the snow-crowned sentinels of the Hindukush, where the Swat River carved turquoise veins through ancient valleys, the village of Gulmaran clung to the mountainside like a forgotten prayer. Here, where the air tasted of ice and apricot blossoms, Zara Khan adjusted her frayed rucksack—heavy not with provisions, but with the weight of her father’s unfinished legacy. A botanist seeking rare alpine flora, she never expected her research would collide with a storm... or with him.

The Whispering Pines

The landslide roared through the pass like the mountains shedding their skin. Zara froze, granite dust stinging her eyes as boulders danced in a deadly avalanche. “Climate change”, the elders whispered, “the glaciers weeping”. She scrambled toward a glacial moraine as debris rained around her. Through the haze, she saw them: three Balti porters trapped near the Buddhist petroglyphs, their crimson “chogas” vivid against the limestone. One figure moved with desperate grace, hauling a wounded companion toward a cave. Even through the chaos, Zara recognized the insignia on his pack—Karakoram Explorers Guild. And the man leading them moved like a snow leopard defending its young .

Chapter 1: Petals on Stone

Arman Abbas tasted blood. His ribs screamed where a rock had struck, and the youngest porter’s arm hung at a sickening angle. They were cornered. The mountain continued to groan, its fury echoing off the U-shaped valleys carved by vanished ice. Ya Allah, grant us passage, he prayed, shielding the boy with his body.

The miracle came not from heaven, but from the cliffs above.

A rope snaked down, striking the scree beside them. Arman looked up and saw her—a woman in an indigo dress (shalwar kameez), her eyes fierce as a falcon’s. She gestured urgently toward a fissure: Here!

He didn’t question. "Grab the rope!" he ordered. They ascended as she anchored the line, her hands raw against the rock. Each tug was a lifeline in the thin air.

Chapter 2: The Hidden Valley

Zara’s sanctuary was a shepherd’s stone hut smelling of juniper smoke and dried mulberries. As she set Arman’s ribs with a poultice of Himalayan yew, her fingers trembled—not from cold, but from the intensity of his scrutiny. His eyes were the color of glacial silt, tracing the curve of her cheekbone.

"You climb like a markhor," he said, his voice rough with pain. "Where did you learn?"

"Oxford Botany Department," she replied, securing the bandage. "And my grandfather taught me ropework before the militants took him." The confession hung between them, fragile as a primrose in snow.

Outside, the wind sang through blue pine forests. For three days, the valley cradled them. They spoke of poetry—Iqbal’s verses mingling with the crackle of the hearth. She learned he mapped vanishing glaciers for UNESCO; he learned she sought the ghost orchid, a flower last seen when empires crumbled. At night, the shared pattu blanket was their only warmth. Once, her palm brushed his as she checked his bandages. The spark was instantaneous, terrifying.

"Zara," he murmured, her name a sigh. His knuckle grazed her wind-chapped lip. "You’re saving my life and unraveling my discipline."

Chapter 3: Fire in the Karez

On the third night, a blizzard sealed the valley. Huddled under yak wool, their resolve crumbled.

Arman’s lips found the pulse beneath her ear. "Tell me to stop," he breathed.

She answered by tangling her hands in his hair.

The kiss was an avalanche of need. Zara hadn’t been touched since Rafiq—the fiancé lost to Siachen’s crevasses. Arman’s calloused hands slid beneath her tunic, mapping the dip of her waist, the scar along her hipbone. Her own fingers fumbled with his shalwar ties, desperate for skin. When he lowered her onto the fleeces, the wool rough against her back, she arched into him with a gasp. His teeth grazed her collarbone, then lower, worshipping the swell of her breast. The cold vanished, replaced by a heat that made her sob.

"Look at me," he pleaded—Look at me. Their eyes locked as he entered her, a slow, devastating claiming. The storm outside mirrored the tempest within—elemental, sacred, alive. Afterward, he cradled her against his chest, his heartbeat a drum against her temple.

"My path is ice and danger," he warned. "This work... it devours anchors."

She pressed her lips to his salt-streaked throat. "Then let it devour us together."

Chapter 4: Shadows on the Silk Road

Their return to Skardu shattered the idyll. Zara’s research grant was revoked—"Compromised by a lowland cartographer," the dean sneered. Arman’s guild accused him of negligence. Centuries-old tribal rivalries had found fresh prey.

Worse came at dawn. A note pinned to Zara’s tent flap: Your greenhouse burns if he stays. Send him away. Or we salt your earth.

That night, Zara wept into Arman’s shoulder on a moonlit deosai plateau. "They’ll destroy it, Arman. Ten years of—"

He silenced her with a kiss that tasted of rage and wild thyme. "Then we vanish," he vowed. "Tonight."

Chapter 5: Above the River of Stars

They fled deeper into the Karakoram, where oxygen grew thin and the clouds churned below like a sapphire sea. At 15,000 feet, they found an abandoned Buddhist hermitage carved into a cliff-face. Time dissolved. Days were spent charting ice caves, nights tangled in furs and each other. Zara taught village girls to read using pressed flowers; Arman documented vanishing glaciers on calfskin maps. Their love was a silent rebellion against erasure.

One crystalline dawn, Arman led her to a glacial tarn. The world unfurled beneath them—a tapestry of valleys and sorrow, stitched by the Indus River. He sank to one knee, pulling a ring forged from a fossilized ammonite.

"Marry me here," he said, "where only the snow leopards and stars bear witness."

The wind carried her "Yes" as he slid the ring onto her finger. They made love on that outcrop, the sun gilding their skin, their cries lost in the Roof of the World. For that moment, they were free—suspended between earth and sky, where rivers touch heaven .

Epilogue: The Weaver’s Bridge

Years later, monsoon clouds gathered over Gulmaran. Zara knelt in her rebuilt greenhouse, the ghost orchid finally blooming—a spectral white against the mist. Outside, Arman taught their daughter to map the stars.

"The magpies are late this year," the child whispered, pointing to the Milky Way—the Kahkashan their people called the Celestial River .

Zara smiled. "They’re weaving her bridge, jaan. One feather at a time."

As the first Qiqiao Festival lanterns flickered in the valley below, Arman wrapped his arms around Zara. The monsoon broke, washing the mountains in silver. Somewhere, high above the clouds, a bridge of wings shimmered into being—a testament that even in a fractured world, love could etch its own geography .