Listen if I don’t dump out all my heart feelings about Chapur, Light, Ghiyath, Arslan, I’ll die.
I need to redo a few TP chapters since they’re all a little mixed up, so forgive me if my timeline is a little off. But hey, slight canon divergence is fine too ✨🕺
Chapur was 18 years old when he fell under the magic comatose, i would assume he and Light are the same age. Chapur awoke and spent 15 years honing his magic. That’d put him around 33 years old by the current time. Sort of, all things considered.
Light however I think didn’t age quite the same way. He was likely awoken and used by the forty thieves but his magic contract to the lamp stunts him. He’s a more enigmatic 88 year old 18 year old, forced between the maturity of an eternal being and the wisdom that comes with it and youthful boyhood due to being trapped in his suspended agelessness. I think that enigmatic aspect helps define him as a sort of trickster archetype, too.
I think his maturity shines when he questions Chapur and when he helps Gina, hidden behind a semi natural facade of immaturity. Semi natural in that, it’s natural because he’s an 18 year old boy in between childhood and adulthood. Unnatural in that he’s an 88 year old djinn with nigh unlimited power.
I love the tension that exists when you think about their relationship, both canonically and for shipping: it’s bittersweet and tragic, Ghiyath and Arslan being the same age pre-timeline, knowing and understanding each other, their similar journeys into adulthood and navigating palace faux pas and respectability, causing mutual mischief, dealing with stuffy overbearing adults and parents telling them how they should act, versus the shattered reality they’ve both endured and now face, anachronic not just out of place in the literal timeline, but no longer aligned with each other. Spending childhood with someone and sharing nearly every experience only to blink and suddenly everything became skewed and misaligned.
Ghiyath, an 18 year old boy who wakes up to see no one he knew is even alive, everything is different, the family of his best friend is the new palace ruler, his father died next to him, he assumes a usurp of power because that seems the most logical despite how painful it is to believe. He hears about a magic lamp stolen from the palace that has ultimate power, he vows to use it to restore everything the way it was, an 18 year old boy terrified and lost who thinks he can fix everything with forbidden time magic just so he can have his father and best friend at his side again, changing his identity to Chapur, his name once a source of pride as royalty but now something he must hide.
Meanwhile the lamp sitting in slumber for 70-40 odd years, the occasional unfortunate soul stumbling in to meet their end at the Cave of Wonders (shh let me call it that). It seems only human contact thus far can awaken Light from the lamp. So without someone to make contact with the lamp, he stays in his suspended state. He was likely used by the Forty Thieves, regardless if he wanted to or not. Even if he could summon himself out of the lamp, what company is the Guardian of the Cave? Bound to only protect the treasure, and the lamp?
Chapur sees Light for the first time and thinks he sees a ghost. He does see a ghost. Light is a ghost of who he used to be, a ghost of Arslan, all the years spent separated from the rubys magic and the 70 years of memory, old memories get lost.
Ghiyath, 18, once adored his best friend. Chapur, 33, sees his best friend, 18, completely unchanged. The cognitive dissonance that must do, to ache for a time that could have been. Light can’t even recognize him at first, he’s lost his memories. What slap to the face that must be, to believe that your once best friend killed your father and stole your throne only to not remember who you even are?
And for Light to be hated so passionately by a phantasmagore he can’t quite place, trying to be unbothered by the obvious significance this relationship is supposed to have, only to be fed the memories later by an outside source, and suddenly feeling the crushing weight of what-could-have-been when he does remember his self as Arslan.
Their relationship is broken, but not in the conventional way. They’re fated together, no matter how shattered their adjacent lives are, and it’s painful. A broken mirror with many shards that can’t be removed because of how perfectly the frame is holding it all together.
