Sa'id al-Sahiratصائد الساحرات

*The Witch Hunter* is an Arabic novel that, upon its publication, achieves unprecedented success in the literary sphere and wins a prestigious award. Buoyed by this triumph, the novelist receives a second, highly enticing offer from his publisher: to step into the real world and embody the protagonist of his own novel—*The Witch Hunter*—in order to rescue a noble gentleman from the clutches of an "evil sorcerer" who has cast a deadly spell upon him, one that threatens to claim his life imminently. The reason for selecting the novelist for this mission is that the gentleman noticed a striking resemblance between the symptoms afflicting him—along with the circumstances surrounding them—and those that befell one of the characters in the novel, leading him to suspect that he, too, has been bewitched. The novelist remained unconvinced by the publisher's claims; after all, his writing was merely a product of his imagination. However, when the publisher confirmed that the bewitched gentleman had discovered—within the private library of his palace—the very magical sigil described in the novel (a five-pointed star centered within a serpent-shaped circle, with the serpent devouring its own tail, and containing—within the circle, between the points of the star—the exact same cryptic characters), the novelist finally agreed to take on the task, hoping to uncover a logical explanation for what he was hearing. As events unfold, the novelist makes a startling discovery: he himself—not the noble gentleman—was the true target of the spell that had been cast. It turns out that the gentleman—who had secretly funded the novel's production through various intermediaries—had orchestrated the entire elaborate scheme with a singular objective: to entrap his own sister, accuse her of witchcraft, and seize her vast fortune.