Shade & Snow
Two old stories, told only in sound.
Close your eyes and put in your AirPods. Walk out of the underworld without looking back, or follow a king into the snow and turn back in time.
You play it with your head
The sounds stay where they are in the room. Turn your head and her footsteps are still behind you, and the King’s voice is still ahead, a little further up the road. Nothing on the screen matters. Everything you need is in your ears.
Put in your AirPods
Any that follow your head: AirPods Pro, AirPods (3rd generation and later), AirPods Max, or Beats with head tracking. Without them, lay your iPhone flat on your chest, your lap or beside you, and spin it to turn.
Sit down and close your eyes
Every walk is taken sitting, or lying down in sleep mode. A short voiced practice comes first.
Listen, and turn — or don’t
One walk forbids you to look back. The other depends on you turning back at the right moment.
Don’t look back. Turn back.
Eurydice
Orpheus sang his way into the underworld, and they gave her back to him on one condition. You climb the road out with her footsteps behind you and Hermes’ lyre ahead. Each ascent is a little longer and stranger than the last: her steps stop, someone whispers your name, the dark goes quiet. A glance is forgiven. Look over your shoulder, and she is gone.
The King in the Snow
From Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. Kay Khosrow has won his war and given away his crown, and he walks into the mountains to vanish. You follow, as his champions did, for his last words. Listen for the signs — the wind rising, the snow squeaking under his feet, the bells of the camp fading behind you — and turn back in time. Too early and you carry nothing home. Too late and the snow keeps you.
The lamp at Tus
When the last walk is over, you come in out of the snow. It is a winter night in 1010, and Ferdowsi has just finished the Shahnameh. He tells you who the King was and why he went, why three of the champions came home, and what the sayings you carried are for. He reads his own couplets as he goes, writes in what you brought down the mountain, and asks you to turn back one last time.
پی افگندم از نظم کاخی بلند
که از باد و بارانش نآید گزند
In English, roughly: I have laid the footings of a high palace of verse, that wind and rain cannot harm.
Everything a walk with closed eyes needs
Sleep mode
Play lying down. A turn of your head on the pillow is a whole turn, the King’s walk moves on its own, and the screen goes dark. Needs AirPods that follow your head.
Fully playable with VoiceOver
Every screen works with VoiceOver, and the mountain walks on its own when you can’t hold the screen.
Answer by voice
When a walk ends, just say “walk on” or “home”. Recognition happens on your device, and nothing is recorded.
A practice first
A short voiced practice teaches you to listen, to glance, and to turn back, before your first walk.
The Scroll
Every saying of the King’s you carry home is written into your Scroll, and where the poem has the words, Ferdowsi’s own couplet in Persian beside it.
Private by design
No accounts, no ads, no analytics, nothing online. Your walks and your Scroll stay on your device.
Old poems, new prose
Eurydice follows Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Georgics, with Hermes as her guide, as on the ancient Orpheus relief. The King in the Snow follows the departure of Kay Khosrow in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. All three are in the public domain. The English is original prose written in their spirit. The Persian couplets are Ferdowsi’s own, taken word for word from ganjoor.net, and in the last chapter, where Ferdowsi himself speaks, only the Persian he reads is his. The voices and sounds were made with ElevenLabs; the King speaks, in English and Persian, in a clone of the developer’s own voice.
Always sit or lie down to play. Never while walking, cycling or driving.
© 2026 Hessam Zahedi. Apple, the Apple logo, AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, iPhone and iPad are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries and regions. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc. Beats is a trademark of Beats Electronics, LLC.