"There are truths older than gods, and lies deeper than death."
---
Aarav couldn't sleep that night.
Not because of the Oracle's words. Not because of the chants echoing in the temple halls. Not even because his Mark had begun burning again.
It was because when he closed his eyes…
He saw roots.
Twisting. Writhing. Endless.
Buried not in soil, but in bone. Cracked spines. Skulls. Ash.
And from beneath those roots came a whisper—not in words, but memory.
> "You've been here before, haven't you?"
He jolted awake, drenched in sweat. The stone floor beneath the tournament quarters was cold, unforgiving. Yet his palms still glowed faintly with the same sigil the Oracle bled out hours earlier.
> The Root That Betrayed the Tree.
He didn't know what it meant, not fully. But it was haunting him now, not just in visions—but in instinct. As if part of him already knew.
Something beneath the Ashvattha was calling him.
And it had been waiting.
---
By morning, the storm had rolled in.
Monsoon winds cracked the sky apart, turning the great temple city into a crucible of wind and thunder. Competitors were forbidden from leaving the sanctum halls. Guards watched every corridor. The Keepers had vanished again behind veils and ancient doors.
But rules meant little to Aarav now.
He wandered through the forbidden wings, past the burning censers and silent statues, to the oldest parts of the temple. The walls themselves began to feel... watchful.
Etchings emerged where none had been—faces twisted in agony, branches growing from their mouths, inked in a language that felt like it was speaking directly to his bones.
> "Why do I remember a place I've never seen?"
The scent in the air changed—wet soil, burnt bark, something animal.
He stopped in front of a mural.
A tree—upside down—roots dangling like claws into a pit of screaming faces.
And in its center, a child. Faceless.
The same child he'd seen in his dreams.
---
"You're late."
The voice snapped him out of the trance. He turned sharply.
Anita.
Champion of the Vratyas. Eyes hollow with secrets. Veins inked in runes that pulsed like nerves. She held a scroll in one hand and a blade in the other.
"You've seen it, haven't you?" she asked.
He didn't respond. He didn't need to.
"You felt it too. The Root. The pull." She tossed him the scroll. "Stole that from the lowest archives. No record in the surface histories. This goes deeper."
He unrolled the ancient parchment.
The ink shimmered faintly, as if resisting light. The language was ancient—beyond Vedic. Etched in a dialect older than Sanskrit. But somehow, he understood.
> "The Root That Never Died.
The child of unmaking.
When gods turned their backs and men sealed the gate,
it remained. Watching. Waiting. Feeding."
"What is it?" he asked, his throat dry.
Anita's voice dropped to a whisper.
> "It's what the gods buried to preserve their power."
"The first mistake. The first curse."
> "The Root remembers what the Tree chose to forget."
And then it clicked.
His sister.
The memory. The smell of ash. The disappearance.
"She touched the Root," he whispered.
Anita didn't deny it.
"She was one of us. Before they took her. Before they erased her."
---
The descent wasn't planned. It wasn't rehearsed. There was no ritual.
Just instinct.
At midnight, through a hall of iron-bound doors, beneath the Temple of the Unseen Flame, they found a stairwell. Hidden in plain sight. Covered by illusions woven from divine silence.
Every step they took downward, their Marks pulsed harder.
At the end of the passage, a door greeted them. Not stone. Not wood.
Flesh.
The bark of the Ashvattha grown solid with blood and skin and something... otherworldly. It pulsed with heartbeat.
> "If we go in there," Anita said, "we don't come back as the same people."
Aarav placed his hand on the door.
> "Then maybe that's the point."
The door split open.
---
The Root chamber was not made for mortals.
There was no architecture. No symmetry. No balance.
Only a tree—not reaching toward heaven but plunging its branches into the ceiling and roots into the blackness below.
It twisted. It pulsed. It breathed.
Each tendril was a story. Each knot of bark a scream. Faces of those long forgotten were etched into the wood, their eyes still moving.
> "This isn't the tree that grants wishes," Anita said.
> "No," Aarav whispered. "It's the one that remembers debts."
As they stepped closer, a breeze blew against them—not from the wind, but from the depths. Cold and whispering.
The ground cracked. And something moved at the base.
Hands.
Hundreds. Thousands.
Clawing upward from the abyss.
And then… it emerged.
A figure.
Not man. Not god. Not beast.
A child.
Eyeless. Mouth stitched into a grin. Veins like vines. Roots coiling from its back like wings of shadow.
It opened its arms to Aarav.
> "You found me," it whispered.
"Brother."
---
The chamber spun.
Memories not his own flooded Aarav's mind.
He saw the first champions—carved from ash and thunder, bearing names no longer spoken. He saw gods kneel before something older than them—a force with no form, only hunger.
He saw a girl, his sister, thrown into the Root, screaming his name.
> And he saw himself, at the center of the Tree, smiling.
Because he had been there.
Once.
In another life.
Maybe many.
> "You're not here to defeat the gods," the Root-Child whispered.
"You're here to remember why you betrayed them."
---
The Mark on Aarav's chest split open like a blooming flower.
And for the first time in centuries…
The Ashvattha Tree trembled.
---