Aranya didn't remember falling asleep.
She remembered the ache in her side, a dull throb stitched with painkillers. She remembered Veyne's voice—a quiet storm—just beyond the veil of her consciousness. And she remembered the flicker of flamelight on her lids, dancing like memory.
Then, nothing.
Or rather—everything.
She stood barefoot on black stone. The ground was smooth, cold, yet humming. Around her rose vaults, carved from obsidian and shaped like open books. The walls weren't stone—they were language. Glyphs pulsed faintly across the surfaces, breathing like lungs.
Each sigil whispered to her. Not in sound, but in knowing.
"Time is not linear. It is recursive."
"All memory is matter, and all matter remembers."
"To walk this path is to meet yourself again."
Aranya walked.
The air shimmered with golden motes, like pollen in sunlight. Her hand brushed one of the vault's edges, and it unfurled—not like a door, but like a scroll made of light and dust. Inside, images moved like living ink.
She saw Veyne.
But not the Veyne of now.
This Veyne wore robes of deep grey, not armour. His crown was simple—a circlet of silver, no flames. He stood at the center of a great amphitheatre, surrounded by factions that once sat as equals. Faith, Knowledge, Law, Desire, Shadow, War, and Trade. The Seven. Whole.
He was younger—not by appearance, but by burden.
And beside him stood Seraya.
Their hands were intertwined.
Aranya stepped closer, trying to hear what he was saying. But the sound was warped, like water passing through glass. Still, his expression held certainty. This was Veyne before betrayal. Before vengeance curved his spine and sharpened his gaze.
The scroll shifted.
Now, it showed Veyne alone—kneeling before a pillar of fire that reached to the sky. The Ashen Crown floated above him, incomplete. Symbols from the Gita danced around him—shlokas written in ancient Vedic script. She recognized them, though they came from another world.
One pulsed brighter than the rest.
"Karmanye vadhikaraste, Ma phaleshou kada chana..."
(You have the right to perform your actions, but not to the fruits of your actions.)
The flame grew intense, flickering around those words until they branded into the dream itself.
"Ego... is the shadow of memory," a voice said behind her.
She turned.
It was not a person. Not exactly.
A scroll had taken shape into a figure—tall, robed, faceless. Made entirely of script and light.
"The Flame is not your master," it said. "Nor is the past. But you walk between both, dreaming of a future that remembers."
"Who are you?" Aranya asked, her voice echoing strangely.
"I am the Wound That Writes. I do not belong to a faction. I belong to consequence."
It raised a hand, and the amphitheatre returned. This time, Veyne stood alone at its center—no crown, no companions. The factions were fractured. A splintered mirror of what once was. Above him, a shadow loomed—a faceless one, mouth stitched with gold thread.
The figure whispered:
"He will burn again.
But what remains after the fire
Will not remember your name."
The dream quaked.
The vault began to close in.
Glyphs hissed and retreated into stone, the motes extinguishing like dying stars. Aranya fell backward, the weight of that vision compressing into a single phrase that echoed in her skull:
"He once chose love.
Now, he must choose truth."
She woke with a gasp.
Veyne was beside her, his hand wrapped around hers, eyes closed in meditation.
She exhaled. Sweat clung to her temples, but her wounds no longer ached. Something inside her had healed—and something else had cracked open.
She touched Veyne's hand, and he stirred.
"I saw you," she said, voice hoarse.
"In Atlantis."
He opened his eyes slowly. There was no surprise in them—only gravity.
"Then the vault is awake," he murmured. "We don't have much time."
The tunnels beneath Dharavi weren't mapped.
No records, no blueprints. Only whispers from those who remembered Mumbai before its sky touched towers and neon-slick streets. Veyne moved through the dark, guided not by sight, but by pull. Something within the Ashen Crown—it throbbed faintly, as if recognising the soil.
Nalini had told him: the old resistance safehouses were built on forgotten caverns.
But this wasn't resistance architecture.
This was older. Far older.
The chamber opened suddenly.
The stone gave way to arches ribbed with roots, each one pulsing faintly with a blue light. Moss and iron dust clung to the walls like breath that hadn't exhaled. In the centre stood a single spire, carved from white stone, cracked down the middle like lightning had kissed it.
A figure waited near its base. Cloaked in ash-grey robes, eyes shadowed by a hood.
"You came," the figure said.
The voice was familiar.
Not the tone, but the cadence—like someone who had once knelt before him in another life.
"You were one of the Watchers," Veyne said.
The figure nodded.
"I was Darin once. Initiate of the Third Eye. I lit the incense during the Rites of Sight. I recorded your Judgements during the Rift Accord. You don't remember that... but I do."
Veyne didn't blink. "And now you serve the Order?"
"I serve Truth," Darin spat. "Not the charade you've returned to play. I watched the world forget Atlantis while you slept in stone. I bled in the dark while your name became myth."
The spire between them vibrated—low and mournful.
Veyne stepped closer.
"You forgot your oath."
"I remembered too well. The Watchers were meant to observe. But you taught us to feel. You corrupted the Eye with hope."
He flung off the cloak.
The Ashen Crown flared briefly.
Darin's body was marked with runes—fractured Watcher sigils and broken chains of memory. They were carved into his flesh like rebellion made permanent.
"Where did you learn those symbols?" Veyne asked, frowning.
Darin's grin was cracked porcelain. "The Bookless Library. We all thought it was myth. But I found it. I touched its echo. It showed me a city beyond thought—half-formed, all-memory. A Dominion where even the Ashen Crown dims."
The spire shuddered again.
Suddenly, Darin lunged.
Their clash wasn't physical—not at first.
Veyne raised his palm and caught Darin's strike mid-air, but the moment fractured. Time slipped. Their surroundings blurred into layers—stone became scroll, shadow became flame.
Veyne staggered.
For a heartbeat, he stood not in Mumbai but in a half-built city, a skyline of glass and quills. Streets paved in ideas. Buildings humming with names he had once decreed.
Knowledge.
This was a threshold. A world forming itself from memory. And it did not want him here.
"This is not your dominion, Ashen Son," a whisper said.
"You rule flame. We rule fact."
He was pulled back as Darin screamed—one hand glowing with a cracked glyph.
"You burned the truth!" Darin shouted. "Atlantis fell because you chose passion over principle!"
Veyne's fury ignited. "You abandoned the Watchers' purpose. You clung to ruin because you feared change!"
They collided again.
This time, stone cracked.
Veyne pushed Darin back with a wave of Ashen influence. Darin hit the spire, and for one second, the whole chamber inverted—gravity blinked, time pulsed backward like a cough, and memory bled into the present.
A child screamed from nowhere.
A scroll opened mid-air.
And a single sentence hung between them:
"The King Who Forgets Shall Reignite the Fall."
Veyne gasped.
The moment shattered.
Darin collapsed, bleeding from the eyes. His mouth moved, but the silence was unnatural—the same silence that had claimed the courier. It slithered into the edges of the air.
The Order's mark.
"They're here," Darin whispered with his last breath. "They watch the memory. They know you remember."
Then he died.
No wound. No visible cause. Just... erased.
Veyne stood over the body, silent.
The Ashen Crown dimmed slightly, as if digesting what had just occurred.
His breath fogged in the air though the chamber was not cold.
Behind him, the spire began to crack. The root-ribbed arches trembled. Time was folding here.
This ruin had been a door.
Now it was closing.
He turned and walked away, heart heavy.
He had seen a city that wasn't built yet, but remembered everything.
The Dominion of Knowledge had awakened.
But it had not invited him.
It had only warned.
Nalini didn't speak much after the attempted assassination.
She hadn't flinched, hadn't shouted. Just moved with robotic calm—attending to Aranya's injuries, managing the lockdown, and ensuring the attackers were imprisoned without bloodshed. But something had changed in her eyes.
It wasn't anger.
It was a quiet, clinical sorrow. Like a healer watching a wound return after years of mending.
Now, hours later, she stood alone in the quietest wing of the Saffron Hand stronghold—one of the old ritual chambers, now empty. Statues of forgotten saints lined the walls, half covered in marigold garlands and dust.
Veyne entered without a word.
He didn't need to announce himself.
Nalini always knew when he approached. Some part of her still operated like a sentinel.
She didn't turn.
"You should be with her," she said softly.
"She's sleeping," Veyne replied. "She murmured something about… scrolls and vaults."
"Then she's healing the right way."
Silence stretched.
Veyne stepped beside her. His voice was quiet.
"You once told me your silence came from discipline. But that's not the whole truth, is it?"
Nalini closed her eyes.
"No," she said. "It isn't."
"I was born into the Dominion of Law," she said, her voice low. "A province where emotion was error and order was salvation. My earliest memory is of a courtroom—not one with people, but machines. Automated judges. My parents were administrators. I never heard them fight. They argued in legal code."
She paused, as if gauging his reaction.
"I was trained as a Resolver. That was our term for agents of moral balance. Not just enforcers—correctors. We didn't only police action. We monitored intention."
Veyne looked at her sharply. "Surveillance?"
Nalini nodded.
"Dreams, desires, deviance—we had systems that traced the lean of a person's thoughts before they even moved. The belief was: 'prevent pain by ending potential harm.' It started with law… it ended in mind control."
Veyne clenched his jaw.
"Sounds like tyranny disguised as safety."
"It was." Nalini's eyes grew distant. "But to me, back then, it was truth. I rose quickly. I was respected. Efficient. Unshaken."
She turned finally, facing him.
"But then I saw a child sentenced to recalibration because he imagined flying a kite during class. A deviation from civic focus. His record was flagged for non-essential desire."
Her voice cracked for just a moment.
"I authorised the sentence myself."
Veyne didn't speak.
He let her carry the weight.
"I defected a year later. Not because I was brave, but because I had started dreaming. They would've found it in my psyche scan eventually. So I fled."
Her fingers touched the edge of an old blade hanging from the wall—a ceremonial dagger once used in sacred judgments.
"I found the Sanrakshna after that. They believed in protection without surveillance. Discipline without oppression. I learned to feel again there. But it's slow. Sometimes… too slow."
She met his eyes.
"That's why I never truly trusted Desire. Your faction thrives on want. On impulse. And I come from a world where want was a crime."
Veyne exhaled. The chamber felt heavier now—not with guilt, but understanding.
"You've carried this alone for a long time."
"I had to."
"You don't anymore."
A flicker of something crossed her face—softness, vulnerability.
Then she stood straighter, voice returning to calm steel.
"Listen to me, Veyne. The splinter in Desire is not the only fracture. There are echoes within this city—remnants of old dominions, ancient creeds. If Law rises again… it won't ask for loyalty. It will take obedience. And it will come with perfect silence."
She paused, then added:
"You must learn the difference between unity and control. One leads to peace. The other to extinction."
They stood in silence beneath the statue of an old monk, hand raised in benediction.
Veyne reached out and placed his hand on Nalini's shoulder.
No flames. No visions.
Just… presence.
A quiet acknowledgement that scars didn't always need fire to heal.
Some needed truth.
It began as a pulse.
No sirens. No alerts.
Just a thrum—low, ancient, almost like a heartbeat beneath the concrete.
At 3:03 AM, every historian in the Pune Preservation Council vanished. No signs of struggle. No broken locks. Their archives: completely intact—except the digital logs. Wiped clean, not with brute force but with surgical precision.
In Delhi, the National Library's east wing—dedicated to mythological reconstruction—collapsed inwards. No one was hurt, but the debris formed a perfect spiral, carved with glyphs no modern scholar could read.
And in the alleys of Varanasi, three independent seers painted the same symbol on their walls in unison: a circle with a thousand tiny teeth.
No one told them to.
They didn't even remember doing it.
In the heart of Mumbai, Aranya bolted upright in her bed, gasping.
Veyne was already beside her, blade in hand.
"It's not another attack," she whispered, sweat beading across her brow. "It's… an echo. Something's remembering us."
Later that day, Veyne stood on the rooftop of the Saffron Hand's stronghold, the smogged skyline of Mumbai burning bronze beneath a rising sun. Nalini joined him quietly, holding a stack of crumpled reports. The top one bore a simple, unnerving headline:
"Archivists Missing. City Records Blanked Overnight."
"Seven cities," she said. "Different geographies. Different jurisdictions. Same outcome. Only historical departments affected."
"And only certain histories," Aranya added, stepping into the light. Her voice was thin but steady. "All the erased files were either about pre-Aryan civilization, lost rivers… or mythologies tied to the Ashen Age."
Veyne didn't speak.
His eyes scanned the distance, as if searching for a pattern in the clouds.
"Somebody doesn't want the past remembered," he murmured.
"Or," Nalini said, "someone's trying to make us forget that it was real."
It was then that the Watchers responded.
A whisper—not spoken, but felt—rippled through the minds of the Saffron Hand's inner circle. It came with a scent: old paper, ink, petrichor.
And one sentence:
"The Librarian who Speaks in Tongues has seen you."
Veyne staggered, clutching his temple. A flicker of imagery flashed in his mind: a cloaked figure in a black vault lined with orbs of light, each one whispering in a different language. Books floated midair, turning their own pages. And at the center—
—a faceless being, its voice a thousand dialects and none.
Then silence.
He came to with Aranya's hand on his cheek and Nalini crouched beside him, face taut with alarm.
"What did you see?" Aranya asked.
He blinked hard.
"Not a place," he said slowly. "A… convergence. A memory that remembers itself."
"And the Librarian?"
Veyne's jaw tightened.
"They don't guard books. They guard meaning. And they've started watching."
Back inside the strategy chamber, a flicker of motion on their ancient projector caught their attention. Karan Dev stood by it, visibly shaken.
"Signal just came in from a contact in Hyderabad," he said. "Every mural from the Temple of Origins has begun… shedding paint. As if it's moulting."
Aranya frowned. "What's underneath?"
Karan hesitated. "Glyphs. Not painted—revealed. Symbols matching the spiral you dreamed."
Veyne turned to the others.
"This isn't random. This is a recall. The Dominion of Knowledge is awakening. But they're not calling out to us. They're calling us in—to test if we remember what was once forgotten."
Nalini's voice was dry. "And if we fail that test?"
Aranya's gaze was distant.
"Then we may forget ourselves."