The acacia trees along the rim of the mountain monastery were shaken by an afternoon breeze redolent with the soft sweetness of sandalwood and jasmine—messages of peace to a world on the verge of disintegration. Acharya Parshvananda passed through soft pencils of golden light, staff at his side and robes frayed by study and piety. Students bowed in respect as he passed, but his eyes were elsewhere. He was searching for something.
For legends. For truths in dust.
I. The Discovery
That night, Acharya sat in front of the bottom altar of the forbidden library. Wind whispered through barred windows, and candles flickered. Twelve manuscripts he had already reviewed, but his hope was not yet dented. Tonight, something new beckoned.
He unrolled the last scroll: yellowed symbols etched by trembling hands. He read quietly, lips tracing syllables lost to ages.
"…and the plate hammered of bronze will hold spirit and skin. But take heed: the hunger will test the soul, and the union—once formed—cannot rend.
The parchment quivered as though alive. Acharya breathed not a word. This piece—a relic of old—may redefine healing. He sensed the thrum in his bones.".
But the scroll tore in two between his shaking fingers. The final couplets were gone—destroyed by moths or hidden under magic. He stared at the partial recipe for creating a mantra plate.
Something much more pressing grew in him then—not ambition but responsibility.
II. The First Experiment
Weeks later, he worked in an invisible sanctum below the monastery—a vaulted chamber hewn out of living stone. Shelves of herbs, crystals, and stoppered jars gave off a gentle luminescence. At the center lay a bronze plate upon an obsidian slab, etched with rough spiral glyphs.
A volunteer beside it was a wounded soldier in need of healing. Acharya's fingers hovered over the plate as he recited.
"Spirit weave into form, flesh receive your light…"
The plate flared pale violet. Heat flooded through his wounds—all healed in an instant. But then his face went black. He shook, and then convulsed.
"Well," Parshvananda said, and he ceased incantation, knelt, and set his palm against the man's chest. He felt it—a surge of something older than memory. The man's soul blazed with desperate hunger, tore right through his chest.
The plate dissolved.
The soldier did not move. The Acharya stared at his own blood that sullied hallowed glyphs.
He had moved beyond the line. He had healed—but now carried more. A magical leech.
III. The Loss
Word reached the monastery at dawn: his student, Aramanu, had died trying to decipher an identical plate. The child's soul had been broken.
Word told Parshvananda he cried at the passing of his master. That he swore in the empty temple: he would finish what was begun—for Aramanu. He would be a master of the bind.
On the funeral pyre, he had first glimpsed the twins—Aramanu's orphaned heirs. They cowered around the fire like sparks of their dynasty. One boy's downcast eyes; the sister's lip quivered with stifled rage. Their little hands replicated the dance of flame.
Parshvananda's heart broke. He fell to his knees. "Never again," he vowed. He embraced them tightly in silence, and they clung to him—fatherless, fearful, broken.
He took them home.
IV. Apprentices
Year by year, he shaped them in ritual and scholarship. They were his memory, voice, hands. The daughter, Arya, acquired an unnatural stability—able to follow glyphs with eyes covered. The son, Ashah, stuttered and shook when he spoke but saw catalysts where others saw randomness.
He taught them compassion — need.
By the age of twelve, they had learned to blend ink from spirit-bark, recite half the creation rite, and write binding glyphs on iron tablets. And when the initial attempt exhausted a stray dog's life, they went hand in hand with their father but did not bat an eyelid. They had learned to sacrifice at an early age.
And they worshipped him—not as a guru, but as the only parent they'd ever had.
V. The Fall
Then came the letter from Dhairyaveer Mithra.*
"Your Inn-atl, your work is, your wisdom—to the empire's service. Come to Ashwan. Do not deny."
Parshvananda hesitated. He would be thrown out of his monastery by kin and peers. But he saw the chance to at last fulfill the verse he had begun.
He brought his apprentices with him.
When he arrived in Ashwan, they enjoyed the opulence of the Mithra fortress. No wonder. No scholar's peace. Only power.
In the basement he saw his first mantra plate test chambers—Paatal Rasoi's inception. But the setting was sterile: jars, cells, paramilitary discipline. The mystic's bones recognized a perversion of purpose.
The twins—Arya and Ashah—could barely speak when they first saw the Bound experiments. Arya's eyes grew cold. Ashah became silent, mouth full of teeth marks.
When the Thin Man had arranged the twin's first solo incantation to prolong a prisoner's life, Arya protested. He intervened:
"They atone for knowledge," he stated. "Once for healing. Now… for power."
Arya and Ashah—merciless imposition of their own faith, ritual-stained from arcane study over many years—took him aside that night.
Arya panted: "We serve you. But not this."
Ashah supplemented: "We still see the monk who soothed us. Not this." His spirit-plates snapped with shudder.
He realized: The spirit of the child he would have consumed earlier was still human.
He concurred.
VI. The oath (future Paatal Rasoi)
They vowed in the underground low stone corridors.
"No light of good that is not preceded by darkness," he told them. "Your hands shall bind not only mantras, but mercy. You, my blood, are the guardians of that line."
They created a small circle of mantra-bark—testament and reminder.
From this evening, the plates were instruments—not tortures. But elsewhere, Chirag Mithra summoned kommandos and compelled obedience.
Parshvananda stood in silence as Arya hurled a glyph of forgiveness into the cage of the prisoner. A tiny word.
When Chirag guided another experiment, Arya spit on the gear. The Thin Man looked away.
He had made monsters. He hoped his children wouldn't turn into them.
VII. A haunted mirror
Later that evening, Parshvananda stood before a broken mirror in the basement. He held a mantra plate to it— to test the passage for the Parivahan method. The reflection stabilized and trembled.
In the glass, he was a healer, a father. But the twin's glimmer behind him in the mirror—a face torn between redemption and sin—haunted him.
He put the plate on the mirror. He didn't shatter it.
VIII. The Visitor in the Smoke
It was midnight when Chirag Mithra returned to Paatal Rasoi, his boots clicking against the mantra-etched tiles. The thin man—Acharya Parshvananda—was kneeling beside a collapsed test subject, sketching a dying pulse into his ledger.
Chirag's shadow fell over him. "Acharya. What you've made tonight—this new variation. It sings."
Parshvananda didn't look up. "It screams."
"A song. All advancement screams." Chirag drew closer. "Dhairyaveer has approved extra funds. We are no longer tuning—we are producing. Now, batches must increase."
Parshvananda slowly stood, stiff. "The plates are out of balance. Some spirits fight so fiercely the vessel dies. Others become too entwined—losing self, losing mind."
Chirag's tone became bitter. "And yet, a select few do succeed. Bound and tight. We need more of those. Your reservations are documented—but unneeded."
Parshvananda's fists were clenched behind his back. "You have what you came for. But my apprentices—"
"Are exemplary," Chirag interrupted suavely. "They reek of talent. My compliments."
"They are not yours."
"Then teach them more. So they need no master." Chirag's smile returned, the smile that never touched his eyes. "This is a new age, Acharya. You either etch the spell. or you become part of someone else's inscription.".
And with that, he vanished into the smoke.
Arya emerged from the corridor. "He frightens me."
Ashah followed behind, cradling a mantra-burn on the palm of his hand. "He is afraid too. But of something deeper."
Parshvananda glared between them, torn.
Something had to change.
IX. The Quiet Rebellion
The next week, Parshvananda began coding several mantras onto the plates—not for control, but for choice. A whisper in the inscriptions that only the most sensitive spirits could hear: flee or stay behind, survive or disappear.
He called it the Ashray Sutra—the clause of refuge.
When bound spirits began disappearing without a trace, Chirag grew impatient.
"They're slipping away," he exclaimed, slapping a broken plate on the table. "Your mantras are faulty."
Spirits are wind, Lord Mithra," Parshvananda murmured softly. "Not everyone is glad of cages."
"Bind them more closely then."
He remained silent. He merely nodded.
Arya and Ashah became silent too, but watchful. They began to sneak assistance to Mira's survivors—smuggled ointment in vent grille spaces, a mantra thread left loose enough to unfurl.
Monstrosities were still created. But some rebelled—thanks to the Sutra. Parshvananda did not think it a rebellion at all. A seed.
X. The Cost
Experiment Seventy-One thus came to be—a boy no older than Arya. The command was given by Dhairyaveer himself.
The boy was too weak. His aura wavered even before binding commenced.
Arya stood between the table and the glyph-covered walls. "No," she said.
Chirag was present. He laughed. "You have misunderstood your role."
Ashah followed her. "We know it exactly. We are not murderers."
Parshvananda hesitated.
This was the moment.
To be with the children—his children—or to safeguard them by surrender.
He put his hand up and touched the plate himself. "Let me do it. I will make the pain small."
Arya's eyes flamed. "You promised."
He didn't answer.
The boy screamed.
And Parshvananda wept afterwards, silently, as his children averted their faces.
XI. The Letter Unsent
That night, Parshvananda sat down and penned a letter to an old student at the monastery—one who had traveled north, where there was no corruption in Ashwan.
"Brother Rityagni,
I forget now the shape of my own soul. I have joined that which I once attempted to unrevel. These plates of mantra—made from healing—have become chains of fire.".
I still believe there is a return. A redemption. My children still seek me as a beacon in the dark.
But how long before I am the dark itself?"""
He never sent it.
And instead, he incinerated it. Not out of fear—but because he knew that words couldn't undo what plates had already ordained.
XII. The Pact of Smoke and Stone
A month passed, and Arya caught up with him when the laboratory's herb room was quiet. The walls were crying with moisture, the air scented with lemongrass and soot.
"We want to leave."
Ashah's face bobbed. "The scream is louder than the song now."
Parshvananda looked at them. "If you leave, you will not be safe. Mithra will find you. You know too much."
Arya's gaze was unbroken. "Then give us a way to hide."
He exhaled. "And what if I refuse?"
"Then we stay. And degenerate."
That night, they drilled the Antramukti Mantra as a ritual of evasion he had sworn never to reveal. It would conceal their auras completely, make them invisible even to spirit-hunters.
They bound it to a glyph only he could unlock.
"When the day arrives," he breathed, positioning the glyph against Arya's shoulder, "you will come back. But until then, vanish.".
They cried in silence. A final goodbye that would not be spoken.
The twins were missing by dawn.
Chirag did not even notice.
But Parshvananda's hands trembled whenever he picked up a plate afterwards.
He began wearing gloves.
XIII. Ashes of the Altar
In the most distant room of Paatal Rasoi, where even Chirag rarely ventured, Parshvananda knelt before a private altar—one constructed of broken mantras and cracked inkstones. A shattered statue of the Bodhi Devi gazed down at him.
He placed a mantra plate before her.
It wrote only three syllables:
"Jeevan. Moksha. Anta."
(Life. Liberation. End.)
And it was on his lips:
"If this fire must consume me, let it burn with intention."
His eyes burned—not with spirit fire, but with grief.
Somewhere far above, music was heard.
But down here in the depths, the Thin Man grieved.