The battle was over—on the surface.
Shaurya stood amidst the wreckage of the Paatal Rasoi's central chamber, breath shallow, aura still flickering with residual power. The last of the Bound spirits had crumbled to ash, but the air remained thick with their residue—a haunting shimmer of sorrow clinging to every stone.
Mira knelt next to the youngest of the children they had rescued, binding a mantra-thread bandage on her arm. Her arms did not tremble, her eyes did not.
"Thirty-two," she breathed. "We rescued thirty-two."
Shaurya nodded without looking at her, his eyes on the pieces of the broken mantra plates scattered around them. Some still glowed faintly—coded, half-alive, murmuring with pent-up potential.
Bhuvan limped in from the stairwell, pulling one of the Mithra guards by the collar. "He's breathing," he grunted. "Should we retain him for questioning?"
Shaurya's jaw clenched. "Bind him. We'll interrogate him when the others are secure."
Kiri came out next, his arm full of scrolls and satchels. "Found a room close to the northwest wall. Seemed like a sanctum. There's… something odd chiseled in the floor. Like a mantra ring. Not Mithra design."
Shaurya's head jerked up. "Show me."
They navigated the burning wreckage and down into a peaceful, more narrow passageway—a place that remained unscathed by battle. When Kiri opened the massive iron door, the illumination of Shaurya's palm showed something surprising.
An altar.
Meager, broken, covered in charred pieces of scroll and broken inkstones. On its surface: a fissured statue of Bodhi Devi, her eyes blinded but serene.
Before it was a solitary bronze mantra plate. Newly made. Unstained by blood or purpose.
Shaurya moved forward, dropping low.
The plate had only three glyphs:
Jeevan. Moksha. Anta.
Life. Freedom. End.
Mira was behind him, her breath held. "Someone was attempting to recall what this used to be."
Shaurya followed the glyphs with a single calloused finger.
"Or what it might be again."
The banqueting hall was mayhem.
Silken drapes draped awry, red wine poured like blood over the white marble, and dancers cowered crying under upturned tables. The formerly celebratory atmosphere stank now of smoke, panic, and spirit-seared silk.
Chirag Mithra had disappeared.
And Rasmika Bhujraj stood at its epicenter—unfazed, radiant, frightening in her immobility.
"My lady," panted Mahipal Suri, a senior merchant lord, sweat dripping under his gold-washed turban. "Is it true? Were the screams real? Was. was the Paatal Rasoi beneath this very floor?"
Rasmika's sapphire eyes nailed him like a hawk. "You heard them. I do not traffic in illusions, Lord Suri. I traffic in truth."
Whispers spread out like venom in water. Nobles whispered in fearful knots. Two attempted to exit.
Rasmika uplifted one hand.
The doors thudded shut with a crash that resonated like judgment.
"You will remain," she declared.
Her voice resounded through the chamber like a clarion.
"You will remain, because Ashwan should know which of its leaders still have a spine."
She stepped down from the high dais with the stealth of a stalking tigress. Guards accompanied her, silent but ready.
"Tonight, a shadow has been stripped away. And what we found under it was rot—designed by Mithra hands. Blood experiments. Spirit twisting. On my property. Under my table."
She stopped. Allowing the silence to be felt.
"You drank their wine. You praised them. You danced in their halls while mine screamed below you."
Silks rustling, a gasp from some southern lady.
"Lady Rasmika," a courtier ventured sheepishly, "we—we did not know—"
"Then you were blind. Or purchased."
Nobody dared reply.
She turned to the gallery of nobles, voice becoming as sharp as a sword unsheathed.
"But hear this: I am Bhujraj. My line recalls what it is to guard the soul of Ashwan. We do not cry. We do not bend. We strike."
A ripple of awe. A wave of terror.
"You tremble before the State Lord, Dhairyaveer Mithra?" she asked, acid dripping from her voice. "Good. You should. But fear me more."
She turned to confront the nobles of the Western Hill, whose loyalty tended to shift with silver.
"To those who stand with me—your estates preserved. Your names revered."
"And those who hedge their faith?" she said, glinting. "I will watch your banners consumed by flames. Your houses remade."
A white-robed noblewoman went to one knee. "House Kanvar offers its allegiance to you, Lady Bhujraj. Let our swords be yours for justice."
There were more.
"House Nalin bends the knee to Bhujraj!"
"The Merchants' Circle is at your back, Diamond Flame!"
"The Watch Guild is at your service!"
The tide had shifted. The nobles one by one swore allegiance to Rasmika—not from love, but need. Because the fire in her eyes spoke the truth: no middle ground existed.
Rasmika raised her hands finally. Her voice softened, but her words were steel.
"I will not allow Ashwan to fall into monsters in silk. Nor into monsters in shadows."
Her fierce eyes moved toward the lofty window where a pigeon beat—a secret gesture, unseen but by her most confidential.
"They believe I was tricked. They believe I slept while they etched this territory."
She smiled icily.
"But even in dreams, Bhujraj sees. And my Seekers now go silently. Through temples, spires, courtyards, vaults. The hunt is on."
It was a moonless night.
The heavens above the Mithra Fortress lay black and boundless, as though the stars themselves had been muzzled. Within the tower, torches smoldered low, casting eerie, serrated shadows along the knife-shaped stone walls.
Chirag stood alone in the circular room toward the top—where even the guards dared not stay.
The silence was icy. The ground below his boots was tiled with obsidian and strewn with etched mantra-glyphs, cracked and worn from age. He did not dare pace, here.
Then he sensed it. The tension in the air.
A quiet noise—nearly a sigh—and the arched door slowly swung open.
Dhairyaveer Mithra stepped in.
No fanfare. No guards. Just the State Lord, wrapped in dark robes embroidered with a design that appeared to change ever so slightly—like serpents beneath cloth. Half-lit, half-shadowed was his face, as if he had never really been a part of the world of men.
Chirag bowed, his head low.
"My lord."
Dhairyaveer did not reply at once. He walked with halting steps, and in his gloved hand, he carried something—a small black box of obsidian, inscribed with a single glyph which even Chirag could not decipher.
He laid the box on the ground between them. His tone was tranquil, but icy.
"The day will arrive," Dhairyaveer said, "when the earth below you becomes ash. When the monsters you control turn against you, and even your own shadow shudders in loathing."
Chirag's face furrowed slightly. "I… I am faithful. Paatal Rasoi is ahead of deadline. The plates—"
"This has nothing to do with deadline," Dhairyaveer cut him off, his voice still sharp as a knife. "This has to do with inevitability."
He opened the box.
Within lay a ring.
Dark silver. Hammered with coiled designs that twisted the eye. A translucent gem at its center, shimmered but not with light—it shimmered with memory. Echoes stirred within it. Screams, maybe. Laughter. Impossible to determine.
Chirag was transfixed. Something within him shrank back. Something else reached forward.
"What… is it?" he breathed.
"A pact," Dhairyaveer replied. "Sealed with something older even than the Binding Codex. It holds a promise. A sacrifice."
Chirag was not brave enough to extend a hand for it. "A weapon?"
"A portal. A tether. A last escape. Or a last prison. It depends who uses it… and when."
There was silence. The torches lost their light, as if they were listening.
Dhairyaveer inched forward. "You are the spider, Chirag. But even spiders get caught in their own webs. If that hour comes—when the lab burns, when the heroes arrive, when the gods watch in silence—use this."
Chirag stared at him, brow furrowed. "And what then?"
Dhairyveer's lips twisted into something that could hardly be described as a smile.
"You will be no longer a man."
He forced the box into Chirag's hands.
"Use it only when there is no other way."
And then he turned, departing the chamber as silently as he had arrived.
The torches roared once more as he disappeared.
Chirag gazed down at the ring.
It throbbed once—weak, like a heartbeat.
Somewhere over the bloodied rocks of Paatal Rasoi, among the torn pieces of the long-lost banquet hall, Chirag Mithra fled.
His breathing was labored. Wine and shame stayed on his silk clothes. Behind him, the whispers of frightened nobles, the crash of far-off ruin, and the flickering shadows of Shaurya Jaydev's warpath shook the foundation.
He was losing.
And he knew it.
He stepped into a side alcove—one of the private viewing galleries constructed to see over the feast from behind a cover of shadows. There, in solitude, with the scent of incense still lingering like ghosts beyond the shattered lattice, he opened the obsidian case.
The ring shone in the dim light within, vibrant with something unhealthy.
Chirag breathed: "No other way."
He put the ring on his shaking hand.
A shock wave ran down his vertebrae. His eyes went pale white. Blood exploded from his nostrils as mantras inked across his body burst into reverse, unweaving.
The gem in the ring's center opened—
—and from it flowed something.
Not flame. Not darkness. Spirit. Wraith-energy, ancient and limitless, like a hurricane contained in bone.
His body was torn asunder.
But not annihilated.
It reshaped—taller, contorted, wrapped in glowing translucent aura-armors that breathed the air. His arms were ghostly tendrils infused with mantra-seals, and his eyes burned like tiny suns. Ash-and-flame wings unfolded behind him, silent.
Chirag Mithra was no longer human. He was fury.
And he bellowed.
The ceiling shattered. The whole Diamond Table shook.
Nobles shouted. Chandeliers burst. Statues of former Bhujraj lords crumbled to dust. And in the midst of it all, Rasmika remained unmoving—eyes fixed on the wraith.
"You idiot," she breathed.
The wraith who was Chirag slammed his fist into the ground with a resounding crash like thunder from another world.
The marble burst. The banquet hall caved in.
The whole western wing of the palace collapsed down in a tumble of golden pillars and ash.
Rasmika went down with it.
Nobles plunged into the pit of their sins—down into the secret world below, where Shaurya continued to battle in the ruins of Paatal Rasoi.
Dust and screams streamed through the broken ceiling.
A huge slab fell. Then silence.
And out of the smoke, Rasmika Bhujraj stumbled, bloodied but on her feet, cloak ripped and sapphire crown at an angle. Nobles around her moaned, wounded but alive.
Shaurya stood across the room, turned from the sound, vines uncoiling down his arms as he stood up from the bodies of the final Bound.
They stared at each other for the first time in years.
"Shaurya Jaydev," she gasped.
Slowly, he moved forward, speaking low. "Rasmika Bhujraj."
Above them, the wraith screamed, a scream that twisted the mantra-runes along the room walls.
And then—darkness fell.