The wind seared with sulfur and spirit.
Rubble crackled as shattered mantra-runes on the walls spat and went dark, singed by the shrieking reverberations of Chirag Mithra's wraith-form. The hidden chamber was revealed—open to the sky where the Diamond Table had previously loomed. Through the shattered ceiling, moonlight colored stripes on blood and ash.
And in the heart of that chaos, Shaurya Jaydev stood, his blade dripping with smoke, and met eyes with the last person he expected to see.
Rasmika Bhujraj.
She rose from a collapsed marble pillar, cloak torn, one boot missing, but spine unbowed. Her eyes—sapphire and flame—locked with his.
"Shaurya."
He lowered his sword, barely. "You're still alive."
A blood-curdling shriek rang out above them. The wraith—no longer man, no longer Chirag—floated through the air, a maelstrom given form. Its arms twisted in shimmering fire, glyphs curling in midair about its body, and each flutter of its ghostly wings brought gales through the destroyed chamber.
"I assumed you were dead," she croaked, voice proud but rough.
"I was," he said. "Then I became bored with it."
They remained motionless. For a moment only. Until the creature fell once more.
The wraith plummeted—fist-first, enveloped in mantra-flame.
Rasmika rolled to the left, Shaurya to the right. The ground shattered behind them in an explosion of broken stone and shrieking echoes.
"Speak later," Rasmika snarled, rolling beneath a pillar. "Kill now."
Shaurya's sword flared with his aura. "Glad we see eye-to-eye on this."
They moved in tandem—not strangers, not comrades exactly. They had a timing that was intuitive. Rasmika deployed three mantra-blades from her gauntlet; Shaurya took advantage of the distraction to vault onto the wraith's flank, cutting deep into spirit-skin.
It screamed.
"You always did like the big entrances," she yelled, flanking.
"You always did lay out the table for carnage," he yelled back.
She came close to smiling.
The wraith snapped out. A tendril wrapped around Shaurya's ribs—he turned, fell onto the ground. A grunt came from his chest.
Rasmika didn't move. She leapt between him and the next strike, throwing up a little glyph-shield that shattered at once but provided enough time.
"You saved me?" he gasped.
"I owe you one," she grumbled. "Now we're square."
The earth shook as the wraith alighted once more. Its shape writhed, limbs elongating too far, its voice in shattered syllables that were like broken mantras and crying.
Rasmika's voice fell.
"What was done to him?"
Shaurya shook his head. "Unknown. A ring. An agreement. Possibly a curse. He's not Chirag anymore."
"Then we finish what he became."
They walked again.
Shaurya called on vines of spirit-light that lashed the wraith's limbs. Rasmika dashed through the opening and drove a mantra-dagger deep into its chest. The blade fizzled—then shattered.
The wraith roared, flinging them both away with an aura-pulse.
They hit the floor hard. Dust swirled. For a moment, only silence.
Then Rasmika rolled over, laughing bitterly. "Just like Khambala Gorge. Except this time, we're older, slower, and vastly outgunned."
Shaurya stood, panting. "Speak for yourself."
She stared at him. Actually looked.
"Where were you all these years, Shaurya?"
He didn't reply. He merely brought up his sword, aura blazing hot.
"Let us get through this. Then I will tell you anything."
The wraith screamed once more—louder, uglier. The actual fight had only now begun.
Deep below the falling ceiling, in the darkness even spirit-light could not penetrate, two stood observed.
Arya and Ashah Bhattacharya stood at the back of the wreckage of a fallen ventilation shaft, eyes aglow with mantra residue. Their robes stained with soot. Their breathing, calm. They had come unseen—through the same neglected tunnels they used to play in as children. They had heard the screams. They had felt the beat of the wraith in their bones.
They had not come for war.
But for choice.
"He's lagging behind," Ashah breathed, looking beyond a crack in the wall where Shaurya's shadow danced in battle.
Arya regulated a pallid silver tablet in her palm, carving something with surgical strokes of a bone stylus.
"No, he's holding back. He's conserving himself for when the wraith gets through."
Ashah's breath shook. "But she's present too. Rasmika. I didn't expect they'd fight together again."
Arya hesitated. For one moment, her hands shook.
"They're not fighting for one another. Just for the same monster."
There was a faraway crash on the floor. Rubble fell from above. They leapt to avoid it, ducking. Dust rained down like snowflakes between them.
Ashah stood staring at her. "Do we move now?"
Arya slowly breathed out. "Not straight away. They'd notice. Or worse—follow the spirit thread."
She caressed the ground softly and muttered a chant under her breath.
A glyph materialized on a broken tile.
The Ashray Sutra.
Its pulses radiated outward in shimmering firefly brightness. It would loosen the wraith's soul-thread just so. Not damage. Just push. A crack ready to expand.
Ashah infused his own counter-charm—brief, staccato, vibrating like glass passed through by gust. The wraith winced across the battlefield. Shaurya did not see. Nor Rasmika.
"Would he forgive us?" Ashah asked abruptly, still observing the fight.
Arya did not reply immediately.
Then: "He already does. He just doesn't realize it."
Silence hung between them, heavier than the rubble around them. They recalled Parshvananda's shaking hands. His final lesson. His sacrifice.
"We could kill him now," Ashah said. "Shatter the anchor. Cut the ring's hold."
Arya's fingers gripped the plate harder. "And become killers?"
A pause.
"No. We assist them to victory. And disappear."
Ashah nodded slowly. "Then what?"
Arya turned to him at last. Her voice was gentler now, sorrowful.
"Then we locate the other children like us. Before they're caught in the web."
The glyph on the ground dissolved.
And like smoke on the breeze, the twins vanished once more—no sign left behind. No footsteps, no glow.
Only a dying mantra echo, somewhere within the stones:
"Jeevan. Moksha. Anta."
Under shattered vaults of the Diamond Table, between mantra-seared marble and guttering detritus, he emerged into the open.
Acharya Parshvananda—dusty with ash, robe frayed at the bottom, face ashen with years of voluntary quiet—strode alone through the smoke.
The Wraith that had once been Chirag stood tall above the rubble, limbs twisted into coils of spirit-light and weaponized aura. The mere presence of it sent mantra glyphs streaming from the very walls themselves. But within it, something trembled—recognition, maybe.
"Chirag Mithra," Parshvananda murmured. "Take off that ring. Or lose what little remains of you."
The wraith screamed—a cacophony of temple collapses and flesh turned inside out.
Parshvananda did not blink.
"I inscribed the initial line of that which created you. Now I will conclude the verse."
He fell onto his knees. Unrolled a new bark sheet, white and silver-dyed.
His shaking fingers inscribed the Ashray Sutra—but overlaid it, inured it, reformed it with additional syllables. Not a let-go, but an accounting. A reflection to send one's inner soul against the wraithform prison.".
The air hissed. The glyph glowed white-gold, brighter than any mantra plate had in the early years of Paatal Rasoi.
The wraith shrieked.
For the first time, it took a step back.
Not in agony. In remembrance.
"Do you recall your name?" Parshvananda's voice climbed, cracked with emotion. "Before the empire. Before the decay. You were a child who gave me a lotus once. Told me you wanted to cure your sister's scar."
The wraith hesitated, form wavering. One of the glowing eyes went dark.
"You inquired of me what mantra meant 'home.' I replied none did."
The mantra circle at his feet throbbed. Its radiance spread—crossing old veins of the floor, awakening old bindings in the stones. Even the shattered statue of Bodhi Devi awakened.
The wraith screamed again, but not with anger, but fracture.
Spirit-flesh sloughed off its form in spiral patterns. The ring smoldered red-hot.
Parshvananda's voice fell to a whisper. "Return. Or finish here. But decide."
He laid his hand on the Ashray Sutra.
And the glyph exploded—not out, but in—into Chirag's aura.
There was no noise.
Only dust settling. The breathless wonder of suspended time.
Then—collapse.
The wraith collapsed, like silk losing wind. Its limbs fell in spirals of ash. And inside it—
A body.
Crumpled, human, bleeding from eyes and mouth.
Chirag Mithra.
Alive. Barely.
Parshvananda towered over him, his hand seared to the bone by mantra backlash. Blood trickled from his nose.
He dropped to one knee.
Ashah and Arya stood in the shadows, wide-eyed.
"He… he did it," Ashah breathed.
Arya said nothing. Her gaze was already on the next group of soldiers approaching.
And in that single breathless instant, Acharya Parshvananda—father, traitor, healer—had reclaimed one truth from the shadows:
Even monsters cut out of mantras could potentially bleed the men's ink.
The stillness following the fall of Chirag's body was deceiving.
Too quiet. Too shallow.
Shaurya came a second too late, accompanied by Mira and Udai, who had just fought their way out through a broken spiral corridor. Kiri and Bhuvan trailed behind, dust-stained but intact.
Parshvananda glanced up from where he crouched beside Chirag's motionless body.
"I cut the ring's control," he croaked. "I saw the boy within once more."
Shaurya moved forward, vines still quivering down his arms. "Then it's done."
But Mira saw it first.
A whisper.
A solitary, spiraling tendril of mantra-light, like smoke unwinding in reverse.
From the gemstone within the fallen ring.
"No—" she cautioned.
But it was already underway.
Chirag's body arched in great convulsion, eyes staring wide with horror as spirit-energy rushed back through him—not from the ring, but to it. Like a drowning soul struggling upward through death.
The floor creaked under his feet.
A scream ripped through the air—primal, ancient, not human. No longer.
The ring lifted up into the air and whirled madly. From it exploded not one person—but hundreds.
Not bodies—imprints.
Phantom illusions of Chirag, each a flash of his past agony, pride, betrayal, ambition—broken selves coming together into one wraithlike form larger than before.
A gestalt of unresolved suffering.
It roared—and ascended—up, up, up—burst through the flaming ceiling, soaring into Ashwan's sky like a comet of pain.
"No!" Parshvananda screamed, stretching out weakly.
Shaurya sprang, but too late.
The wraith-shape burst through the palace roof.
And the city beheld it.
Over the spires of Ashwan, over the temples, over the houses of poor and rich alike—a godless form composed of all that had gone awry.
The Wraith came down into the city with a scream that shattered windows and toppled prayer bells. Ashwan started to burn.