Varsha was the kind of town people fled from, not fondly remembered but quietly erased from the stories they told afterward. It wasn't on any map that mattered, and even the clouds seemed reluctant to linger. Its crooked streets twisted like ancient scars, lined with the husks of homes that leaned into each other like old men sharing forgotten regrets. The scent of wet earth clung stubbornly to the air long after the last monsoon vanished, as though the town itself refused to dry out, to move on.
Dreams did not thrive in Varsha.
They withered in silence—curling in on themselves like leaves deprived of sun.
Except for one.
Aarav Mishra was the lone defiance to the gravity of this place.
Where others saw endings, he saw beginnings. Where they saw walls, he traced windows in the cracks. His mind was a crucible of ambition, glowing steadily beneath the practiced calm of his polite, worn smile. While the rest of the town still slept—held under the heavy spell of survival—he would sit by the cracked window of their two-room house, fingers ghosting over the fogged glass, sketching imaginary routes to places where his name might mean something. Places where people became more than what they were born into.
His father, once a man of grand ideas and failed ventures, now passed the time hunched over broken watches, coaxing life into things time had already abandoned. His mother, shaped by years of quiet disappointment, whispered of fate and humility—of not asking too much, not wanting too loudly, for fear the gods might punish such arrogance.
But Aarav wanted.
He wanted with a hunger that gnawed through bone and reason.
Sometimes it frightened even him.
At night, when sleep slipped away like a thief, he read by the thin glow of a stolen bulb. Books were his currency: borrowed, smuggled, salvaged from secondhand stalls. Philosophy, psychology, twisted mysteries that pried open the hinges of thought. He devoured them all and filled notebook after notebook with diagrams, strategies, and escape routes. How to rise. How to outthink the system. How to become undeniable.
He had already learned the first lesson:
Talent meant nothing without opportunity.
And then, one gray morning, opportunity arrived.
The envelope was unremarkable—pale, creased, anonymous—but bore the unmistakable seal of St. Icarus Institute of Advanced Studies. A name that hovered in whispered reverence even in a town like Varsha, where reverence was a rare commodity. His hands trembled as he tore it open. His heart was a drumbeat in his throat.
"Congratulations..."
The word blurred before he could finish the sentence.
Tears stung, uninvited but unstoppable.
He had done it.
He was getting out. He was leaving Varsha.
But as he packed his meager belongings into an old, battered suitcase, he felt it: a subtle, cold pull in his chest. A whisper without a voice. Doubt. As if the very soul of the town had reached out to remind him—dreams, here, were often just longer shadows before the fall.
Still, he told himself, this was different.
This was the beginning.
He didn't notice the figure across the street.
Half-swallowed by morning mist.
Watching him. Silent. Still.