PrologueAndalusia, Spain — Present Day
The cave was not supposed to be there.
Elena Navarro stood frozen, the dry wind sweeping across the scorched hills of Ronda, her flashlight's beam trembling as it flickered across an uneven rockface. It had taken her three years to decipher the Moorish land deeds, another six months to match satellite anomalies with historical seismic collapses. And now this—this hollow, humming space carved into the belly of the earth, marked with a symbol she could not explain.
It was not Roman. Not Moorish. Not even Celtic-Iberian.
The carving on the wall looked like a flower, a spiral, a flame—and yet none of those things. At its center was an eight-pointed star, etched with impossible precision, each point coiled into Sanskrit syllables that danced in silence.
But what made her legs give out, what made her drop to her knees as dust curled around her lips like incense smoke—was the sound.
It wasn't audible. Not quite. But it was present. Like a memory someone else had left behind, playing just beneath the skin of time.
A voice. Feminine. Resigned. Eternal.
"I was never rescued.I walked through the fire.I became the fire."
Elena gasped. The air turned heavy. Her vision blurred—and for a split second, the cave transformed.
The stone melted into pillars of gold-veined rock. Jasmine bloomed in the air. And on a dais carved of blue crystal stood a woman draped in fire-colored silk, her eyes closed, her arms bound in thread, her voice whispering in perfect Vedic Sanskrit.
Then it was gone.
Just a cave. Just a cave again.