It has been 71 years since the Great War, Mahabharat. The kingdoms and their people are still recovering from the losses.
Few dynasties still hold on to the grudge of losing. The small kingdoms that were defeated by the Pandavas turned into raiders; the bigger ones consolidated what resources they had left and dreamt of a glorious victory.
The supposedly winning side had also lost many men and was affected significantly, but the continuous raids and attacks made their recovery slow, and their proximity to Magadha made it even worse.
The kingdom of Indraprastha, once a barren land, is now the centre of trade, debates, philosophy, and for a long time, peace. Carved by the mighty Pandavas and prospering the most under Parikshit, it had everything one needed — but it was soon to receive what had made it come into existence in the first place: Politics and War.
"Your second attack should not take more than 2 seconds. At worst, treat the sword as an extension of your hands," said Devgupt.
"It is just your age, Grandpa. What kind of Prince will I be if I struck an old man?"
He swung his sword from above. I raised my shield to guard myself, and then —
"What?! This is cheating — you used your leg to push me!"
"Well, you don't expect your enemy to pat you on the back before attacking, do you, Aadivijay?"
"Whatever. But you cheated, that's for sure."
"Be prepared for the worst, my Prince. Fight twice with the same enemy — once in your mind, and then on the battlefield."
The training yard of Indraprastha sat on the eastern wing of the palace, open to the sky, floored in old red stone worn smooth by generations of bare feet and dragged heels. In the morning the shadows of the surrounding walls fell long and cool across it, but by midday the sun owned every inch of it. There were no trees here, no shade. Devgupt had always insisted on that. The battlefield will not shade you either.
Two wooden dummies stood to one side, their painted faces faded from years of receiving blows. On the other wall hung swords of different weights and lengths, arranged not by size but by the age at which a Prince was meant to graduate to each. The last one on the row, a full-length sword with a dark, plain hilt, had not been touched yet. I had been eyeing it for months.
Devgupt had barely broken a sweat. That was the most humiliating part. He was old, lean, his hair entirely white, with the kind of face that has stopped telling you its age and simply settled into being permanent. His hands were spotted with age but his grip on that sword had not wavered once in the entire hour we had been at this. There was a quality of patience in him that felt less like calm and more like he had already seen every swing I would make and was simply waiting for me to arrive at them.
"Again," he said, tossing me a cloth to wipe my face.
I caught it and said nothing. There was no point.
The sound of footsteps on the stone — a particular kind of footstep, unhurried but deliberate, the kind that a corridor has learned to recognise — made both of us turn.
"My son will need a new teacher if this pace continues, Devgupt — a fast learner needs a steady tutor. I didn't think you two would get along so fast, hah" said my father, the King.
He stood at the entrance of the yard, filling the frame of the arch without effort. Tall, lean, muscular, dusky in appearance, with a big moustache and a soft tone of voice that had always seemed slightly at odds with the way the rest of him looked. There was a relaxed authority about him — the kind that doesn't need to announce itself. He was dressed simply, as he always was within the palace, a cotton angavastram loosely draped, no crown, no ceremonial weight. He had never seemed to feel the need for those things inside his own walls.
"Father!"
"There's my Maharathi(Ultimate warrior)! I suppose you are not skipping your classes anymore, like before."
"I am keeping an eye on him, Father. If he tries again, maybe I will teach him some hand-to-hand combat," said my brother Rasik.
I had not even noticed Rasika behind him. That was typical. Rasika moved through rooms the way smoke did — quietly and then suddenly everywhere.
"And then maybe I will teach you what real hand-to-hand combat feels like, Rasika. What do you say?" said my eldest brother Mahit.
Mahit leaned against the far wall of the archway, arms loosely crossed, watching the whole scene with the kind of mild amusement he reserved for situations where he had already decided not to intervene but was enjoying the fact that he could. Of the three of us, Mahit was the one who had always seemed to belong in a story older than himself. People noticed him when he walked into a room — not because of any theatre or effort on his part, but simply because there was a quality of stillness in him that made the air around him feel more settled. He was the most revered of us three, and he wore that with an ease that would have looked arrogant on anyone else but somehow looked like grace on him.
"Why do you always side with him? Let us teach our little brother more, or do you want him to remain this lousy crybaby?"
"Father!! See what Rasika is saying!"
"Enough, you three."
Father stepped into the yard, glancing once at the training dummies, once at Devgupt — a look passed between them that I had seen before and never quite been able to read — and then he turned back to us with a particular expression that meant the conversation was over and something better was beginning.
"Let us get inside and eat a big elaborate feast. I had them prepare Moonghalwa too — let us attack that first. What do you say?"
The inner dining hall was warm in a way the rest of the palace rarely was. It faced west, and in the late morning the light came through the carved stone lattice on the upper windows and fell in broken patterns across the floor, shifting slowly as the sun moved. The smell of food had been drifting through the corridors for an hour before we arrived and had collected here, thick and layered — ghee and cardamom and something roasted underneath it all.
We sat as we always had. Father at the head, not at the far end where a formal table would have placed him, but closer to the centre, where he could reach across if he wanted. Mahit to his right, Rasika and I across from each other, which had always been a poorly considered arrangement by whoever had first set it up. Devgupt sat to Father's left, which was unusual — he rarely ate with us — but Father had insisted, and Devgupt had not refused, though he looked as though a part of him wanted to.
The Moonghalwa arrived first. It always did, for Father. The serving boys had learned long ago not to wait to be asked.
"You parried better this morning," Devgupt said to me without looking up from his bowl. "Your footing was off, but the parry was better."
"He gets that from his mother," Father said. "She could block anything. Never saw anyone with faster hands in a guard position. Never told her that, which was a mistake."
There was a brief, comfortable silence. The kind that only comes when no one needs to fill it.
"The raids from the western flank have been coming closer," Mahit said, quietly, not making it an alarm. He had a way of raising difficult things without sharpening them unnecessarily.
Father did not answer immediately. He ate a spoonful of the halwa, unhurried.
"I know," he said.
"People are speaking about it in the market. The southern traders have started asking about alternate routes."
"Rightly so. We will have an answer for them before the rain bearing clouds arrive."
The conversation moved on, as it always did — to Mahit's latest session with the scholars, to a delegation coming from the north, to whether the eastern garden needed to be expanded or simply better maintained, to a disagreement between two merchants at the trade gate that had apparently lasted three days and was becoming something of a local spectacle. Father laughed at that one, genuinely, a full laugh, and for a little while the morning was entirely ordinary and entirely good.
"Sire, this was the 13th attack. Magadha is using raiders from the west, and their small batches of armies keep attacking every 30 to 35 days. We could not keep prisoners of war after the 5th attack. Just because they surrender or ask for forgiveness does not mean you should let them inside the gates." said Devgupt.
"It has been 7 years since the first attack, and most of their men have started working at the Aravalli mountains. They have started to treat Indraprastha as their home now, but even then I keep them at the outskirts of the city. They have eaten with us, worked with us, sworn an oath with us and most importantly, Magadha's economy is dead, there is no life for them or their families."
"It is good to expect righteousness from people, but not when you are a King — and not when, even after 7 years, our spies could not find out the purpose of these suicide-army missions. What we are keeping in this castle can change the world forever, and..."
The warning bell began ringing.
"The sound is very loud... This is the Palace bell being rung — for the first time in Indraprastha's history. This means we are under attack, and the enemy is inside the palace."
For tens of dynasties, and as far back as anyone could remember, no enemy had ever reached the palace gates.
The sudden breach changed the entire atmosphere of the palace.
It did not happen the way anyone imagined an attack would happen. There was no single moment of rupture, no one gate that broke and announced it. It happened the way a fever takes hold, first one thing, then another, each individually small, and then suddenly the whole body is burning and you cannot point to where it began.
The outer courtyard guards had gone quiet. That was the first sign, though no one inside the palace recognized it as one. The quiet was mistaken for calm. By the time the second bell post failed to respond to the first, the men at the inner gate were already being pressed from two directions simultaneously.
The women in the eastern corridor heard it before they saw anything — a sound that should not have been there, metal on stone, close, and then a scream from the direction of the kitchens that was cut short in a way that a scream should not be cut short. The head of the household staff, a woman who had managed the palace's inner workings for twenty-three years and had never once raised her voice, stood very still in the middle of the corridor for a moment before she began moving people away from the windows. Not running. Moving. Quietly, quickly, with her hands outstretched like she was herding something fragile. She did not look at the windows herself.
The men trying to hold the inner gates were being stabbed, and the thing that made it worse was the silence of it. The brown-robed figures did not shout. They did not coordinate with calls or signals that anyone could hear. They simply pressed forward, and the palace guards, trained for warfare that announced itself, found themselves fighting something that did not follow any grammar of combat they had been taught.
A young servant girl, perhaps fourteen, carrying a stack of folded cloth, turned a corner in the western passage and walked directly into it. She stood for a moment with the cloth still in her hands, looking at something that her mind had not yet found a way to process, cloth fell. Then she screamed. And then every woman within hearing range who had been holding herself at the edge of composure simply let go. The scream passed through the corridors like fire through dry grass, one voice catching from another, and the palace, which had been tense and fearful and trying to hold its shape, became something else entirely. Not a palace anymore. Just a place where something terrible was happening.
The household women had trained for fires, for floods, for illness. They had been told what to do if an enemy reached the outer walls. No one had told them what to do when the enemy was already inside, moving through the same corridors where they carried meals and folded linen and lived their ordinary lives. That absence of instruction showed now. Some ran toward the sound, unable to reason against instinct. Some ran away from it and found more of the same waiting in the next corridor. Some simply stopped, pressed themselves against the nearest wall and became very small, as if smallness could protect them.
The royal women — the older ones, who had lived through enough to have given fear a shape they could recognize — were different. Not unafraid. But they moved. They gathered the younger ones, the children, the servants who had frozen, and they moved toward the inner rooms, toward the places where the walls were thickest, where the doors were heaviest, performing the only act available to them; making the distance between themselves and the sounds as large as possible, and hoping that distance meant something. There is a particular quality of silence that precedes a palace falling — not the silence of nothing happening, but the silence of everything that was ordinary being interrupted at once. The sound of a bell that had never been rung. The absence of the usual footsteps in the corridor. The way the light looked the same, indifferent, while below it, people were dying.
The gates to the outer courtyard were already compromised when the alarm was raised. The guards on the inner walls had not been positioned for an internal breach, they were watching outward, as they had always watched outward, as there had never been a reason to do otherwise. The screaming came from the southern corridor first, then the east wing, and then it was everywhere, layered and overlapping, so that it stopped sounding like individual voices and became something more like weather.
"Send all of my personal guards to evacuate the palace and —"
Swarms of men in brown robes, emanating a dense dark aura with only their eyes visible, barged in, breaking through windows and gates. There was no war cry from them, no shouting, no rally. They moved in complete silence, which was somehow worse than any sound they could have made. Each held a unique, unusual dagger, not the standard issue of any army, not the crude weapons of raiders. These were crafted things, specific things, the kind of weapon that is made for a single purpose by someone who has thought at length about that purpose.
Their way of moving was unlike anything the palace guards had been trained to counter. Not aggressive exactly, more like water finding its level, filling every available space with a patient, terrible efficiency. The palace guards who tried to hold them were not outfought so much as simply redirected, their training suddenly irrelevant against something it had never anticipated.
"Their demeanour is completely different, and their way of holding a dagger is unlike anything I have seen. Deva, retreat and find my children. You know it is time."
"No, Sire, I will stay with you."
The King did not look at him immediately. He was watching the men pour through the broken gate, counting, reading their formation, his eyes doing the work they had always done in the moments before a fight - calm, precise, already three moves ahead. When he turned to Deva, there was no fear in his face. There was something else. Something that looked like a man who has known for a long time that a particular day would come, and has now simply looked up and seen it arriving.
"Are you insulting me, Deva? You don't think I can handle 32 men?"
"No, no!" With teary eyes, Deva said, "I don't feel right about this, Mihir. I just don't…"
The name landed differently than anything else in the room. Mihir. Not Sire. Not my King. The name his mother had given him, the name that only one person in the palace still used, and only in moments that had no room for anything formal.
The King was quiet for a beat.
When he spoke again his voice was the same soft tone it always was, but there was something underneath it now, something that had been held down for years by duty and composure and the daily weight of being a King, and was now simply present, the way a fire is present when a door opens.
"Heh. It has been decades since I last heard my name from you."
He looked at Deva the way you look at someone you have stood beside for so long that looking at them is almost like looking inward. There was no ceremony in it. No performance. Just two men who had shared enough of a life that words had long since become the smaller part of what passed between them.
Deva's jaw was set. His eyes were full. He was not wiping them, not hiding them, not apologizing for them. The tears were simply there, the way rain is simply there, and underneath them his expression was something ancient and unmoving. The face of a man who has already fought this argument inside himself and lost, and knows he has lost, and is making it anyway because making it is all he has left.
"Go," the King said. Quiet. Final. Not cruel, not soft. The voice of a man who has made his decision and closed the door on every other version of this moment. "It is my order. My unhinged will. Under the Akhand Pact, that I now invoke."
He turned back to the gate.
"Get my three children to safety. Away from here."
He did not look at Deva again after that.
Deva stood there for one more moment in the doorway. His hand moved slightly, involuntarily, the way a hand moves when it wants to reach for something and has decided against it. Then he turned and ran. Deva ran through the palace, avoiding combat entirely, his expression tense and strained. He had the kind of face that, in ordinary times, gave very little away — steady, careful, composed from long practice. Now it gave everything away. His expressive eyes made no effort to hide his fear and anxiety.
The eastern passage was clear. He took it, ducking under a low arch, past the room where the King's maps were kept, past the stone alcove where three small swords hung in a row, sized for three boys at three different ages. He did not look at them.
"Aadi! Mahit!! Rasik!!"
Fruits do not fall far from the tree.
All three of them were at the gates, evacuating the populace — as though they had not needed to be told, as though some instinct older than their training had simply activated and pointed them outward. Aadijay was holding a baby someone had thrust at him in the chaos, one arm supporting the child with a steadiness that did not match how young he was. Rasik stood on a low pedestal near the gate, his voice carrying over the crowd without strain: "Our soldiers and my Father are here, worry not! Just go this way!" — directing people toward the Northern gates with the particular confidence of someone who has decided, in the middle of chaos, that confidence itself is a form of protection. Mahit moved through the houses at the palace's edge with a systematic patience, checking each one, calling out, waiting a moment, moving on. He did not rush.
"What are you doing here, Deva? You should be with our father."
"I cannot explain, Rasik. Leave all of this."
"Forget guarding me, get the people to safety. Our Princes are already doing your duty."
"At once, Sire."
"Mahit! All three of you, follow me now."
"Are we going to join Baba, Deva?" "Finally, a battle alongside Father!"
"Come this way."
The corridor Deva led them through was not one they used regularly. It was older than the rest of the palace, the stone here was a different color, darker, and the walls were slightly uneven, as though they had been built in a different era and the newer palace had simply grown around them rather than replacing them. The light here came from clay lamps set into alcoves rather than the larger torches of the main halls. Their footsteps echoed differently.
"This is the way to the watchtower, Kaka. What is happening?" said Mahit.
"Mind your head."
The passage narrowed and then opened into a circular chamber at the base of the watchtower staircase. The floor here was cold, even in the warmth of the season. A single window, barely wider than a hand's span, let in a thin blade of afternoon light. The sounds of the palace — screaming, metal, the dull percussion of bodies and doors — were muffled here, but present, the way a storm sounds from inside a thick wall.
"You did not answer my question."
Deva stopped walking. He stood with his back to them for a moment before he turned. Whatever expression he had been managing in the corridor was no longer being managed.
"I wish we had the time to explain, to teach, to fight and then witness you all come into your glory. I wish we had more time, Mahit."
"Why are you talking like this? Where is Father, Kaka?"
"What is happening Deva?"
"Is everything alright, Bhaiya?"
A sudden gust of wind knocked the three Princes to the ground — though every window in the chamber was closed, though there was no source for it, though the air had been still a breath before. The lamp in the alcove went out. The room went dark without transition, as if darkness had been waiting just outside the light's edge and had simply stepped in.
And then — light. Not from the window, not from any wall. From Deva's hands.
A geoid, cosmical in appearance, seemed to gather itself from the air around him rather than emerge from any pocket or fold. It was engraved with a thousand stars, or what looked like stars — points of light that moved slowly within the glass or stone or whatever it was made of, as though it contained its own small sky. The darkness in the room did not retreat from it. Instead, it seemed drawn to it, pulled inward, as though the globe was not generating light so much as collecting it, concentrating it, pulling the last of it from every corner until the chamber was entirely dark except for the one blazing point in Deva's hands.
His face in that light looked nothing like the face they had grown up beside. Or perhaps it looked exactly like it, stripped of all the careful steadiness, the managed expressions, the daily patience of a man who had decided long ago to be a particular kind of person and had held to that decision without wavering. What was underneath was older and sadder and entirely sincere.
He threw the globe to the floor.
The burst felt like something releasing, shockwave moved outward from the impact point in a slow, visible carpet, displacing dust and air, the room completely engulfed in white.
"Find your destiny. Find yourselves. Find those like you, living in ignorance, for the night is far from dawn. The Chaos has just begun; the Order must prevail. The Great War is here. Find your purpose. There is no moment to rest, to wait, to stop "
"Kalahpriy!! I am invoking my last wish, my earned boon. Guide them."
The light is collapsing inward. I can see Kaka — vulnerable, crying and smiling all at once. It feels like time has slowed, or perhaps I am imagining it. We are being sucked into the ground, and all I can think of is - nothing, Mahit thought, distressed and confused.
"No! Devaa!"
"Kaka, what are you doing to us? Where is Father?! I want to see Father." Aadijay, the youngest, was sobbing, looking at Deva the way a sheep looks at a shepherd who has raised and fed it daily, only to now bring a blade. The banishment felt like a swing of the axe. Like the person who had always meant safety had simply, without explanation, become the source of the wound.
The white consumed everything.
The fiery globe appeared in a faraway forest, merging into the ground on a mountain peak.
The weather was completely different - no ice mountains visible on the horizon in any direction, only rocky terrain everywhere the eye landed. The trees below the peak were dark and dense, and in the last light of the day they had the look of something that had been there longer than memory. The sky was a deep bruised amber at the edge where the sun had just dropped, fading upward into a blue so dark it was almost black.
"No!!" screamed Mahit.
"Whe — where are we?" asked Rasik.
"Bhaiya, are you alright?" Aadijay asked Mahit.
"I am fine anuj."
Mahit stood up and looked around the peak. The stone beneath them was different from Indraprastha's red. Darker, grainier, older. He pressed one hand against it briefly, as if confirming something, and then straightened.
"We are very far from Indraprastha. The air is too moist for this early in the year."
"How far, do you think? We have to get back to Father."
"Deva would not send us anywhere near Indraprastha. It must be months or weeks of travel."
The amber at the sky's edge was deepening toward orange. The stars were beginning, faint at first and then, as the eye adjusted, startling in number — more than could be seen from the city, where the torches and lamps softened the sky. Out here, there was nothing between them and the dark.
"The sun has almost set, and we are very far east of Indraprastha. Deva! I will kill you for this. I will never forgive you!"
His screams hit the rocks and came back with nothing.
Another sphere of blazing light appeared without warning, sending mud and dirt flying, clearing the ground several inches deep. The air around the crater it had made shimmered briefly, like heat from a fire, though the sphere itself had gone dark on contact with the ground.
And then a figure, standing where nothing had stood a moment before.
"Ah! Now I know how a lioness must feel when she hunts — when she has encircled her prey and the gazelle is just one claw-swipe away and she knows it. Huhh!"
The voice was easy, almost conversational, with a warmth in it that was entirely the wrong kind of warmth for what the words were actually saying. The figure stood at the edge of the crater, and the last of the day's light was behind him, which made reading his face difficult.
"Do you know how many years I have waited? How many people I had to befriend, how many I had to kill, how many I had to convince. Just to be here, facing you three?"
Mahit leapt at the stranger with his sword.
A sharp, thunderous sound broke the silence of the mountain — Mahit's sword was blocked.
Blocked. Stopped. The stranger had not moved his feet. He had simply raised one arm and the sword had found it and gone no further, as if the sword had reached the edge of what was possible and could not travel beyond it.
"Tch, tch! Is that how you greet a guest, my Lord Prince? This is very unprincely. Don't you think?"
Mahit jumped back in pure shock.
I couldn't even see Mahit approaching the stranger, and that man blocked it, Aadijay thought, equally stunned. He had seen Mahit move quickly before, had seen him fight.
Mahit, always praised for his skill and speed, was in disbelief. For the first time he felt his humanity, his fear, his vulnerability as a mortal. Without even a proper fight, merely by the stranger's presence and that one block, his body was screaming for life.
The stranger emanates pure power, something vast and incomprehensible, neither divine nor evil, just power in its purest form. My body is refusing to move, to try – Mahit's consciousness.
"Who are you, and how do you know us? And how did you arrive here using the same thing that sent us? Speak, before I decide to slit your throat," said Rasik.
"Oh, my Prince. Please calm down," the stranger said, an evil smile on his face. "My name is Udaybhadra. You do not know me, but I know everything about you. This is thrilling — to speak to someone like you. I could tell you any secret and it would still be kept secret. I can tell you anything, and it would not change a single thing. Haha, but you know..."
Rasik charged at him.
"You siblings are very ill-mannered. Don't you know you shouldn't interrupt when someone is talking?"
Rasik moved with terrifying speed, a dagger in one hand, a sword in the other.
Uday blocked his swings, and when Rasik switched to the dagger, he dodged with ease. It was like a thunderstorm — continuous strikes penetrating the chilling silence of the forest, sparks thrown with every clash of steel, a flash with every blow. The relentless sound and light could send any man running.
Aadijay watched Rasik's swings — the speed at which he changed positions, crouching to attack the legs, rushing behind Uday, swinging the sword at his neck and the dagger at his gut. And then, seeing his chance, Aadijay jumped in too.
Rasik kept shifting position, attacking constantly, while Aadijay focused entirely on the legs. With the forest burning in the background, embers drifting through the air, the fight looked like a desperate battle for survival - desperate for Aadijay and Rasik, and merely a game for their enemy.
Then, a loud, sharp sound, a great spark — Rasik's sword was broken in half. Rasik was thrown back, barely standing, drawing shallow, rapid breaths. Aadijay barely standing, clung to his sword, thumping his chest for air.
"I wanted to kill your mother with my own hands. I had the privilege of killing your father, though, and now the three of you. I will make your deat—"
"I... will... bury... you... alive." A new speed, a new force — Rasik was filled with rage. Mahit's eyes widened; his disbelief and shock now mingled with grief.
"You are lying!!" Aadijay charged at Udaybhadra.
Uday blocked Aadijay's swing with his fingers.
"Pathetic." He kicked Aadijay in the gut and brought a knee to his head, knocking him unconscious.
Uday suddenly seized Rasik by the arms and hurled him into the forest.
"I did all of this to get you alone. I had some doubts, but I did not think you three would be such easy prey. I thought at least two of you would be my hardest kill, my glorious quarry. I am disappointed. I suppose a mere mortal, your father, remains my hardest kill yet."
Enraged, his eyes red, filled with vengeance, Rasik screamed and leapt toward Uday. The mud beneath his feet began to steam, the impressions of his push solidified in the muddy ground. For a moment, the valiant forest fire seemed to follow Rasik — as though the flames had clutched in toward him. The broken sword met Uday's block once more, but this time the full force of the forest fire came surging forward, pushing the enemy far back.
Off-balance, surprised, Uday tried to rise, and then:
"I think that is enough." A soft voice. A sage, with a mellowing touch, placed his hands on Rasik's shoulders. "Rest, my child. You have fought valiantly."
"Ah! You! You finally showed up," said Udaybhadra.
"Yes, and I am taking them with me. Do not worry — you will meet them again, for the last time."
As he finished speaking, the mountain's peak and its edge crumbled. All three Princes, now losing consciousness, were held suspended in midair alongside the sage. The moon shone down on them — full, close, indifferent. Dust slowly engulfed Udaybhadra below, swallowing him from the feet upward in the way that a tide swallows a mark in sand, patient and complete. The last thing Rasik heard before darkness was a faint scream carried up from below: "Naar...."
I cannot move. What is this feeling of... vastness? As though I am experiencing the entire universe in this single moment, Mahit thought.
They were no longer on the mountain, nor were they falling. There was no sensation of falling - no wind, no pull, no sense of direction at all. Pitch-black vastness surrounded them, dotted with a few bright points of light that did not behave like stars. They were too close, or too large, or too aware, they shifted, slightly, when you looked directly at them, the way a flame shifts when you approach it. Like a river of nothingness containing every possible thing in the universe.
And through that vast, frightening, unfamiliar dark, a soothing voice cut through — not from any direction, not from above or below or beside, but from everywhere at once, the way your own heartbeat is everywhere at once.