Chapter 149
"Kālo'smi lokakṣayakṛtpravṛddho... and I am the one who turns back time according to My will."
Arya read the third line, and here he paused longer than before, a pause as if he were trying to pronounce words from a language he had never learned yet somehow felt familiar on his tongue, a pause as if he were trying to understand why Krishna, in that sacred text, spoke of himself as time that destroys the world, as a force that cannot be stopped by anyone, as something that comes for all living beings without exception, and yet suddenly spoke of reversing time, of turning back something that should only move forward, of doing something that even in the oldest mythologies had never been described as something even the most powerful god could accomplish.
And when Arya continued to the fourth line, to the teaching of causality delivered by a prince who abandoned his palace to sit beneath the same tree until he understood that everything that arises will inevitably cease, that nothing is eternal in a world that is constantly changing, that suffering is born from the desire to hold on to what cannot be held, Nirma heard how that verse was twisted into something else, into something that claimed that causality was not a chain of events moving on its own, but a hand deliberately arranging each link, a hand deliberately pulling every thread, a hand seated at the center of time that never moves forward because it itself is the one that moves it.
"All things occur according to the Mandate of Heaven, and I am the holder of that mandate."
Arya read the final line, a line derived from doctrines taught by philosophers who sat by rivers flowing from unnamed mountains, doctrines that spoke of authority granted by the heavens to those worthy of receiving it, of a mandate that could be withdrawn when a ruler lost wisdom, of dynasties rising and falling according to the will of something greater than any human, yet in the hands that twisted it, the mandate could no longer be taken away, no longer passed from one hand to another, no longer something to be earned or defended, but a declaration of ownership, a claim that the heavens grant no mandate to anyone because the heavens themselves belong to him.
Nirma felt something like coldness creeping from the tips of her fingers still resting open on her lap, spreading through her wrists still heavy with blood that had not fully recovered, traveling up her arms that still remembered the resonance of the three liturgies that had not completely left her mind.
And when that cold reached her chest, reached the space she had long filled with hatred and vigilance and resentment she never allowed to heal, she realized that what she had just heard was not merely a collection of verses twisted by an Abnormal that was too intelligent, not merely a message written across the sky of Jerusalem on the day the city drowned in blood, but something more, something like a map that had long been hidden behind all the cases she had handled, behind all the bodies she had seen, behind all the clues she had never understood because she had never possessed the key to read them.
Five major religions, five sacred texts, five teachings that shaped human civilization across most stable timelines, all spoke of time, all spoke of something greater than humanity, all gave place to a force that could not be reached by hands that only knew swords and bullets.
And in the hand that rewrote these verses, in the fingers that twisted every word from its original meaning, those five teachings no longer spoke of surrender to something greater, no longer spoke of submission to time that could not be intervened in, but spoke of claim, spoke of ownership, spoke of something declaring that time was his, that life and death were his, that causality was his, that the mandate of heaven was his, that he was time, that he was the mover, that he was the holder, that he was something never recorded in any sacred text yet suddenly appeared in the sky of Jerusalem on the day blood flowed through the streets ankle-deep, on the day the Crusaders slaughtered Muslim and Jewish inhabitants with tireless blades, on the day history was written by hands still wet with blood that had not yet dried.
"That means…."
Arya's voice lingered, not because he doubted, but because something in the report refused to be read as ordinary data.
His fingers paused over the final page, as if the paper was not paper, but a thin surface holding something behind it.
"The message in the sky over Jerusalem in the year 1099… was not merely an anomaly. Not the act of an Abnormal disrupting historical property."
He raised his gaze.
In his eyes—which were never truly black, never truly brown—there was a flicker of uneasy awareness, like someone who had just realized they had been standing too close to something that should not possess distance.
"This is a warning."
And that word, once spoken, felt wrong.
Too small.
Too human.
Because what appeared in the sky at that time was not writing in any sense known to mankind.
It was not written in ink, nor carved, but formed of something resembling light—yet not a light that had ever been named.
The letters existed and did not exist at once, read by thousands of eyes that did not truly understand what they saw, recorded by witnesses who did not even possess the language to describe the experience.
A message that should not have existed in the year 1099, in a language not yet discovered—or perhaps never to be discovered.
A message… that may have been waiting.
Waiting since before humanity first carved meaning into stone, into skin, into fragile sheets that would one day be destroyed by the very time they believed they could understand.
Arya closed his report slowly.
"A warning for the Temporal Cross-Police," he continued, now with a flat tone forced back into place, like someone attempting to tidy reality with intonation, "not to interfere in the affairs of an entity intent on targeting the concept of time… and the five major religions."
The room felt narrower after those words were spoken.
"And that warning," he added, more quietly, "is not meant to be understood by everyone. Only by those foolish enough to believe that time can be tamed—with regulations, with procedures, with weapons they continue to produce endlessly."
Nirma did not respond immediately when Arya finished reading, nor did she nod or shake her head or make any movement that could be interpreted as acceptance or rejection of the information that had just flowed from the man before her, because within her mind, in the space she had long used to store all the information she had gathered across years, across centuries, from one fallen civilization to another rising upon its ruins, the scattered pieces of a puzzle began to move, began to shift, began to search for the proper place to unite into something whole.
To be continued…