The serpent-spear captain's weapon hissed its last, the heatstone in its forked blade cracking like burnt glass. He spat blood onto cobblestones that were no longer frost-rimed—they'd become a mosaic of frozen flesh and steel, each corpse a unique snowflake pattern suspended mid-scream. "Status report. Now."
His dual-sword commander slumped against a crystallized banyan tree, one arm hanging useless from a shoulder that had been flash-frozen and flash-thawed in the same instant. "Seventy-three hostiles... neutralized." He coughed, the sound wet and thick. "All units. Including..."
His gaze swept the courtyard where his soldiers had stood moments before. Seventeen men, now seventeen drifts of diamond dust.
"Including ours," the captain finished grimly. He pressed a hand to his ribs, feeling bone grind against bone. "The frost-bitch's technique didn't discriminate."
"Suicide?" The serpent-spear captain laughed, a wet, ugly sound that sprayed more blood. "Look around, Sword-Master. No crater. No ash. She didn't explode—she unmade. That's not suicide, that's..."
He trailed off, his spear-point trembling as it traced the air where Shruti Baghel had knelt. There was nothing. Not even a frozen footprint. Just a perfect absence where a person had been.
"The forbidden texts," the Sword-Master murmured, crawling toward the library's burnt shell. His twin blades were snapped at the hilt, but he still clutched them like talismans. "Every scroll we came for. Gone."
"Not gone." The serpent-spear kicked a frozen fragment of Sapta-Diary IV. It shattered into powder. "Annihilated. Along with our entire platoon."
The captain's jaw tightened. "Majesty will have our heads for this."
"Or," the Sword-Master said slowly, "we give him a better story."
The three survivors looked at each other. The serpent-spear's armor was caked in half-frozen gore. The Sword-Master's face was a mask of burns and frostbite. The captain stood with a visible tremor in his legs, his Prana core flickering like a dying ember.
"Three children," the captain said, his voice dropping. "Behind the Matriarch's body. Still intact."
"Intact?" The serpent-spear limped over, grimacing with each step. "Frozen like statues?"
"Alive." The Sword-Master pressed gauntleted fingers to a girl's neck, feeling the slow, thready pulse. "But their Prana... it's dormant. Newborn-level. She stripped them."
"She preserved them," the captain corrected. "Selective neutralization. Only a Baghel could—" He stopped, his eyes narrowing. "She's not dead."
Both commanders froze.
"Explain," the serpent-spear hissed.
"The children are alive. The knowledge is gone. The princess is..." The captain gestured at the emptiness. "But Baghels don't sacrifice themselves for servants. Ever."
"So it's a trick." The Sword-Master's broken blades rose instinctively. "A feint."
"Check the eastern gate," the captain ordered. "She mentioned it before she—"
"Already frozen solid." The serpent-spear spat again. "We'd need a month to thaw it, even with our cores at full."
"Which means," the captain exhaled slowly, "she had an exit planned before she activated the technique."
"Impossible." But the serpent-spear's voice wavered. "The diary was her Prana source. We all saw her tear it."
"She tore a diary," the Sword-Master said quietly. He held up three singed pages he'd scavenged from the library's ashes. "There are seven Sapta-Diaries. These are from IV, V, and VI. The other three were already missing from the inventory we intercepted."
For a long moment, only the wind moved through the frozen courtyard, stirring snowflake corpses.
"She's alive." The captain's voice was flat with certainty. "Somewhere."
"Then we hunt her," the serpent-spear snarled, his weapon sparking with renewed heat.
"With what army?" The Sword-Master gestured at their nonexistent troops. "With what Prana? I'm running on fumes. You're coughing blood. Serpent-Spear's core is cracked. We couldn't hunt a rabbit right now."
The captain stared at the three comatose children, at the snow-drifts that had been his men, at the emptiness where an enemy had smiled. "We don't hunt her," he said finally. "We bury her."
"Sir?"
"Report to Majesty: Princess Shruti Baghel, last heir of Vidyagriha, terminated herself via forbidden technique to deny us victory. The knowledge was destroyed. The line is extinct." He paused. "The children are our proof."
"Proof?" The serpent-spear frowned.
"Living evidence that the Frost Clan died protecting its weakest." The captain's lips curved, a cruel mockery of Shruti's own smile. "Let the story serve our purpose. Let the court see Baghel nobility as weakness. And let the princess believe she's dead to us."
The Sword-Master nodded slowly. "She'll surface eventually. They always do."
"And when she does," the captain said, "the world will think her a ghost. Easier to kill that way."
The serpent-spear laughed, though it hurt his cracked ribs. "A ghost with no Prana, no clan, no knowledge. You're not letting her go. You're putting her in a cage she built herself."
"Precisely." The captain turned away, his cape snapping in the frozen wind. "Load the children. We're done here."
Behind them, the three comatose forms were lifted onto a sled. They looked peaceful, frozen in a sleep deeper than death. The perfect martyrs for a story that was still being written.
---
Shruti woke to the taste of moss and the smell of rain on hot leaves.
Her body felt wrong—too light, too empty. She tried to summon frost to her fingertips and felt nothing. Not the familiar chill of her Prana core, not even the dull ache of depletion. Just... static. A blank space where her power had lived.
She rolled onto her back, staring up at a canopy so green it hurt. This wasn't Vidyagriha. Vidyagriha didn't have humidity that made your lungs feel like wet cloth. It didn't have insects that droned in frequencies that made your teeth vibrate. It had order. Ice. Silence.
This place was chaos.
"Where—" she croaked, but her voice was a stranger's. She tried again, the word emerging as a cracked whisper. "Where am I?"
"The question," a voice answered from between the trees, "is not where, but when."
Shruti scrambled to her feet, broken sword in hand. The blade was intact now, but different—warped, like metal that had been melted and reforged in a dream. "Who's there?"
"When you tore the diary," the voice continued, ignoring her question, "you asked a question. The Beggar's Frost answered. The answer was: not yet."
"Not yet?" Shruti's grip tightened. "Not yet what?"
"Not yet dead. Not yet finished. Not yet... free." The voice seemed to circle her, coming from no fixed direction. "The diary was a key. You broke it in the lock. The door opened anyway. This is the other side."
"I don't understand." Her voice broke. "I killed them. I killed everyone. The children—"
"Are safe." The voice was firm for the first time. "You commanded it. Your final Prana obeyed. They sleep, but they live."
Shruti's knees buckled. She caught herself on the moss, the humming vegetation pulsing beneath her palms like a living heart. "Mumma..."
"Gone." The voice was gentle now, ancient and tired. "Your father, too. Their signatures vanished from the world-grid three minutes before your technique activated."
The words hit like a physical blow. Shruti curled inward, her forehead pressing into the damp earth. "No. No, he was—he was at the eastern gate—"
"He was at the eastern gate when a Prana-bomb detonated in his personal reserves. A sabotage. Internal." The voice paused. "Someone in Vidyagriha wanted him dead before the siege ended."
Shruti's mind reeled. The inferno clan had been the enemy. But her father had been betrayed from within? By who? The council? The librarians? The guards who'd saluted her?
She couldn't process it. The grief was too large, a beast that filled her chest and clawed up her throat. She tried to scream, but it came out as a whimper. She tried to breathe, but her lungs were full of ice that wasn't there anymore.
"I want to die," she whispered to the moss. "Please. Let me die."
"The jungle doesn't grant requests," the voice said, fading. "It grants chances. You have three days. After that, the Prana-eaters find you. They do not care about your grief."
Then silence. True silence, not the hollow quiet of a frozen battlefield, but the living, breathing silence of a world that didn't know her name.
---
Shruti walked.
She walked until her feet were blistered and raw, until the blood on her dhoti had dried to brown stains, until the sun had crossed the sky and set and rose again. She walked because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering.
Remembering her mother's hand crumbling to snow.
Remembering her father's final roar, moments before his Prana signature vanished.
Remembering the seventeen soldiers she'd unmade, their surprise turning to frost mid-laugh.
"I killed them," she told a tree that looked like a frozen guard. "I killed everything."
The tree didn't answer. The jungle hummed on, indifferent.
She'd been walking uphill for hours when she realized the ground had become stone. The trees had thinned. Before her, a mountain rose, its peak catching the first light of a new dawn. Her body was screaming—hunger a hollow in her gut, thirst a fire in her throat, grief a weight on her shoulders that felt heavy enough to drive her into the earth.
But she kept walking.
Because if she stopped, the truth would catch up: she was alone. Truly, completely alone. No clan, no power, no name that meant anything in this green hell. If she died here, no one would know. If she lived, no one would care.
She reached a cliff's edge as the sun broke over the horizon. The light hit her face, and she didn't close her eyes. Let it blind her. Let it burn.
"I can't die yet," she said to the sunrise. The words felt hollow. A lie she was telling herself.
But then her father's voice, not from the jungle but from memory: "A Baghel's promise is the only thing that survives."
Her mother's voice, layered over it: "Believe in your king."
She was the heir. There was no king left to believe in. Only her.
"I am the daughter of Shankar Baghel," she told the light, her voice gaining an edge. "I am Shruti Baghel."
The name felt different now. Not a title. A weapon.
A poem surfaced from her eighth birthday, the one her parents had made her recite until it was carved into her bones:
"A dream breathes 'one day,'
But 'day one' is the sword.
A gentle mind charts the way,
Rough hands make it scored.
You walk a line, stark and true,
Through weather, stone, and fate.
You'll seize the sun, blazing through,
Or lie beneath the weight."
She hadn't understood it then. She did now.
She looked at her broken sword. At her blistered, bleeding hands. At the sunrise that didn't care about her pain.
"I won't lie beneath the weight," she whispered. Then louder: "I'll serve their heads to my parents."
The jungle listened.
"I'll cripple them until they beg."
The mountain echoed.
"I'll destroy everything they have."
She flung the broken sword into the abyss. It spun, catching fire from the dawn, becoming a comet of her old self.
"Let's play the countdown game, Agnihotri," she whispered, the clan's forbidden final oath tasting like ash and vengeance.
From deep in the jungle, too far to be heard but close enough to feel, an old voice whispered:
"Indeed."
But Shruti was already descending the mountain, her beggar's smile carved in ice, her countdown begun.
The hunt would start soon. And this time, she wouldn't be the prey.