He had been lying on the stone bed for perhaps half an hour, staring at the ceiling and doing his best thinking, when he heard footsteps.
Not the heavy clank of guards. Lighter than that. Two sets of them — one measured and deliberate, the other quicker, less even, with a slight skip in the rhythm that suggested the person producing it was either very young or very excited or possibly both.
Arya sat up.
The blue curtain at the entrance shifted, and two people walked in.
The first was his mother.
The memories had told him to expect a straight back, and the memories had not exaggerated.
Rajmata Devayani was not a tall woman, but she carried herself in a way that made the question of height feel irrelevant. She was perhaps thirty, though the particular quality of tiredness around her eyes made her seem older — not the tiredness of someone who had slept badly last night, but the tiredness that comes from years of holding something up that would fall if she stopped. Her robes were silk, dark green, and she wore no crown tonight. She didn't need one. She walked into a room the way certain people walk into rooms, as if the room had been waiting for her.
Behind her, barely contained by the doorframe, was a girl of ten who was quite evidently the opposite of her mother in every respect that could be observed within five seconds. Mrinalini was small and quick-eyed and was wearing a smile of the specific variety that suggests its owner has been informed they must behave but has not yet fully committed to the plan. Her hair was coming loose from its braid. She had clearly been running recently. She noticed Arya and the smile went from restrained to enormous.
He almost smiled back.
Almost.
His mother was looking at him the way someone looks at a sum that has not come out correctly — not angry, exactly, but with the quiet focus of a person recalculating.
"Leave us," she said, over her shoulder. Two attendants who had followed her in withdrew without a sound, which told him something about how she was generally obeyed in this palace.
Mrinalini came and sat on the edge of the stone bed beside him, completely uninvited, tucking her feet up underneath her. Her mother regarded this and chose not to address it.
"Tell me what happened," Devayani said.
Her voice was level. Not cold — that would have been easier, in a way.
Level. The voice of someone who has made a considered decision not to waste energy on tone when the substance of a conversation was what mattered.
Arya looked at her steadily. "I was tired," he said. "It was a long ceremony."
Devayani studied him for a moment. Something moved through her expression — not quite a laugh, not at all. "You forgot the speech."
It was not a question.
Arya said nothing, which in its own way was an answer.
"I wrote it myself," she said. Still level. "Three drafts. Each one shorter than the last, because I know your attention and I was trying to work with it rather than against it." A brief pause. "Apparently even the final version was too ambitious."
He had no good response to this. He was, in fact, a forty-three-year-old man in an eleven-year-old body who had been king for approximately a hour and had never seen the speech. He kept his expression neutral.
Devayani looked at the crown, which he'd set back on the ledge when he lay down. She looked at it the way you look at something you've invested a great deal in and are not yet certain was a wise investment.
Then she turned slightly, and the level quality of her voice took on something else — something underneath the words, like a current running below the surface of still water. Not softer. Denser.
"Do not disappoint me," she said. "And master the royal treasure as soon as possible. Your claim to this throne is not yet secure. It will not be secure until you have demonstrated that it is yours in more than just name." She paused once. "You know what happens to those who sit on the throne but cannot hold it."
He did know. The memories had been very clear on this point.
"They die," she said.
Then she walked out. Not dramatically — there was nothing theatrical about it. She simply turned and left, the silk of her robes making a quiet sound against the stone floor, and in a moment she was gone and the curtain was still.
Arya looked at the space where she had been standing.
He thought about her face. Not the words — the words were direct enough, almost blunt, the kind of speech that comes from someone who has given up on comfortable vagueness because comfortable vagueness costs lives. It was the face underneath the words he was thinking about. The very specific fatigue around her eyes. The way her jaw was set — not with anger but with the long-term effort of someone holding a position under continuous strain.
She was afraid. Not of him. For him.
In the world Arya had inherited, the throne was not a seat of comfort. It was a position you defended or you lost, and losing it meant not getting to live in retirement somewhere pleasant. It meant what she had said: death.
The older brothers had stronger bodies, more years of training, and the resentment of men who believed they had been passed over. The only advantage Arya had was legitimacy — the legal and ceremonial fact of being the first wife's son — and even that would not hold against a sword if someone decided the legal facts were less important than the practical ones.
She was not being harsh with him. She was being honest.
He found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he respected her for it.
---
"She's not always like that," Mrinalini said.
He looked at her. She was watching him with the sharp attentiveness of a younger sibling who has spent years reading the mood of a room and adjusting accordingly.
"She's worried," she added, with the simple directness of someone who has not yet learned to dress observations up. "She was up last night until the lamps burned out. I heard her pacing."
"She's right to be worried," Arya said. He had not quite planned to say this. It came out honest, which surprised him a little.
Mrinalini tilted her head. She seemed to be recalibrating something. "You're different today," she said.
"I became king today. It's a significant event."
This appeared to satisfy her, or at least redirect her, which was perhaps the same thing with a ten-year-old. "You forgot the speech," she said, but without any accusation — more like noting something interesting. "Mother spent three days on it."
"I know."
"Are you actually going to master the Agni Astra?"
He looked at her. She looked back, patient and curious, her loose braid falling over one shoulder.
"Yes," he said.
She nodded, as if this were the correct answer to a question she'd been waiting to confirm. Then, with the total gear-change that is the exclusive privilege of ten-year-olds, she said: "Do you want to play first? I learned a new pattern with the stones."
He did not, in any meaningful sense, want to play with stones. He had a great deal to think about and a kingdom in a fragile state and a body that someone had possibly already tried to kill once. He had meditation to figure out and a magical fire amulet to understand and a court full of people who had watched him end his own coronation speech in under three words.
"Show me the pattern," he said.
---
They played for a while. She was, it turned out, genuinely good at the stone game — better than him, though this was partly because he had no memory of the rules and was reconstructing them from context. She was also, underneath the cheerfulness, paying close attention to him. Not in a suspicious way. In the way of someone who loves a person and is checking quietly to make sure they are alright.
He let himself be checked. It didn't cost him anything and it seemed to mean something to her, so he sat on the floor of the stone chamber and learned the pattern with the stones and let his younger sister beat him twice in a row with visible satisfaction.
When she finally left — hugging him briefly, which he accepted with only a moment's stiffness before his hands remembered what to do — the room was quieter in a different way than before. Quieter in the way that a room is quiet after something warm has been in it and then gone.
He sat on the floor for a moment after she left.
Then he looked down at his chest.
---
He had noticed it earlier — in the throne room, during the ceremony, during the walk through the corridors — but there had been too much happening to examine it properly.
A locket.
Hanging from a simple cord of twisted gold around his neck, resting just below the collarbone. He had not taken it off. In the memories, it was always there — always, as far back as the memories went, even before the crown, even before any understanding of what it was. Part of the body's inventory, like eyes or hands.
He picked it up now and looked at it properly.
It was not large — perhaps the size of a large coin, slightly oval, made of gold that had been worked into the shape of a flame catching in a wind. Simple, almost plain compared to the decorative excess of everything else in the palace. No gemstones. No elaborate engraving. Just the flame, in gold, on a length of twisted cord.
The memories came up around it like water around a stone placed in a river.
'Agni Astra.' The Royal Treasure of their kingdom. Not a sword, not a staff — a thing that lived in a locket, or more accurately, a thing of which the locket was merely the physical container, the way a jar is not the water inside it.
It had been passed down through his father's line for generations, growing in power with each wielder, carrying with it the accumulated skill and strength of everyone who had held it before. His father had spent years with it. Decades. He had meditated with it in the mornings before the palace was awake, sitting cross-legged in his chamber while the torches burned low, and he had emerged from those sessions incrementally more dangerous, year by year, until the court began calling him something they had never called a king before.
The Flame God.
And the Flame God had died of diarrhea.
Arya turned the locket over once more and then set it back against his chest. He breathed.
"Alright," he said, to no one. "Let's see what we're working with."
He focused on the locket the way the memories suggested — a deliberate, directed attention, like pointing your eyes at something that isn't visible in the ordinary way. It was harder to describe than it was to do. Like flexing a muscle you didn't know you had until someone told you it existed.
The screen appeared.
He went completely still.
It floated in the air in front of him — at roughly chest height, the size of a small book, made of something that was not quite light and not quite substance. Text on it, in the script he could now read, clean and legible:
---
Sakti: 1/1
Astra: Agni Astra Lv1 (0%)
---
He reached out and touched it.
His hand passed straight through.
He tried again. Same result. The screen existed, clearly, but it existed in a way that did not respond to physical contact. It was informational only. A display, not an interface. He could look at it but not poke at it, which was frustrating in the way that all useful things are frustrating when you can see them but not quite use them.
He pulled his hand back and studied the two lines.
'Sakti: 1/1.' Maximum one unit, current one unit. Full.
The memories told him what this was — not a technical term, exactly, more like the name for something everyone understood intuitively the way people understand hunger. The energy that powered everything. Every use of the Astra consumed it. Let it drop to zero and you had a decorative locket and nothing else.
'Agni Astra Lv1 (0%).' Level one. Not even begun. His father at his peak had been — the memories were vague on this, not from secrecy but because Arya had been too young to understand it fully — many levels higher. Each level a different scale of capability entirely.
One unit of Sakti. Level one. Zero percent toward the next level.
He thought about it practically. This was what he had. One unit of a fuel he did not yet know how to refill, powering a tool at its most basic possible setting.
He needed to understand what it could actually do.
He stood up and walked to the torch nearest the window.
---
He held his hand over the flame.
It did not burn him. He had half-expected it, a part of his brain still operating on the physics of 2026. But the fire simply — moved around his fingers. Parted. The heat was present, he could feel it, but it stopped at the surface of his skin and went no further. Like trying to get wet while wearing something completely waterproof.
He breathed out.
He focused on the flame and pushed, the way you push on a door to test whether it's locked.
The flame grew.
Not explosively — gradually, smoothly, as if someone had turned a dial from low to medium to high. It climbed the wall bracket, stretched upward, brightened. He could feel it happening: a steady draw from somewhere in his chest, small and continuous, like a tap left slightly open.
He pushed harder.
The flame grew more. Hotter now. He could feel the wall beside it warming. Shadows in the room jumped and stretched.
He eased off. The flame returned to normal.
He looked at the screen again: 'Sakti: 1/1.' The reading hadn't changed. He had used some, but it had been so small an amount that it hadn't moved the number, or the number didn't track fractions. Either way — useful to know. Modest use did not drain him instantly.
He thought about it in terms he was comfortable with. The gas cylinder and the stove. He'd grown up with both in the Trilokpuri flat — his mother checking the weight of the cylinder by lifting it slightly, gauging how much was left. The amount of gas was fixed. The rate at which you burned through it depended entirely on how high you turned the flame.
Here: Sakti was the gas. The Agni Astra was the stove. The locket didn't generate anything — it converted. Took what he had and turned it into fire, efficiently or wastefully depending on how he used it.
At Level 1, with one unit of Sakti, he could amplify an existing flame. He could not create fire from nothing yet — he had tested this, reaching for it, finding nothing there. The raw generation was either a higher-level ability or required more Sakti than he currently had. What he could do was take fire that already existed and make it bigger. More intense. Directed, to some degree.
Could he kill someone with it? He thought about this practically, without drama. An ordinary person — yes, probably, if they were close enough and he had access to a source flame. A trained soldier in armour — difficult. The armour would take time to heat. He would drain himself before doing serious damage.
He was not, at this moment, a weapon.
He was a beginning.
He remembered the image the memories showed him: his father, cross-legged, eyes closed, before dawn, the Agni Astra on its cord, the torches burning steadily around him. Not training. Not doing anything visible at all. Just sitting.
'Meditation.'
Arya sat down on the floor, folded his legs beneath him, closed his eyes, and tried.
---
It took longer than he expected. The mind, it turned out, was bad at doing nothing. His mind especially — which had spent forty-three years in a world of constant input, of phones and noise and the background roar of a city that never fully slept — found sitting in silence profoundly difficult. Thoughts came. He let them come. They didn't leave. He pushed them away. They came back. He watched them come back and tried not to push. He pushed anyway.
Ten minutes of this. Perhaps twenty. He had no way to measure.
And then, gradually, something changed. Not dramatically — nothing that happened tonight seemed inclined toward drama. It was more like the moment when your eyes adjust to a dark room and you begin to see the shapes that were always there, waiting for you to look properly.
He felt the energy.
It was in the air. In the stone beneath him. In the slow movement of the torch flames. Everywhere, diffuse, ambient, like moisture in the air before rain — present but not gathered. And the Agni Astra was gathering it. Drawing it in, filtering it, letting it pass through into him: a thin, steady trickle of something warm that settled into his chest and expanded, by degrees, the capacity of what was there.
He stayed still and let it happen.
An hour passed.
He opened his eyes.
The screen: 'Sakti: 2/2.'
His maximum had increased. One full additional unit, earned in an hour of sitting on a cold stone floor in the dark while his kingdom sat uncertain around him and his mother paced and his brothers planned and the world prepared to become the Ramayana.
He looked at the number for a long time.
It was a small number. Objectively, practically, in any reasonable assessment of the situation he was in, it was a very small number.
But it was bigger than before.
For the first time since he had opened his eyes on a throne this morning — since he had woken up dead and found himself somewhere entirely unexpected — Arya felt something that was not panic or confusion or the careful management of panic and confusion.
Something simpler than that. Something almost like relief.
He was not helpless. He was not powerless. He was behind, and underprepared, and living in an ancient world without toilets, in a body that someone had already tried to kill, with a court that had watched him fumble his own coronation and was drawing its own conclusions.
But he had fuel. And he had a way to make more of it.
He thought about his father pointing at aeroplanes. 'Something important.'
He looked at the number on the screen.
'2/2.'
Yes, he thought. Something like that.
He settled back into position, closed his eyes again, and returned to the meditation. There was time before sleep. Not much. But enough.
He would use every bit of it.