The sky was torn open as its heartbeat lies within the living and death.
Pune, the city of neon lights, clubs, and the leverage of lifestyle provided by mankind, was buried in silence; it was close to a graveyard but far from it as scavengers fly over the city in thirst of blood and flesh. The city was on high alert; sirens moved within the roads and alleys like a blade meeting the surface of water, slicing through it. On the asphalt, the heavy rhythmic thud of soldiers' boots glazed the air—a sound heard in the era of independence turned into screams with the blood clotting on streets never loved by locals, but yet needed for survival. Above in the air, helicopters glazed and churned the night into a slurry, filling the night with a terror humanity has engineered against its own soul.
Sanvi watched Arush vanish in the air, dissolving his particles in the air, disappeared in a blink of an eye. She whispered in a cold haze of breath, not believing her eyes, "How did he get such a strength?" as her breath leaves a wisp of frost while the truth was spoken.
Then Ujjwal groaned in agony; he was a ruin on the ground holding his half-chewed arm where nerves were bleeding as the bone was visible. His wounds were not only deep but were enough to kill someone instantly; a ravening of human flesh with nerves jagged, hanging out of the wounds on the bone as blood drips through it with a sound of beats.
"Dip-dip."
Sanvi breathed heavily as her heart pumped blood more than the size of a fist, holding Ujjwal and starring at his wounds of claws given by the justice of the devil of carnage. She gave her everything to save a life, pressing the wound to stop the bleeding and gasping for air, but nothing changes as the steps of an angel were being dragged to hell where his wings would be torn apart with the tip of a spear. Sanvi pressed her hand, trembling against his heat; the wet thick slurry of blood was sticking to her hand as she could hear the pumping of his heart. Then her emotion turned into a blaze of cold fire; a crystal uneven as shapes in a lotus bloomed over his wounds, not pink in beauty but as manky red with the darkness of life and readiness of blood, sealing the veins and forcing the bleeding to a frozen halt.
Ujjwal groaned, his eyes rolled white and shutting down, but his heart beat with a rhythm to survive with a soul alive in a numb blaze.
The streetlights were broken in that darkness with a blaze of blue sparks that glowed in that agony as frost came off the leaves like a vine of glass, and dew over the blood-coated land grew thin with water inside it. Then the walkie-talkie on Ujjwal's belt hissed as life sparked within the burning battlefield.
"We are coming for you, is the threat eliminated?"
Ujjwal groaned as the frost of his chest—the bloomed lotus—was holding his light of life away from the darkness. Sanvi grabbed the radio in the red mascot of her hand like a poison, slow but steady in its work, saying, "Copy... ehh," as she swallowed her saliva with a flavor of salt in her throat, "Threat has been eliminated." She rasped, her voice cold as ice, "I am an Awakened. Mr. Ujjwal is critically injured; we need medical support urgently."
A silence flowed through the radio like tides in a sea, thick and stinking like a bee. Then a sharp voice cut through, "Stay with him, our men are close; what is your name, young lady?"
Sanvi looked at Ujjwal, covering his chest and pressing hard against it, then looked at her hand driven by blood and whispered, "Sanvi."
Miles away in the graveyard of cursed groves where spirits were never wanted to stumble, Arush sat within the skeleton of leaves with a crisp of sound.
"Crick-crick."
His watch was cracked like a spiderweb knitted over the glass, and the arms were barely visible. Arush looked carefully; it was 9:34 PM. He looked at his shirt; it had turned red, rough and crisp as blood was mixed with it and his flames turned them into hard rock.
His brain felt like a surge of a warzone where light and darkness go against each other, the destiny where every nerve was hanged on a spear facing the sky as its blood drops to his mother soil. Neurons sparked with flames of pain; the flesh was stitched, not with any thread of stitches, but was still smooth and new under the steam that rose from out of the agony, like the soil which was seeing her son battling and shedding blood come to her again in return for her own sin.
"Human evolution," Arush whispered as the being's words echoed in his head like a king's command, "Was it praise? Was it a taunt?" He looks at his watch through the spiderweb and the arms beyond the glass; 9:45 it displayed as the time was moving, losing the sun, and the gears were barely ticking.
"Tick-tick."
Arush stood up, removing the leaves sticking to his clothes as his gaze turned to the small temple box where his blessing was turned into his own inheritance. He began the lone walk as he owned the death-cursed groves, but he didn't walk with a chest full of pride; he dragged his legs as his nerves didn't forget how his bone was cracked open and torn through flesh and muscle as the skin bled into dark red blood. While he crawled for his life, he moved his palms around the skin of the jagged bone area, remembering the moment the steam had risen from his wounds. He remembered the bone—the white, jagged reality of it sticking out of his skin; he remembered putting his own hand in his mouth, biting down until his gums bled so he could grab that bone and force it back into place. Even the thought brought a wave of goosebumps that felt like needles.
The grace of stars in the sky was like darkness didn't win but light also never lost; they were different colorations of light.
He reached his house. From the stairs, he could hear the screams of hideous agony; it was his mother, the sound of a woman who lost her hope in the well of the world. Arush looked at the cold surface with a hollow cursing, "Shit me." He climbed the stairs, each step a heavy pulse running through his veins, and rang the bell.
The door surged open. The light of the hallway hit him—a warmth of home that comforted a hermit and momentarily healed the wound in his soul. His mother collapsed into him, sobbing in tears as her son returned home, but for the hermit, he felt nothing; he felt like he was a warrior carved out of stone—no pain, no relief. He looked past her to his father, whose face was a mask of shock looking at him.
"Arush, what happened! Why is your shirt soaked in blood?"
Arush's eyes turned a fading crimson, looking at the human eyes of his god—at his father—and lied within the court, "A few soldiers came to help us, but none survived." Inhaling, he said, "I tried to help one of them but... he died. It's all his blood."
He moved past them, a ghost in the warm ken of the house as he locked himself in the bathroom. The house was a graveyard of silence under the spray of the shower as Arush whispered, "The Alexander Technique can't work on death because I am a Marbie of a failed subject created by God." Arush watched the red water swirl down the drain; his leg was perfect, but the pains of agony never fade, and the numbness cannot be traded with wonder. He realized his feelings were just an illusion toward himself as his power had taken them; that illusion cannot survive the heat of the red flame over the world of chaos. He had survived a night where men crumble and where life sustains.
Dinner was not a funeral of the living, but was like a sky where only the swing of the fan could be heard and the food tasted salty, as if blood had turned his taste buds into a magnet. Arush chewed his food, tapping his spoon, then his sister saw him and leaned forward, her eyes wide with a terrifying curiosity. Arush was unable to lift his spoon as his sister asked in a tone of killing thousands of questions, "Why are your eyes glowing red with a symbol that looks like the sun?" Arush didn't answer; he took his plate of Chinese mud and said, "It doesn't matter."
He walked into his room in darkness; his eyes glowed red while he looked at his soul, and it was glowing red. A whisper tore through the air: "Did I change myself from the start... or did the power do it?" Exhaling as his lungs relaxed, "Am I a curse?" He lies on the bed, closing his eyes.
"You are like water," the Hawk's voice resonated in the air, a frequency only the soul could hear. "The world forces you to take shape, yet it cannot change your essence. You are the Sun—vulnerable, yet the strongest. You carry emotions no one sees. You are ice-cold, but those who stay long enough will know your worth. You will die, but your glory will rise from the ash. Sun... you have me this time."
The Hawk spread its wings, catching a wind that didn't exist in the modern world. It spiraled upward as a shimmering portal tore through the night sky. The Hawk passed through the veil, leaving the sirens of Pune for the blazing, unfiltered sunlight of the 13th Century.
Below the sunrays lay the bazaar of Varnaspur. Horses thundered through the fields of golden grain toward the River Maya... with huge sculptures of the elephant Airavata holding the six white tusks as water flowed in the Maya. The Hawk whispered, "The beauty of the ace," the vein for a hundred kingdoms ruled within one almighty King Indrasur. The Hawk descended, its claws gripping a Peepal tree, scratching the dust on its branch.
The air shimmered. Black flames licked the grass as a figure stepped out of the void. It was the same shadow—the tail, the flames, the terrifying calm.
"The Sun has evolved, hasn't he?" the Hawk asked.
Kurozaru looked out at the River Maya. "Human evolution... hah. We have both witnessed it."
The Hawk laughed, a sharp, ancient sound. "Not like this, Kurozaru."
"I thought I chose a vessel," Kurozaru replied, a dark pride entering his voice. "But I never knew I had made the perfect one."
He turned his face toward the river, hiding a predatory smile as the transparent water revealed golden fish swimming in an Indraprastha that knew no borders—yet. The all-almighty Indraprastha. The noise of children playing was heard while the Hawk saw Kurozaru putting his hand in the river as if he would turn it into a void that the kingdom is not ready for.
Back in the modern world, the cleanup had begun. Black bags were lined up in the park to collect the "sacrificed" squads of Delta and Alpha. Ujjwal was rushed to the emergency ward, his hand a mangled ruin, his body a map of chewed flesh. The park was flooded with artificial white light. Men in tactical vests and masks—NSEA agents—occupied every inch of the soil. Sanvi sat in the back of an armored vehicle, her shoes caked in mud and blood.
At the NSEA Headquarters, the light in the interrogation room was blindingly white. Sanvi sat alone, her hands like ice. An agent entered, placing a humming device on the table.
"Place your hand on the scanner," the agent ordered.
Sanvi's hand trembled as she touched the cold metal. The screen flashed: DEALER LEVEL.
The agent's eyes sharpened. "Thank you for your cooperation. One: Would you like to join the NSEA?"
Sanvi looked at the agent, then at the frost beginning to creep across the metal table from her fingertips. She put a thin, cold smile on her face. "Yes. I would."
The agent leaned in, her tone becoming a low, serious growl. "Question two: Who killed the sinner, young lady? Who did this?"
Sanvi closed her eyes. She felt the blood on her shoes. She remembered Arush's scream. She remembered the Red Sun. Her lips moved to say something—to release a new revolution, or a betrayal that will never be accepted?
- ARUSH SALUNKE