The desert of Vaithra stretched endless beneath a twilight sky—its sands shimmering not with heat, but with latent magic. Every grain was a whisper, every gust of wind a memory lost in the folds of divine wars. And beneath it all, the earth pulsed... like something ancient was breathing.
Astha stood at the edge of a half-buried ruin, cloak tattered, eyes unwavering. The heat didn't touch him. Not anymore. Not since the pact with Iksara had started… shifting something inside him.
Beside him, Luv adjusted the plates of his newly reforged silver armor, gifted in fragments by the last storm spirit of Indravan. Each plate hummed faintly with divine current. Electricity curled through his fingertips every time he exhaled.
"You sure this is the right place?" Luv asked, glancing at the cracked altar ahead. Symbols carved into its surface flickered faintly—serpentine lines interwoven with a lotus, bleeding from its center.
Astha didn't answer immediately. He knelt, brushing sand away from a hidden glyph.
"It's not just a place," he said finally. "This… is a wound."
Naira, standing behind them, traced a protective mudra in the air. "This site was erased from every known archive. Whatever was buried here—wasn't meant to be remembered."
"That's why we're here," Astha muttered, rising to his feet. "To remember the things that broke the gods."
---
[Beneath the Surface]
The glyph cracked open with a sudden chime—a ringing like glass shattering underwater. The sand split apart, spiraling downward into a staircase made of black stone and petrified bones.
They descended in silence.
Torchless, guided only by the faint glow of Smritidhaara's embers wrapped around Astha's arm. The chain-sickle hissed softly, as if sensing something familiar down below.
The deeper they went, the colder the air grew—not physical cold, but the kind that seeped into memory. Luv began to hear whispers—his mother's voice, long dead. Naira's hands trembled. Astha… only tightened his grip on the weapon. His memories were already ash. There was nothing left to take.
Then—
They entered a circular chamber. And at its center hovered a sphere of cracked crystal, filled with a suspended corpse.
Not just any corpse.
A god.
Torn open from throat to spine. Wings shattered. Third eye gouged out.
Naira gasped. "That's… that's a Devaraja."
Luv narrowed his eyes. "One of the ten golden kings?"
"No," Astha replied. "One of the ones that fell before them."
And carved across the chamber walls, written in ancient Vedic script older than any spoken mantra, was a name scratched into stone and then violently struck out again and again.
"Sharvaka," Astha whispered.
---
The Executioner's Mark
As soon as he said the name, the corpse in the crystal twitched.
Not reanimated. Not conscious.
But some echo of power responded to the invocation. The stone altar behind them slid open, revealing a passage of void. A corridor carved not through space, but belief itself.
A mark began to burn onto Astha's forearm.
A sigil in the shape of a crescent sword cleaving a sun.
"What is that?" Naira breathed.
Astha looked at it, jaw set.
"A warning," he muttered.
But Luv wasn't listening. His gaze had shifted back to the glyphs now glowing on the wall—new lines burning into the stone as if they were being written in real time:
"When the Ash-Walker awakens the chained name… the Executioner will descend."
Astha turned to his companions.
"We leave. Now."
---
As they ascended from the tomb, the air grew heavier.
Each step dragged. Each breath became sharp.
Outside, the sky had shifted.
The moons—three of them—were no longer in their usual orbits.
Instead, a black shape hovered in the upper atmosphere. No wings. No light.
Just presence.
And a voice—not heard, but felt in bone and blood—echoed across the valley:
"I am not a god.
I am the one gods send when they no longer wish to show mercy."
The Executioner had begun his descent.
Sharvaka was coming.