Banaras Hindu University – Department of Indology
The ceiling fan creaked overhead, stirring the scent of sandalwood, old paper, and ink.Professor R.C. Vaidya tapped a fountain pen against the edge of a folio and looked up through his bifocals, his gaze steady.
"You shouldn't have come back, Devika."
Devika Anand stood motionless, her dupatta loosely wrapped over her shoulders, still marked with ash from the ghats. She didn't answer. Her eyes were fixed on the page before her.
The manuscript had been archived years ago. But the verse now inked across its surface hadn't existed until last week.
"He who holds the verse, holds her breath.He who awakens the flame, commands her will."
Vaidya cleared his throat.
"This doesn't belong to any known tantra or Vedic text. I cross-referenced the phonetic meter. Nothing matches. One of our research assistants tried copying it out by hand yesterday. His nose began bleeding mid-stroke."
Devika inhaled sharply, then leaned forward.
Grantha script. Precise. Ancient. Rhythmic like a pulse.
It mirrored something she had seen—not in a book, but behind her eyes.
A dream she hadn't told anyone.
She had been kneeling, bare-skinned, surrounded by floating lamps.A voice whispered verses into her shoulder—not spoken aloud, but pressed into her skin by touch.
When she woke, her palm had burned. The mark of three moons around a flame lingered faintly, as if inked from inside her.
Kamakhya, 1807 CE
The procession had long vanished down the hill, its sound muffled by twilight.
Inside the sanctum, the girl sat cross-legged, unclothed except for the sindoor streaked across her breastbone. Her skin shimmered under the lamplight, warm with rose oil and ghee.
An old priest crouched before a slab of dark stone, carving syllables with a bone shard sharpened to a point.
"Each verse is a breath," he murmured. "Each breath, a memory waiting for skin."
The girl shivered—not from fear, but from the strange certainty that this had happened before.
Another body.Another time.The same verse.
Banaras Hindu University – Present
The professor's voice pulled Devika back.
"The lines appeared two days ago. On the reverse side of a temple donation record from Kamachha. It was blank when we catalogued it. Now—"
He flipped the brittle folio.
There it was—inked in fresh black, smooth as river current. A verse in Grantha script that shouldn't have existed.
Not written.Manifested.
Devika stepped back. Her temples throbbed.
"Do you still have access to the original archive vaults beneath Kamachha?"
Vaidya hesitated. "They've been sealed since the fire."
She looked up, her voice composed but cold.
"Unseal them. I want every folio with references to devadasi lineages or Shakti rituals linked to physical transmission. Especially those bearing tactile notations."
Vaidya frowned. "You believe this connects to you?"
Devika nodded once. "Not belief. Recognition."
For a moment, there was silence. Then Vaidya pushed his chair back slowly.
"You'll need clearance. And someone to keep watch."
"Keep watch for what?"
Before he could answer, the window behind them slammed open. A sharp gust twisted through the room. The lamp flame bent hard to one side. Loose pages scattered to the floor like frightened birds.
On the tiled floor, just beside the wall cabinet, someone—or something—had traced a symbol in soot:
Three moons. One flame.
Elsewhere, that nightLocation Unknown
He sat cross-legged on a red cotton mat, unmoving.
Before him, an unrolled palm-leaf manuscript trembled under the weight of silence. Its letters seemed to rise and recede in the lamplight—not dancing, not glowing—but breathing, like flesh.
He smiled faintly.
"She's near it again," he whispered. "The body has begun to remember where the mind was forbidden to look."
A woman entered behind him, her sari the color of drying blood. She bore a brass plate of offerings—betel leaf, black sesame, ash.
"She will resist," she said. "That is her nature."
He picked up a sliver of bark and ran his thumb across its edge.
"She won't have time to resist," he said. "Not once the next verse calls her."
He looked toward the open door, where wind carried the scent of incense and burnt marigold.
"She was born to awaken it.And this time... she will not walk away unburnt."