The desert didn't welcome her.
It watched.
Wind moved in slow, circular drifts—not forward but around, like it had forgotten the direction of time. It whispered—not in gusts, but in syllables. Half-names. Fragments of stories.
The road to Bhangarh twisted like a half-buried serpent in the sand — a path forgotten by time, chewed hollow by wind and age. As the jeep rattled into the desert outskirts, the sky above was a sullen bruise: black clouds hunched over the horizon like beasts waiting to pounce.
Rasmika stepped out of the jeep like a blade drawn too early. Her boots hit the sand with dull indifference. She didn't pause to admire the horizon or adjust to the dry burn behind her eyes. She didn't look up. She only noted: heat index spiking—ambient pressure low—smell of iron and stale incense.
From the corner of her eye, she noticed a girl standing by the broken well, half-shadowed, watching without expression. She looked away before their eyes could meet.
Two local workers stood murmuring near a stone arch.
"Woh jagah jeeti hai," one said.
That place lives.
She heard it, logged it, said nothing.
She was not here for myths. She was here for anomalies, carbon dating, and measurable shifts.
But something in her ribs paused.
It was nothing. She wrote it off.
The ruins stood ahead, fractured like memory, half-swallowed by dune and time. A haveli not built but bled into the earth. The walls leaned in like they'd heard a secret they couldn't unhear.
The locals had already begun to retreat. They always did. By sundown, not a soul would remain within five miles of the ruins.
"Woh jagah jeeti hai," the old driver muttered, more to the cracked steering wheel than to her. That place is alive.
Rasmika said nothing. Her hands, gloved and steady, clutched her field journal like a relic. Logic kept her spine straight. But her eyes — sharp, haunted, scanning — betrayed the quiet tension wrapped around her ribs.
The wind howled unnaturally, dragging the heat with it like a fevered breath. Cactus plants stood twisted and dried, their spines blackened, red-stained at the tips — like they'd been thirsting for something deeper than water, longing for blood the earth would not give. A cluster of bats erupted from the ruins in a panicked spiral, screeching overhead.
The compass in her hand spun violently before freezing, dead north. Her tablet flickered. A seismometer on the assistant's belt shrieked into static.
"EM disturbance," she muttered. "Solar flare maybe."
But she wasn't convinced.
She opened her notebook and wrote as clinically as one might report rainfall:
Site: Akhirbhoomi. Temp: 43°C. Wind: Unstable. Locals report haunted cognition. Recommend observation.
Dust curled around her like a creature without form. It smelled faintly of burnt almond and wet copper—too unnatural for weather, too subtle for gas leaks. Still, she told herself: everything has a reason.
But the locks on the haveli's main door were rusted from the inside.
That had no reason.
She clicked her pen closed. That was the only sound she allowed herself.
Ryan, the American field liaison, shouted something from behind about gear delays. She didn't answer. His voice always sounded like ego, even when it asked questions. Instead, she turned toward the crumbling steps that led into the haveli's outer courtyard.
As they neared the crumbling façade of the haveli — an old mansion clawed halfway out of the sand like the spine of a buried god — birds launched skyward in a synchronized terror, leaving behind a silence too exact to be natural.
Her boots crunched against the gravel as she stepped out of the vehicle. The air smelt burnt, metallic. Something older than the dust breathed through the ruins. Her team began unloading equipment, trying to keep it clinical, professional.
But her eyes were already on the haveli.
It wasn't just a structure.
It watched.
A low, almost imperceptible thrum vibrated through her soles. The kind of silence that comes not from the absence of sound — but the holding of breath.
She approached the iron-wrought gate alone. The air grew colder the closer she stepped.
She caught a flash of red—movement—just beside a cracked pillar.
The girl again.
Now crouched, head tilted, like she was listening to something Rasmika couldn't hear. She still hadn't spoken.
"Dr. Sen?" someone called from behind. "You're going to want to see the courtyard markings—there's something off with the perimeter alignment."
She barely heard them. Her gaze had locked onto a stone archway where a half-collapsed mural shimmered under the gathering clouds. Not shimmered like light.
No — shimmered like memory.
She blinked. For half a second, the mural changed.
A woman — tall, wrapped in blood-red silks, stood at the balcony with snakes coiled around her wrists.
She blinked again. Gone. Just dust and peeled paint.
Must've been an afterimage, she thought. A trick of contrast—light on moisture, or retinal memory.
This is scientific, she reminded herself. You're here to document, not to dream.
But the wind whispered a name she did not yet remember knowing:
"Alira…"
Behind her, the girl was no longer crouching. She stood now, framed in the narrow corridor of broken sandstone, her eyes still, too old for her face.
Rasmika gave her the smallest nod.
The girl didn't move. Just said, very softly,
"Woh wapas aayi hai."
She's come back.
Rasmika turned toward the haveli without asking who she was.
Some things don't need answers.
Not yet.
She wasn't afraid.
She didn't do fear.
She did patterns. Hypotheses. Analysis.
And this place was... misaligned.
As if history itself had hiccupped.
She stepped forward, into shadow.
The wind followed.
Far beneath her, in the underbelly of the haveli,
something ancient stirred — thrilled that she had returned.