Deception on the Vindhya Mountains and the Trial by Fire
Agni guided Neer back to his chambers, his grip on his husband's elbow firm but not unkind. He settled him onto the edge of the bed, the silken covers cold and unwelcoming. "Sit here. Rest. I will return shortly."
He didn't wait for a response, didn't meet the confused, clouded blue eyes that followed him. He strode out, his pace measured but urgent, a king containing a cataclysm within his own stride.
In his own austere room, Agni didn't light a lamp. He folded himself onto the cold stone floor in Padmasana, the lotus position. Closing his eyes, he brought his palms together before his chest. For a long moment, there was only the sound of his own heartbeat, a frantic drum against the cage of his ribs. Then, he began to breathe—deep, measured pulls that stoked the inner furnace.
A glow kindled between his palms. Not the wild, destructive orange of battle-fire, but a concentrated, sacred gold-shot-with-crimson light—the flame of his highest sadhana, the fire of pure intent. The light grew, painting his stern features in stark relief, casting long, dancing shadows that seemed to bow and pray on the walls.
"Gurudev…" The invocation was not spoken, but poured from his spirit into the flame. "Gurudev… guide me!"
Within the heart of the conjured fire, the air shimmered. The golden light resolved into a familiar, aged visage—Guru Visharaya, his image woven from flame and will. His voice was distant, thin as ancient parchment, yet clear in Agni's mind. "What troubles you, my child?"
"Pranam, Gurudev." Agni's mental voice was strained. "I need your aid. The talisman… it holds the surface calm, but it's feeding the fury beneath. The shadow grows angrier, not weaker."
The fiery image of the Guru seemed to sigh. "The shade has made a nest of Neer's flesh, Agni. It is not a guest; it is a landlord claiming its property."
"I am fighting a war with no weapon!" Agni's projection roared silently in the flame. "Every path is a dead end. Show me a way. Any way. I will pay any price to pull him back from that abyss."
The Guru's flame-face grew solemn. "There is one path. Do you remember, Agni, when you journeyed to claim the Agnyastra? Who you met in the heart of the living mountain?"
A memory, old and potent, surged—the scent of volcanic stone, the feeling of immense, feminine power, a voice that was both song and seismic shift. "Mother Yakshini," Agni whispered.
"You must seek her counsel," the Guru affirmed. "She told you then to call upon her in your hour of ultimate need. Go, my son. To her ancient temple in the Vindhya ranges. There, you may find the key… or the lock."
---
Agni found Neer exactly where he'd left him, sitting stiffly, staring at his own hands. "Neer," Agni said, his voice carefully neutral. "We must take a journey."
"Where?"
"To the Vindhya Mountains. There is a rare herb there… for Nirag."
Neer's head snapped up. "Nirag? But he was fine just—"
Agni led him swiftly to Nirag's chamber. Inside, a small scene had been arranged. Nirag lay on his bed, face pale and drawn, a sheen of cold sweat on his brow. Anvay sat beside him, a damp cloth in his hand, his expression one of grave concern.
"Father…" Nirag moaned, his voice convincingly thin. "My stomach… it burns. The royal physician said… only the Moon Lotus from the Vindhya peak can draw the poison out."
Neer stared, a crack appearing in his detached calm. Deep lines of worry etched his forehead. "But you were well!"
Nirag convulsed, a choked cry tearing from his lips. "The pain! It comes in waves!"
Neer flinched. He looked from his son's agonized face to Agni's implacable one. "Very well," he said, the words clipped. He turned to Anvay. "Watch over him."
Anvay met Agni's eyes for a fleeting second, a silent promise passing between them. "I will guard him with my life, Acharya."
As soon as Neer turned to leave, Nirag sat up, the pain vanishing from his face, replaced by keen anxiety. "Tauji… will he be alright?"
Agni placed a hand on his shoulder, a brief, proud squeeze. "Well played. Now, you two must be the fortress we return to. Guard each other."
---
The journey was a silent, tense procession of two. They crossed the borders of Prakashgarh swiftly, the lush fields giving way to rocky foothills. Agni tried to bridge the silence.
"Nirag is twelve now," he ventured, watching the path ahead. "Do you think… we should tell him everything? The truth of his birth? Of us?"
Neer's reply was a shard of ice. "No. Not yet."
"Do you remember, Neer? The Trikuta Mountains, fourteen years ago? We were just boys, chasing legends." Agni's voice was soft, probing, an attempt to summon the ghost of shared laughter.
"I remember." The words were flat.
"Are you… alright?"
"I am FINE, Agni." The retort was sharp, brittle—the sound of a man holding himself together by sheer, fraying will.
They reached the foothill town of Bhanupur as the afternoon sun bled into the hills. The town was ancient, a skeleton of crumbling temples and narrow alleys choked by the encroaching jungle. But its true state was more chilling than its decay. An unnatural silence hung over it. No children played. No vendors called. Shutters were drawn tight over empty eyes. The air itself felt watchful, and stale.
Their horses had barely halted when an old ascetic emerged from the shadow of a broken archway. His robes were rags, his body skeletal, but his eyes held a desperate, lucid light. "Maharaj Agnivrat… Maharaj Nirvrah… You are here?" His voice trembled, not with age, but with awe and dread.
Agni stiffened. "You know us?"
The ascetic nodded slowly, his gaze lingering on Neer with a peculiar mixture of pity and fear. "This town is the threshold of the Vindhya. The air here… it wakes old ghosts. But you must reach the temple before nightfall. The town… holds echoes. They grow hungry at dusk."
Neer urged his horse forward. "Show us the way, Sadhuji."
The old man pointed a bony finger down the narrowest alley. "There. But be wary… the echoes walk. They cry for what they have lost."
They entered the alley. The moment the high, moss-slick walls closed around them, the whispers began. They didn't come from a direction; they seeped from the stones, breathed from the very air.
"Neer… Agni… come back…" The voices were myriad, but each one held a haunting, twisted echo of Neer's own melodic tone.
Agni's jaw tightened. An illusion. A psychic trap. He felt Neer's hand, where it rested on his own reins, grow rigid. He glanced over. Neer's knuckles were white, and a terrifying, physical cold began to emanate from his skin, frosting the leather of the reins.
At a bend in the alley stood an ancient, dry well. Leaning against its crumbling rim was the translucent figure of a young woman. Her robes were blue, her hair flowed like water, but her eyes were solid, weeping pools of black ink.
"Neer…" her voice was a liquid sigh, full of bottomless sorrow. "You left me behind… in the deep. Now I will take you with me."
Neer's horse stopped dead. He stared, transfixed, his own blue eyes reflecting the specter's void. For a moment, his own essence seemed to thin, to yearn toward that watery grave.
"NEER!" Agni's shout was a crack of thunder in the psychic fog.
The specter smiled, a sad, drowning curve of her lips, and dissolved backwards into the dark mouth of the well.
Neer shuddered, a full-body convulsion. He blinked, disoriented, horrified. "Agni… that was… me. A part of me I drowned long ago."
Agni grabbed his forearm, the heat of his touch a brand against the unnatural chill. "It is a phantom. A memory given form by this place. Do not listen. Move."
---
The temple was not a building of beauty, but of raw, terrifying power. It was carved into the living rock of the mountainside, its entrance a jagged maw guarded by stone serpents whose eyes seemed to follow them. Inside, the air was still and heavy, smelling of ozone and deep earth. The center of the single, vast chamber was dominated by a great fire pit—the Agnikunda. It was cold, filled with ancient, grey ash, but around it were scattered archaic, metallic yantras, their geometries speaking of rituals older than kingdoms.
Guru Visharaya's warning echoed in Agni's mind: Here, the shadow will be drawn out. But a price will be exacted.
Neer stood at the edge of the cold pit, his back to Agni. His voice, when he spoke, was hollow, echoing in the cavernous space. "Agni… if the shade emerges… I may not be who returns to you. Are you prepared?"
Agni stepped to his side, taking his cold hand in his own burning one. "You will always be my Neer. Now and after. Begin."
Neer began to chant. The language was pre-human, the syllables like drops of ice falling into the silent dark. As the cadence built, a wind stirred from nowhere, swirling the ancient ash in the kund. Then, a spark. A single, blue-white flame flickered in the center of the ashes. It grew, not with warmth, but with a fierce, cold light.
Neer's body began to shake. A low groan escaped him, warping, deepening into something else—a guttural, grating laugh that was utterly foreign. His head lolled back. When his eyes opened, they were twin pools of liquid night.
"Agni…" the voice was a layered horror, Neer's tone buried under millennia of icy malice. "You think to cage me with parlor tricks?"
Agni's hands came up, wreathed in pure, golden flame. He didn't attack. He focused the energy into a containment field, a sphere of molten heat around Neer's trembling form. "FIGHT IT, NEER! YOU ARE STRONGER!"
A wrenching, tearing sound, not of flesh but of spirit, filled the temple. From Neer's chest, a plume of absolute blackness—thicker than smoke, colder than space—began to pour forth. It coalesced into a shifting, man-shaped void above him, attached by a tether of darkness to his heart. The void had a face—a screaming, hateful rictus.
"ANDHAK! I AM ANDHAK!" it shrieked, the sound shattering the remaining yantras. "And he was my perfect vessel!"
Agni unleashed a torrent of fire. The flames passed through the shade harmlessly, cooling and dying as if doused in liquid nitrogen. The entity laughed. "You cannot burn nothingness, little sun-king!"
"AGNI… RUN!" Neer's own voice, strangled and desperate, broke through for a second. "IT CAN'T… BE CONTAINED!"
The shade roared and rushed back into Neer, not as an invasion, but a claiming. Neer's body straightened, the struggle gone. His now-completely-black eyes fixed on Agni. He raised a hand. From his fingertips, a torrent of black, viscous liquid, like corrupted ink, shot forth—his water element, poisoned to its core.
Agni met it with a blade of white-hot fire, vaporizing the stream into a foul, freezing mist that coated the temple in hoarfrost.
Neer-Andhak smiled. With a casual gesture, the legendary Chhaya Damaru materialized in his hand, carved from bone and frozen shadow. "Did you think you could save him? Your love is a feeble shield."
Agni drew Agnishikha. The steel gleamed in the eerie light. "Release him. Or I will carve him free."
"Or what?" Andhak sneered, twirling the damaru. Will you pierce your beloved's heart to reach me?"
"I will do what must be done!" Agni's voice broke with the admission.
"Then try, hero."
Agni dropped his sword. He raised his empty hands, palms together. He began the incantation for the Agnyastra, the ultimate fire-weapon, a mantra that pulled at the very core of his life-force. The air around him superheated, warping vision. A searing, concentrated light began to form between his palms—a miniature sun, hungry and pure.
For the first time, a flicker of something other than contempt crossed Neer-Andhak's void eyes. A sliver of primal fear. It stepped back. "You… you would not."
"For him, I would unleash the apocalypse," Agni growled, the energy straining his form, cracks of light appearing on his skin.
Andhak recovered, a cruel laugh bubbling forth. It raised the damaru and beat it once. A visible wave of distorted sound and solid shadow erupted, not at Agni, but at the forming astra. The two supreme forces collided in mid-air. The Agnyastra's light fought, but the nullifying wave of the damaru absorbed, dissolved. The brilliant light snuffed out with a sound like a dying star.
The backlash threw Agni across the chamber. He hit the stone wall with a sickening crunch, slumping to the floor. A trickle of blood, bright and shockingly red, traced from his temple into his hairline. His eyes fluttered shut.
Silence, deeper than before, reclaimed the temple.
Neer-Andhak stood over him, the damaru now still in his hand. The void eyes looked down at the fallen king, the husband, the would-be savior. The entity knelt, bringing Neer's face inches from Agni's. With a chilling tenderness, it used Neer's thumb to wipe away the blood from Agni's brow.
"The game," it whispered, Neer's lips brushing Agni's ear with a lover's intimacy, "has only just begun."
It rose, turned, and walked calmly into the deeper darkness of the mountain temple, leaving the King of Fire broken and alone on the cold stone, the only light the fading ember of his own fading consciousness. The Vindhya had witnessed the trial. And the fire had been found wanting.