The serpent-spear captain's weapon hissed with stored heat, its forked blade glowing amber against the creeping frost. Seventeen soldiers formed a crescent around Shruti Baghel, their boots crunching through the frozen courtyard. But they didn't close in.
They stood there, transfixed by the smile spreading across her bloodied face—a beggar's smile, her mother had called it, the expression that preceded absolute disaster.
"She's cracked," muttered the dual-sword master, his twin blades crossed in a defensive wedge. "The Frost Matriarch's death broke her."
The Inferno commander laughed, a sound like coal cracking in a furnace. He strode forward, bone mask still smoking from the battle. "Broken? No. This is the part where she begs." He spread his arms wide, addressing his troops but staring only at Shruti. "Look, men! The icy princess finally understands her place. On her knees, where all royalty ends up."
The three children behind Shruti huddled closer, their sobs turning to whimpers. One clutched the frozen hem of Sarika Baghel's sari, now a crystalline shroud.
Shruti's smile didn't falter. Her fingers traced the charred cover of Sapta-Diary VII. The diary her mother had died clutching. The diary that held secrets about loyalty engineering—about making people into weapons, into tools, into things that obeyed.
"Commander," she said, her voice soft as falling snow. "You want these?"
She held up the diary. The soldiers glanced at each other. A few laughed—the nervous, ugly sound of men who'd expected tears and got transaction instead.
"The princess bargains now!" crowed a spearman. "Think your little book will buy these brats' lives?"
The commander stepped closer, his shadow falling across the children. "Oh, she wants to trade." He crouched, bone mask level with her face. "But what could you possibly have that I haven't already taken? Your gate? Frozen. Your mother? Dead. Your honour?" He flicked her forehead with a gauntleted finger. "You sold that the moment you smiled."
Shruti didn't flinch. Behind her eyes, she was counting. The Prana signatures—serpent-spear's volcanic pulse, sword-master's twin flickering flames, the commander's dense furnace core.
Her father's signature was gone.
The realization hit like a blade between ribs. No flicker of Baghel ice. No resonance of the man who'd roared about sealing gates, about saving scrolls, about names. Just... static. Vacant air where a king should be.
For the first time since the battle began, Shruti Baghel's eyes filled with tears. Real tears, hot enough to scald frozen cheeks.
The commander saw them and crowed. "There it is! The waterworks. I was starting to think you were actually—"
"You have three seconds," Shruti whispered, hugging the children tight. They clung to her, their small faces buried in her bloodied dhoti. "I'm sorry, kids. I can't protect you."
It wasn't a confession. It was a trigger.
The children looked up, eyes wide with something more than fear. Understanding. They'd lived in Vidyagriha. They knew what happened when a Baghel's whisper turned musical.
Shruti's fingers dug into the diary's pages. Prana—all her Prana, everything her mother had left her, everything her father had taught her—crystallized in her veins. The Sapta-Diary's forbidden text flooded her mind: Submission is a tactical retreat. Your cage is my headquarters. But also: A weapon that breaks itself cannot be disarmed.
She tore the scroll apart.
The sound was paper and thunder and breaking ice, all at once. A single, crystalline shhrrrrik that echoed eighteen times across the courtyard.
Everyone gasped.
"She's going to detonate!" shrieked the spearman who'd laughed. "Prana-suicide!"
"RUN! We can't survive a Baghel death-burst!" Another soldier bolted, his inferno cloak flickering out in terror.
The commander surged forward. "What the hell are you doing?" His gauntleted hand reached for her throat.
The serpent-spear captain lunged, grabbing his lord's shoulder. "Wait, my lord! It's dangerous—"
The sword master was already moving, twin blades spinning into a shielding formation, Prana flaring to create a hemispherical barrier of heat. "All units! Defensive formation!"
But Shruti was already whispering the last line of the diary, the one her mother had never taught her: The Beggar's Frost is not a technique. It is a question. And the world always answers.
Snnnnnzzz.
The sound was not a scream, not an explosion, but silence being born. Every molecule of sound simply gave up and went to sleep.
The courtyard froze.
Not the gradual, creeping frost of before. This was instantaneous, absolute crystallization. The air itself turned to a trillion snowflakes, suspended. The serpent-spear's weapon became a sculpture of ice and amber. The sword master's barrier shattered into diamond dust. The soldiers' eyes—wide, terrified, still laughing in some cases—froze in their sockets.
Then they died.
Not with blood or fire, but with beauty. Their bodies dissolved into snow, each person becoming a unique pattern of frost that floated upward like feathers. The commander was last, his bone mask cracking into a thousand perfect snowflakes, his final words—some desperate curse—turned to frozen breath that drifted away.
The children remained untouched, held in the eye of the storm by Shruti's final command: Protect them.
---
Hours later, Shruti's eyes opened.
She lay on soft loam, not frozen stone. Above her, a canopy of unfamiliar trees wove green shadows. No ice. No blood. No smell of charred flesh. Just the rich, humid scent of a jungle a thousand miles from Vidyagriha.
A voice pierced the quiet. Not harsh, but amused. "Too early."
Shruti sat up, frost blade instinctively in hand. It was broken, snapped at the hilt. She was uninjured—no gash across her ribs, no frost-burns, no scars. Her dhoti was clean, her skin unmarked. As if the battle had been a dream.
"Who—" she started, but the voice continued, casual as a neighbor commenting on rain.
"For the... well. You wouldn't recognize it anyway. Not yet."
She spun. No one. Just the endless jungle, its floor carpeted in moss that hummed with dormant Prana. Her stomach clenched with hunger so profound it felt like a living thing. Her throat was desert-dry.
"Show yourself!" she shouted, her voice raspy. "Baghel Vidyagriha demands—"
"Loud for someone who just died." The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. "The Beggar's Audit doesn't begin with demands. It begins with silence."
Shruti's hand tightened on the broken sword. Her Prana... was gone. Not depleted. Absent. She felt hollow, a shell that had once held a glacier.
"Where am I?" she whispered.
"The bottom of the world," the voice said. "The place where weapons go when they break themselves." A pause. "You tore the diary, Princess. You asked the question. This is the answer."
She looked down. In her other hand, clutched so tight her knuckles were white, was a single page from Sapta-Diary VII. Not charred. Pristine. The words shimmered with a light that wasn't quite Prana.
Lesson One: A beggar owns nothing. Therefore, a beggar cannot lose anything.
The hunger sharpened. The jungle seemed to lean in, listening.
The voice spoke one last time, fading like an echo: "Survive three days. Then we'll discuss whose cage you're really in."
Shruti Baghel, heir to a frozen kingdom that no longer existed, stood alone with a broken sword and a single page of forbidden knowledge. For the first time in her life, she had no plan. No Prana. No name to hide behind.
Just hunger, thirst, and the beggar's smile still frozen on her face.
The jungle waited.