When Armaan opened his eyes, the world did not rush back to him.
There was no jolt, no sharp intake of breath, no sudden panic.
Consciousness returned the way a tide does in the deepest parts of the ocean—slow, heavy, inevitable.
Darkness surrounded him.
Not the absence of light, but something denser. A living dark, thick and weighty, pressing against his skin from all sides. He was standing, or perhaps floating; the sensation of ground beneath his feet was vague, unreliable. His body felt lighter than it should have been, as though gravity itself had thinned.
Above him, impossibly far away, a fragment of light shimmered.
It was small. Fragile. A pale shard suspended in the void, barely strong enough to push back the surrounding black. It reminded him of sunlight filtered through miles of water, the kind divers speak of in whispers, where the surface feels like a forgotten myth.
Armaan lifted his head slowly, his gaze drawn to that distant glow.
The deep sea.
The realization did not arrive as fear. It arrived as certainty.
Cold crept along his skin, not biting, but persistent. The water around him was still. No currents. No movement. The silence was absolute, broken only by the faint echo of his own breathing, muffled and strange, as though heard through layers of memory rather than air.
He turned.
The darkness behind him was not empty.
A stretch of land lay there, illuminated by a soft, impossible light. Not the blue glow of the sea, but something warmer, closer to daylight. Grass swayed gently beneath invisible wind. The colors were muted, as if painted from recollection rather than observation.
And there were voices.
Laughter.
Armaan's breath caught.
Children ran across the field, their movements carefree, unburdened by caution or fear. Their feet kicked up dust as they chased one another, shouting, arguing, laughing again moments later. Their faces were bright with life, untouched by loss or knowledge.
They were playing football.
A worn ball rolled across the ground, scuffed and uneven, yet treated like treasure. One boy sprinted after it, barefoot, his movements clumsy but full of unrestrained joy. He tripped, tumbled forward, and burst into laughter before he even hit the ground.
Armaan stared.
The boy pushed himself up, brushing dirt from his knees. He was small. Eight, perhaps ten at most. His hair was untamed, falling into his eyes no matter how many times he pushed it aside. There was a light in his expression that hurt to look at.
Because Armaan recognized him.
The boy noticed him then.
He slowed to a stop, curiosity replacing his laughter. His friends continued playing behind him, their voices fading into a distant hum as the world seemed to narrow around the two of them.
The child tilted his head.
"Who are you?" he asked.
His voice was clear. Innocent. Untouched.
Armaan tried to speak. For a moment, no sound came out.
"I…" His throat felt tight. "I am you."
The boy frowned.
He took a step closer, studying Armaan with open scrutiny, the way children do, without politeness or fear. His eyes moved over Armaan's face, his posture, the stillness in his shoulders.
"No," the boy said finally.
The word landed softly, yet it struck harder than any blade.
"You can't be me."
Armaan's fingers curled at his sides. "Why not?"
The boy hesitated, searching for the right words. Then he shrugged, as if the answer were obvious.
"You don't look like me," he said. "Your face is… empty. Like you're thinking about too many things at once."
He gestured vaguely toward Armaan's chest.
"You look tired."
The world seemed to tilt.
Armaan felt something inside him fracture, quietly, without spectacle.
The boy turned away, already losing interest, already returning to the game. He ran back toward his friends, laughter reclaiming him as though Armaan had never existed at all.
Armaan stood alone at the edge of the field.
The sounds of play echoed faintly, distorted, as if heard from the bottom of a well. He looked down at his hands. They were steady. Scarred. Familiar.
Heavy.
He remembered this place.
Not exactly, not perfectly—but enough. The neighborhood field. The afternoons that stretched endlessly, where the future was a vague promise rather than a looming threat. He remembered running until his lungs burned, collapsing into the grass with sweat in his eyes and a smile he hadn't questioned.
He remembered dreams.
Not of battles. Not of duty.
Of stadiums filled with noise. Of wearing a jersey with his name on it. Of carrying a nation's hope on his feet, not on his shoulders.
A footballer.
The memory surfaced slowly, like something long buried and finally disturbed.
He had wanted something simple.
Something joyful.
The field began to blur.
Water seeped into the edges of the scene, creeping across the grass, swallowing color and sound. The laughter of children stretched and distorted until it dissolved into silence.
The boy vanished.
The light dimmed.
Armaan found himself once more suspended in the deep sea, the fragment of light above him trembling, as though it too were struggling to exist.
His back bent slightly.
Not from physical weight, but from something far heavier.
That was when the water moved.
A pressure rolled through the abyss, ancient and deliberate. The darkness thickened, folding in on itself. Far below, something immense shifted, unseen yet undeniable.
A presence.
A voice rose—not spoken, but felt.
It did not come from a mouth. It came from everywhere.
"You see now."
Armaan did not turn.
"I did not take that from you," the voice continued, deep and resonant, like stone dragged across the ocean floor. "You left it behind."
The water grew colder.
The deep sea did not just press against him; it claimed him.
It held him in a suspension so absolute that time seemed to dissolve, losing its relevance entirely. The pressure was not violent, nor was it urgent. It was the quiet, crushing insistence of an entity that had waited eons for this moment and could wait eons more. There were no currents to carry the sound of the world above, no tides to mark the passing of hours. Even the air in his lungs felt borrowed—a temporary loan from a void that viewed his existence with total indifference.
Far above—impossibly, hopelessly distant—the single fragment of light trembled in the abyss. It was too faint to offer guidance and too cold to offer comfort. It served only one cruel purpose: to remind him that a surface existed, that somewhere, there was a world of breath and sun that he had drifted far away from.
Armaan stood motionless.
He remained frozen not out of paralysis, but out of a terrified reverence. His instinct whispered that the equilibrium of this place was fragile, held together by the tension of repressed memories. To move would be to shatter the glass stillness. To speak would be to invite judgment.
Xarthos did not manifest.
Yet, the dragon was inescapable. Armaan felt the ancient presence in the phantom weight settling across his shoulders, in the slow, rhythmic tightening of his chest that mimicked a second heartbeat. It was in the way his own thoughts began to surface without his permission, bubbling up like air from a drowning man.
"You asked," the voice finally arrived. It did not travel through ears or nerves; it manifested directly in the marrow of his bones, heavy and undeniable. "What changed."
The sea floor shifted.
It was not a tectonic rumble, but a rearrangement of reality. The darkness seemed to fold in on itself, knitting together shadows to birth a memory.
A shape began to coalesce in the gloom ahead of him.
At first, it was nothing more than a smudge of darker ink against the black water. Small. Curled inward like a dying ember. It was so impossibly still that Armaan almost dismissed it as wreckage—debris from a ship that had sunk long ago, resting finally at the bottom of the world.
Then, it moved.
A tremor, minute and devastating, ran through the silhouette. The small shoulders hitched upward. A sound followed—faint, uneven, and wet—like the gasp of someone trying to inhale while weeping.
Armaan's heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage.
He forced himself to take a step.
The water resisted. It thickened around his legs, turning to molasses, as if the ocean itself was questioning his right to approach this sacred, broken thing.
There, seated on the desolate expanse of the ocean floor, was a child.
The boy's hands were small, pale, and they clutched the fabric of his own knees with a white-knuckled desperation.
His head was bowed so low that his chin disappeared into his chest, hiding his face from the crushing dark.
The boy was crying.
It was not a loud, demanding wail. It was not a cry for help. It was the soft, rhythmic heaving of a child who has already learned the most painful lesson of all: that no one is coming.
Armaan's vision blurred, the salt of his tears mixing with the phantom sea.
"No…" The syllable fractured in his throat before he could swallow it back.
The boy lifted his head.
Time seemed to stutter and stop. Their eyes met, and looking into that gaze was like looking into a mirror that reflected only the soul. There was no confusion in the child's eyes. There was no innocent curiosity. There was only recognition, layered thick with a hurt so raw it felt like an open wound.
"You left me here."
The words did not ripple through the water. They bypassed the air entirely and sank straight into the softest part of Armaan's chest like lead weights.
"I didn't—" Armaan's voice cracked, brittle and weak. He swallowed, tasting bile. "I didn't mean to."
The boy uncurled his limbs and pushed himself to his feet.
The movement was slow, weary, as if the simple act of standing required a reserve of strength he had exhausted years ago.
"You met me," the child said. His voice shook, high and thin, but underneath the tremble was a steadiness that cut deep. "You looked at me. You remembered who I was."
The child took a single, accusing step closer.
"Then you turned away."
Armaan's legs gave out. He dropped to his knees, the sand of the ocean floor biting into his skin.
The silence of the deep swallowed the impact.
"I had to grow up," Armaan whispered, pleading with a ghost.
"I had to be strong. There were things I needed to do.
Burdens I had to carry."
The boy's hands curled into tight fists at his sides.
"I waited," the child said softly. "I sat right here and I waited. I thought if I stayed still, you would come back for me. I told myself maybe you just forgot where you left me."
Tears slid freely down the boy's round cheeks, shimmering like pearls in the gloom.
"But you didn't forget," the child continued, the accusation landing with the force of a physical blow. "You chose."
Armaan bowed his head, unable to hold the gaze anymore.
"You took my dreams," the boy said, his voice finally rising, cracking with the strain of held-back years. "You took the laughter. You took the football fields, the sunlight, the silly promises we made. You took them all and you fed them to the fire, and you called it sacrifice."
Armaan reached out instinctively, his hand trembling as he tried to bridge the gap.
His fingers passed through smoke.
The child stepped back, unreachable.
"You didn't kill me, Armaan," the boy said quietly. "You abandoned me."
The sea darkened, the shadows lengthening like prison bars.
Xarthos's voice returned, low, vibrating through the water like the hum of a leviathan.
"This part of you was not destroyed," the dragon rumbled. "It was left behind to rot."
The child's form began to dissolve, retreating into the surrounding darkness, becoming one with the pressure. But his crying did not stop. It lingered, echoing faintly in the silence, a sound Armaan realized with horror he had been hearing in the back of his mind for years.
Then, the sound of footsteps crunched on the ocean floor behind him.
Armaan turned slowly, a heavy dread pooling in his stomach, cold as ice.
Samar stood there.
He looked exactly as Armaan remembered, yet entirely different. His posture was rigid, his arms crossed tightly over his chest, his jaw set in a hard line as though he were holding back a torrent of words that had rotted from waiting too long.
Beside him stood Roumit. His eyes were shadowed, his expression unreadable, but his presence radiated a heaviness—the weight of things left unsaid.
"You know what actually hurts?" Samar asked. His voice was conversational, terrifyingly calm.
Armaan swallowed, his throat dry despite the ocean around him.
"It's not the danger," Samar continued, his eyes boring into Armaan. "It's not the battles. It's not even the fear of dying."
Roumit spoke next. His voice was low, restrained, lacking its usual warmth.
"It's standing next to you," Roumit said, "and realizing that you never really let us stand with you."
Armaan shook his head violently. "I didn't want to involve you. I didn't want to drag you into my mess. I wanted to keep you safe."
Samar took a step closer, invading his space.
"And who gave you the right to decide that for us?"
The silence stretched, tense and suffocating.
"You disappear," Roumit said, the words falling like stones.
"You smile. You fight. You lead the charge. But you never tell us what is breaking inside you."
Samar's eyes burned with a mixture of anger and grief.
"We're not strangers, Armaan," he said. "Or at least… we didn't want to be."
The accusations began to pile up, not shouted, not thrown in rage, but placed carefully upon his chest, one by one.
"You don't trust us."
"You don't talk to us."
"You don't let us help."
Each sentence was a physical weight, crushing the air from his lungs.
Armaan's hands curled into the sand, gripping the grains as if they could anchor him to sanity.
"I thought I was protecting you," he rasped, his voice barely holding together.
Roumit looked away, staring into the abyss.
"Protection without honesty," he said softly, "feels like distance."
They began to fade, their figures turning to mist, leaving Armaan grasping at empty water.
In the space where they had stood, Alya appeared.
Her expression was soft. That softness was a weapon; it hurt more than anger ever could.
"You don't look at me the same way anymore," she said quietly. Her voice was a melody he had almost forgotten.
"Your eyes are always somewhere else. Somewhere far away."
Armaan's throat tightened until it burned.
"I'm tired, Alya," he admitted, the truth finally slipping out. "I'm just… trying to keep everything together."
"I know," Alya said. "But somewhere along the way, you stopped letting me in."
She stepped closer, the distance between them feeling like miles.
"You don't talk like before. You don't laugh like before. You don't help me the way you used to. You treat me like glass that might break if you hold it too tight."
Her voice trembled, a crack in the porcelain.
"I miss you," she whispered. "Not the warrior. Not the protector. You."
Tears slid down Armaan's face, hot against the cold sea.
"I never wanted to hurt you."
"I know," Alya replied, fading into the dark. "That is exactly why it hurts."
She vanished.
The ocean floor dissolved. The pressure shifted, changing from the weight of water to the damp, suffocating heaviness of stone.
The cavern returned.
Shadows lengthened, twisting into familiar shapes. Advika. Reet. Manvi.
They stood silent, their faces pale, watching him with eyes that had seen too much. Behind them, the walls of the Kalambhaar Cave bled into existence, the stone soaked with the metallic scent of old blood and fresh memory.
"You were strong," Advika said. Her voice was devoid of judgment, which made it unbearable. "You were the strongest of us all."
The atmosphere thickened. The air grew cold.
"And still," she whispered, "Tara died."
There was no anger. No blame. Just the cold, hard slab of truth.
The ocean pressed down harder now, blending with the cave, creating a hybrid nightmare of stone and water.
Xarthos loomed behind the figures, vast and ancient, his scales merging with the darkness.
"This," the dragon said, his voice vibrating through the floor, "is what changed."
Armaan bowed his head until his forehead touched the ground.
"I thought strength meant carrying everything alone," he whispered to the stone.
"Strength without connection," Xarthos answered, the verdict final, "becomes isolation."
Somewhere in the distance, the child's sob echoed once more—distant, fading, but undeniably alive.
Above them all, the fragile light flickered, and then went out.