Sixty days had bled into the soil of the Kalindi Valley, yet the passage of time felt less like a healing balm and more like a shroud. The relentless monsoon rains had arrived on schedule, scouring the riverbanks and washing the physical stains of celestial ichor into the churning grey waters. New grass, thin and deceptively bright, had begun to stitch itself over the scorched earth where the Asuras had stood, but the verdancy was a lie. Beneath the roots, the land felt cold, and in the minds of the survivors, the memory of the obsidian rift remained as jagged and raw as a fresh wound. To the villagers, the sky was no longer a comfort; it was a ceiling that had once broken, and they lived in the quiet, breathless terror that it might shatter again.
The Architecture of Suspicion
In the village proper, the air had grown stagnant with a new kind of poison: gossip. At the communal well and under the heavy, low-hanging eaves of the tea stalls, the rhythm of daily life had been replaced by a low-grade, persistent paranoia. The villagers no longer whispered about the harvest or the rising price of grain; they spoke in hushed, jagged sentences about the boy on the hill.
"They weren't men," the blacksmith whispered to a circle of hushed listeners, his hammer resting idle. "The ones in the dark... they dissolved into smoke they were asuras we have heard from the myths. And the ones in gold and silver? They looked at us like we were ants they accidentally stepped on while fighting a spider."
But the sharpest edge of the village gossip was reserved for the house of Verman. Suspicion is a slow-growing vine, and it had wrapped itself tightly around Arjun and his family. The villagers remembered how the Asura leader, Mihirkul, had screamed for the "Avatar." They remembered how the celestial warriors had bowed to Verman as if he was one of them.
"Verman wasn't one of us," the village elder muttered to his wife. "He brought that war to our door. And the boy... Arjun. Have you seen his eyes lately? There is a light in them that doesn't belong to a mortal lad. It's dangerous. Having him here is like keeping a lightning bolt in a straw hut."
A handful of listeners nodded in fearful agreement, the murmur of dissent was cut short by a sharp, authoritative snap.
"And where would we have been without that spark?"
The voice belonged to the temple priest, who was listening them from a distance his eyes flashing with a cold, righteous anger that silenced the room. "You speak of expulsion as if it were a cure, but you forget the disease. When the shadows tore through the clouds, it wasn't your prayers or your locked doors that held them back. It was Verman. He was the only man among us who could stand against those demons, and he bled into our soil so that you could sit here tonight and gossip about his son."
He stood there, his gaze sweeping across the shamed faces of the villagers. "To turn our backs on the boy now isn't just cowardice—it is a betrayal of the blood that saved us. We are alive because of the 'lightning' you so fear. We should be on our knees in gratitude, not sharpening our tongues to exile a grieving child."
The first villager who had nodded in agreement now looked at the floor, his face flushed with a sudden, stinging shame. One by one, the others began to murmur in hushed, redirected tones.
"He's right," someone whispered from the back of the room. "We owe the man a debt that can't be paid with exile."
The elder who had started the gossip shifted uncomfortably, the venom in his words neutralized by the weight of the truth. But even as the villagers nodded in reluctant agreement, the fear remained—a cold, underlying dread that no amount of gratitude could fully wash away.
To the people of Kalindi, Arjun had become a living omen. They watched him with a mixture of reverence and revulsion, as one might look at a beautiful, unexploded shell. He was a reminder of their fragility, a witness to a slaughter they wished to forget, and the target of a war they didn't understand.
The Hill of Echoes
Far above the fearful murmurs of the valley, the world was quieter.
Midway up the mountain, where the mist clung to the jagged rocks like a damp shroud, a single, ancient cedar tree stood defiantly against the slope. Its roots were gnarled, twisting into the earth like the fingers of a giant.
Arjun lay flat on his back, his fingers interlaced behind his head. Beside him, Gopi sat hunched, a small paring knife in his hand as he mindlessly stripped the bark from a fallen branch. The silence between them was long and heavy, filled only by the rhythmic scritch-scritch of the blade and the distant roar of the river below.
Arjun stared blankly at the swirling grey mist above. To anyone else, it was just weather. To him, it was a veil. He searched the gaps in the clouds, his eyes aching as if he were trying to see through the very fabric of the universe.
"Why us?" The question echoed in his mind until it lost all meaning. For weeks his mind had been a labyrinth of whys. In the depths of his own chest, did he feel a strange, humming heat that grew louder every time he looked toward the horizon?
"They're talking about you again," Gopi said, his voice small and tight, breaking the long silence. The wood shavings fell into the dirt like pale snowflakes.
Arjun didn't move. He didn't even blink. "They're always talking, Gopi."
"It's different now," Gopi persisted, his voice tight with anxiety. "They don't look at us with pity anymore. They look at us with... dread. That bastard old Man Haryan says the ground where your father was burned still glows at night. He says we're 'tainted' by the celestial blood and should leave the village so that asuras wouldn't come back again."
Arjun maintained his calm composure and replied "Haryan is a coward who fears even his own shadow, Gopi. He thinks if he closes his eyes, the asuras will stop existing like a pigeon in front of a preying cat."
"It's not just him," Gopi whispered, finally dropping the knife. "It's everyone. They look at you and they see the rift. They look at your mother and they see a widow who was married to a ghost. They're suspicious, Arjun. They think if you stay, the 'Asuras' will come back to finish the job."
The Burden of the Beacon
Arjun finally turned his head. His eyes, once bright with the mundane dreams of a village lad, were now deep and unsettlingly clear. There was a gravity in his expression that aged him a decade—a look of someone who had peered behind the curtain of the world and could never un-see what lay there.
"They aren't wrong to be afraid," Arjun said, his voice a low, melodic rasp. "The world they knew is gone. They want to go back to a life where the gods are just stone idols they can appease with a handful of flowers. But now when they already saw both god's and asuras in front of them, They don't want them back here, it's ironic how the same people who have worshipped god's for centuries in hope to see them in real don't want to see them anymore when they finally appeared." He passed a little smirk with a mocking smile.
Hello continued "But..Their fear is legit nobody ever wanna witness the bloodshed ever again happened that night."arjun whispered with a low realising tone.
He sat up, his movements possessing a fluid, predatory grace that made Gopi flinch instinctively.
"For weeks I had layed here under this vast sky watching the stars, sun and moon and I asked them for the answers, but the sky always remained silent, they never replied," Arjun continued, his hand tightening into a fist. "I think the answers aren't up there. I think they're waiting for me in the dark places my father tried to keep me away from. Let the villagers whisper. Let them look at me with suspicion." He uttered with a furious voice and turned his gaze towards gopi, "A beacon doesn't care if the people it guides are afraid of the light—it just burns."
Gopi looked at his friend and felt a sudden, cold realization. The boy he had raced to the river with was gone. In his place sat something harder, something forged in the heat of a hundred funeral pyres.
"The two months are almost up, aren't they?" Gopi asked, his voice trembling.
Arjun looked back at the sky, where the mist was beginning to part, revealing a sliver of terrifyingly clear blue. "The air is changing, Gopi. The pressure is rising. They're coming back soon. And this time, I won't be watching from the mud."
The mist continued to swirl around them, a thick grey curtain that seemed to isolate the two friends from the rest of the world. Gopi looked at Arjun, hesitant, before finally asking the question that had been rotting in the back of his mind for weeks.
"Your mother..." Gopi started, his voice barely a whisper. "Has she said anything yet? About... you know. Who your father really was? Or who you are?"
Arjun's jaw tightened. He picked up a stone and hurled it into the fog, listening for a thud that never came. "No. Not a word. Every time I bring up the golden warriors or the way the Asura leader looked at me, she finds a chore for me to do. She buries herself in the kitchen or starts praying until her voice goes hoarse. She's terrified, Gopi. She thinks if she doesn't speak the truth, it won't be true."
"She's just trying to protect you," Gopi said softly.
"Protecting me won't stop the sky from opening again," Arjun replied, standing up abruptly. "I'm tired of living in a house of shadows."
The House of Silence
They both started to walk back to the village the walk was silent. When Arjun reached his home—a modest stone cottage that now felt far too small for him—he found his mother, Smita, sitting by the hearth. She was meticulously cleaning lentils, her movements rhythmic and mechanical, but her hands were trembling.
Arjun didn't go to his room. He didn't wash up for dinner. He stood in the doorway, his silhouette blocking the fading evening light, until she was forced to look up.
"The villagers turned their backs when I walked past the well today, Ma," Arjun said, his voice flat.
Smita kept her eyes on the bowl. "They are afraid, Arjun. People say foolish things and act foolish when they are scared. Just ignore them."
"I can't ignore it when I'm scared too!" Arjun's voice cracked, the first sign of the boy breaking through the stone mask. "I'm scared because I don't know what I am. I don't know who we are and what's our real identity, and why my father have to die in front of my eyes in the hands of those demons.
Smita finally dropped the bowl. The lentils scattered across the dirt floor like tiny, forgotten beads. "Stop it, Arjun. We are just simple ordinary people. Your father was a good man who just did his duty with utmost honest and sincerity—nothing special"
"He wasn't an ordinary man!" Arjun stepped into the room, the intensity of his presence making the flames in the hearth flicker. "Everyone saw him fighting the demons Ma. No ordinary human could putup the fight against those asuras alone like him. The way he was fighting showing his inhuman feat of strength against them and moving with the speed of light in between them, can't be performed by any other ordinary human being. And the leader of those monsters—he called me an Avatar, what does that mean."