The ground moved before the warning came.
Swaminathan felt it first through his feet—a faint vibration, almost polite, like a knock asking permission to enter. He paused mid-step on the stone path outside his house, brows knitting. The vibration deepened, turning into a rolling tremor that passed beneath the soles of his boots and traveled up his legs, settling somewhere behind his ribs.
He stood still.
Movement, he believed, should follow reason. This did not.
Across the street, a stack of clay pots rattled, then collapsed in a scatter of red shards. A dog barked once and ran, tail tucked low. Somewhere, a woman screamed—not sharply, but in confusion, as if she had not yet decided whether fear was justified.
Then the ground shifted.
Not violently. Not like the earthquakes described in old books. The earth did not crack open or swallow buildings whole. Instead, it slid, as though the land itself had grown tired of standing where it was told to stand. The straight road curved abruptly, bending away from Swaminathan's house. A line of trees leaned, roots groaning, then settled at a new angle. Stone steps leading to the marketplace shortened, compressing themselves like drawn breath.
People stumbled. Some fell. Others laughed nervously, trying to pretend this was merely another strange morning in a strange time.
Swaminathan did not move.
He planted his feet, spine straight, jaw clenched, refusing to adjust his stance even as the ground subtly reshaped itself beneath him. His body compensated instinctively, muscles tightening to maintain balance, but he did not step aside or bend his knees.
Around him, people scrambled to adapt.
"Hold on!" someone shouted.
"Move with it, don't fight it!"
Swaminathan ignored them.
The tremor lasted less than a minute. When it ended, the town looked almost familiar, but not quite. Distances had changed. Paths no longer met where memory insisted they should. The old symmetry was gone.
A murmur rippled through the crowd.
"This is new," someone said.
"No," another replied quietly. "It's getting worse."
Swaminathan exhaled slowly. His heart was beating faster than usual—not from fear, he told himself, but from irritation. The disruption had forced a pause in his routine. He was meant to visit the records office at this hour, review old statutes, reinforce his arguments against the council's latest proposals.
Routine was armor. Without it, the mind was exposed.
He took a step forward—and stopped.
The road ahead dipped sharply, then rose, forming an unfamiliar slope. The steps to the records office were no longer aligned with the entrance. A gap yawned where there had once been smooth stone.
For the first time that morning, Swaminathan hesitated.
He could, of course, find another way. Walk around. Adjust his path.
The thought tightened something in his chest.
He chose instead to step directly onto the slanted road, placing his foot carefully, forcing his body to comply with his will rather than the terrain's suggestion. The stone shifted slightly under his weight, testing him. He responded by stiffening, redistributing pressure through discipline rather than instinct.
It worked.
But it was slow.
Others passed him with ease, bending, swaying, altering their gait without thought. Among them was a man Swaminathan had never seen before—short, wiry, barefoot, with clothes that looked as though they had been repaired a dozen different ways by a dozen different hands.
The man moved like water finding cracks.
He stepped where the ground dipped, hopped where it rose, adjusted his pace mid-stride. When a loose stone slid, he laughed softly and let himself slide with it before regaining balance.
"Careful there, sir," the man said, glancing at Swaminathan with amused eyes. "The road's in a bad mood today."
Swaminathan did not reply.
He reached the edge of the slope and paused, calculating the safest way across without compromising posture or pace. The man waited, watching him with open curiosity.
"You're fighting it," the man said.
"I am navigating it," Swaminathan replied.
The man grinned. "That's a fancy word for the same thing."
Swaminathan finally looked at him properly. The man's face was lined, not with age, but with experience—sun, wind, hunger, and laughter etched into skin that refused to harden. His eyes were alert, constantly adjusting, as if measuring the world anew every second.
"Who are you?" Swaminathan asked.
"Bicchu," the man said easily. "Just passing through. Or staying. Depends how the land feels about it."
"The land does not feel," Swaminathan said. "It behaves according to forces."
Bicchu shrugged. "If you say so."
A sudden shout interrupted them. Down the road, a group of guards—bearing the insignia of the council—were struggling to keep order. The ground beneath their feet shifted again, a smaller aftershock, and one of them fell hard, his rigid armor preventing him from rolling with the movement.
Bicchu winced. "That's going to hurt later."
Swaminathan watched as two townspeople helped the guard up, loosening his armor straps so he could move more freely. The guard resisted at first, then relented, breathing easier once the rigid plates no longer constrained him.
"Armor protects," Swaminathan said, almost to himself.
"Until it doesn't," Bicchu replied.
They crossed the slope together at last—Swaminathan slowly, Bicchu lightly. On the other side, the path narrowed unexpectedly, forcing people to pass one at a time. A bottleneck formed. Voices rose. Frustration mounted.
Swaminathan stepped forward, prepared to assert order, to instruct people to queue properly, to restore the discipline that had governed such situations for generations.
Before he could speak, Bicchu moved.
He climbed onto a low wall, waved his arms, and called out, "Hey! You go left, you go right—yes, both of you at once. There's space if you stop insisting there isn't!"
People hesitated, then followed his directions. The flow eased. The tension dissolved.
Within moments, the bottleneck was gone.
Swaminathan stared.
"That was… inefficient," he said finally.
Bicchu laughed. "It worked."
"It ignored established procedure."
"There was no procedure for a road that shrinks," Bicchu replied. "So I made one that fit."
Swaminathan felt the familiar pressure then—not as strong as before, but unmistakable. The air seemed to thicken briefly, as if the world itself were paying attention.
Bicchu blinked, glancing around. "You feel that?"
Swaminathan said nothing.
They continued walking, now toward the marketplace, which had shifted closer to the river overnight. Stalls leaned at odd angles. Merchants shouted prices that changed mid-sentence as goods spoiled faster or lasted longer than expected.
"How do you live like this?" Swaminathan asked abruptly.
Bicchu considered the question seriously. "By not living against it."
"That is not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got," Bicchu said. "This place—this whole stretch of the world—it doesn't like being told what it must be. Took me a while to learn that."
"And if it is wrong?" Swaminathan asked. "If adapting encourages further instability?"
Bicchu stopped walking.
He turned to face Swaminathan fully now, his expression no longer amused. "You think the world's misbehaving because we're too flexible?"
"I think," Swaminathan said carefully, "that when rules bend, reality follows."
Bicchu nodded slowly. "And I think when rules refuse to bend, reality breaks people instead."
For a moment, neither spoke.
A sudden crack echoed from somewhere nearby. A stall collapsed inward, its owner scrambling back just in time. The ground beneath it sank slightly, then stabilized.
Bicchu moved immediately, helping the merchant retrieve scattered goods, adjusting the stall's legs so they compensated for the uneven ground.
Swaminathan watched, hands clenched at his sides.
"Come with me," Bicchu said suddenly.
"To where?" Swaminathan asked.
"Anywhere you weren't planning to go today."
The suggestion felt like a challenge.
"I do not abandon routine lightly," Swaminathan said.
Bicchu smiled, a hint of sadness in his eyes. "The land doesn't care about lightly or heavily. It just cares whether you move when it does."
Another tremor rippled through the ground, gentler this time, almost playful.
Swaminathan looked down at his boots—dusty now, scuffed by altered stone. His schedule for the morning was already ruined. The records office was inaccessible. The council would be in chaos again.
Routine had been broken.
Against his will, a question surfaced in his mind: What if standing firm is no longer enough?
He pushed the thought away.
"I will walk with you for a time," he said stiffly. "Observation requires proximity."
Bicchu grinned. "That's flexibility talking. Don't worry—you'll get better at it."
As they moved off together, the pressure in the air eased, like a held breath released.
Far beneath them, something ancient shifted, adjusting its attention.
The ground had moved.
And Swaminathan, however reluctantly, had begun to move with it.