The flames danced like demons.
Rohan was five when the world ended. Smoke thickened the air, each breath tearing at his lungs. He clung to the stairwell railing, eyes burning, as the inferno devoured the walls around him. Screams—his mother's, his father's—ripped through the haze, but he couldn't see them. The heat was unbearable. Wood cracked and split, glass shattered. Somewhere behind the smoke, a bookshelf collapsed.
Then silence.
Not the silence of safety—but the kind that arrives when something living has gone still.
They never came out.
The neighbors told him later that he'd been found curled near the front door, clutching a charred piece of his father's watch strap. The firemen said he was lucky. But Rohan knew better. Luck would've meant they got out too.
---
Five years later, blood replaced fire.
Rohan stood frozen on the side of the road. Cars screeched to a halt around the wreckage. Horns blared, voices screamed. His sister's schoolbag lay torn in the gutter. A yellow scarf—hers—was wrapped around his wrist, wet and red.
They said the driver lost control. That the brakes failed. They said it wasn't anyone's fault.
But Rohan had been standing there, waiting for her. He saw it all.
Her small hand stretched toward him through the shattered bus window. Then it vanished.
And just like that, the last person he loved was gone.
---
Grief became routine.
Rohan spent the next decade under the roofs of strangers who fed him but didn't see him. Foster homes came and went. Some were kind. Most were cold. No one stayed long enough to understand that the boy didn't speak much because silence was safer than trust.
He learned to be invisible. A quiet child, diligent but unremarkable. No fights. No questions. No real friends. Just enough presence to avoid concern.
He passed school. Finished college. Graduated.
By 24, he had a job in a mid-tier tech firm in Pune. He lived alone in a one-room flat that smelled of old paper and silence. No family photos. No visitors. No birthdays. The world had moved on, and he'd stayed behind.
Until Priya.
---
She entered like a whisper. A new hire in the design team, sharp-witted, with eyes that lit up when she laughed.
Rohan noticed her because she noticed him.
One afternoon, during a team lunch, she caught him hiding behind his headphones and asked, "What are you always listening to? Ghosts?"
He smirked. "Silence."
She laughed. Really laughed. Loud and unapologetic.
He didn't understand it then, but something cracked inside him. Something old and tightly sealed.
They talked more after that. At coffee machines. In elevators. She had a way of pulling words out of him like thread from a spool. For the first time in years, he looked forward to something.
Then came the invitation. Dinner at her house. To meet her parents.
---
He wore his only blazer. Shaved twice. Rehearsed lines in his head.
Her house was all glass and expensive art. Her father was a towering man with eyes like courtroom judges. Her mother smiled the way knives might smile.
The questions came sharp and fast: "Where are your parents?" "What's your family background?" "Any siblings?"
And the answers, each like a dull blade: "Dead." "Foster care." "None left."
Her mother didn't even try to hide her disapproval. "You have no roots, no lineage. That's tragic."
Her father added bluntly, "We want stability for our daughter. Not a project."
Priya said nothing. Not in protest. Not in support. Just silence.
That silence hurt more than the words.
He left early. She didn't follow.
---
The unraveling began quietly.
He sat through meetings but couldn't focus. His code failed in testing. He forgot deadlines. Emails went unanswered. He heard whispers—about incompetence, mood swings, unprofessionalism.
Then came the client escalation. A high-priority delivery failed. And he, the project lead, had no excuse.
HR didn't sugarcoat it. "We're letting you go. You need time to figure yourself out."
That night, his flat felt smaller than usual. The walls pressed in. The ticking of the clock was deafening. Her laugh echoed in the silence. So did her mother's voice.
You have no roots...
He grabbed a half-finished bottle of rum and walked.
---
It was Amavasya—the moonless night. The sky above was pitch, starless, oppressive. The streets emptied early. Even the dogs didn't bark.
He walked until the city gave way to the riverbanks. The Mula-Mutha shimmered black under the dim streetlamps. Somewhere across the water, a crematorium burned faint orange.
He took another swig. Then another. His mind burned with memories—blazing timber, shattered glass, blood on asphalt, Priya's silence. A life filled with endings, never beginnings.
He staggered closer to the edge, shoes sinking into mud. The current whispered like voices just below hearing. Maybe they were calling him.
One wrong step.
The ground slipped from under him.
The world flipped.
And the river swallowed him whole.
---
Underwater, he opened his eyes.
The river wasn't cold. It was warm. Like memory.
He didn't feel pain. Only weight.
He saw them—floating beside him.
His mother, arms outstretched. Her face blackened by smoke. "Why didn't you save me?"
His father, crushed beneath a beam. "Why did you live?"
His sister, blood on her forehead, whispering, "You promised you'd be there."
Then Priya's mother: "You're nothing."
The current twisted around him like chains. He didn't fight. There was nothing to fight for.
But something—no, someone—pulled him back.
---
He awoke coughing, mud in his throat. The sun was rising, pale and cold.
He was on the riverbank. But not the one he knew.
No buildings. No bridges. Just trees. Fog. And silence.
He rose, trembling, soaked to the bone, and stumbled forward through tangled undergrowth until he saw it: a broken house.
Half its roof had collapsed. Vines crept along the brick. Its door hung open like a yawn.
Drawn by something unseen, he stepped inside.
The air was thick. Not dusty—oppressive. Like the house had been holding its breath for centuries.
He looked around. Torn wallpaper. Black mold. Symbols carved into the wood. Not graffiti. Older.
The temperature dropped.
A whisper crawled through the floorboards. Then another. Then a laugh—low, guttural, and not human.
The door slammed shut.
---
They came at him—shadows twisted into faces he recognized. The woman from the bus stop. His father's charred figure. His sister's shattered glasses.
He ran, but the hallway stretched longer and longer. He fell. Crawled. Cried out.
A voice, ancient and echoing, cracked through the darkness.
"You begged for death. Now we ask: what life do you have left?"
It wasn't a question.
It was a judgment.
He knelt.
Not out of fear—but clarity.
Everything he had feared, everything he had lost... it had brought him here. And there was nothing left to mourn.
He said nothing.
But something in his silence answered.
---
The room changed.
Red light seeped through the cracks in the walls. A shape formed—a face, not quite human. Eyes like dying stars. A mouth that didn't move when it spoke.
"You carry the weight of the dead. Would you bear their power too?"
Rohan looked up.
For the first time in years, his lips curled into something not quite a smile.
"What's the cost?" he asked.
The entity grinned.
"Only what's already been taken."
The pact was not sealed in blood. It was sealed in emptiness.
A soul with nothing left to lose... becomes the most dangerous vessel of all.
To be continued...