"In the end, all stories become memory, and memory becomes silence. But some stories… refuse to die."
🌑 Scene Setting:
Time: Before time. Outside the timeline. The cosmic void.
Place: Between the folds of fate. Beyond death and before birth.
Perspective: Sage Vyasa, the Eternal Witness.
🕉️ Opening Scene – The Cosmic River of Time
The void was not silent.
It whispered.
A ceaseless murmur—a cascade of lives and deaths flowing in the River of Time, infinite and untamed.
There, seated at the edge of eternity, blind to both beginning and end, Vyasa wrote.
His eyes were closed.
His fingers bled words onto the leaves of a palm that had not yet grown, with ink drawn not from wells, but from the veins of gods.
He was not a man. Not anymore.
He was memory.
He was curse.
He was witness.
Behind him, thousands of spirits circled like moths around the dying flame of history. Kings without crowns. Lovers without names. Children unborn and ancestors long forgotten.
All bound.
All watching.
And from within the swirling light of the past, a voice echoed.
"Write it again, Vyasa."
Vyasa did not lift his head.
"It has been written already. More than once."
"Then write what was not remembered."
🔱 Dialogue – Vyasa & the Voice of Fate
VYASA:
"You ask me to bleed again, Fate. Do you not tire of this cruelty?"
VOICE (Fate/Kaal):
"Cruelty? Or justice delayed?"
VYASA:
"Justice is an illusion. They all believed they were right. And so they killed. Sons slew fathers. Brothers drank brothers' blood. Gods wept, and demons laughed. And in the end, the dust swallowed them all."
VOICE:
"And yet, their names live."
Vyasa turned. His one eye—blind to time—saw what none could bear.
The image of the battlefield.
Kurukshetra.
The ground cracked open like a wounded mouth.
A chariot stood burning, horses long dead, and upon it—the remnants of kingship turned to ash.
In the distance, a boy wept beside a broken bow.
A mother screamed for her sons. Another prayed for her enemy.
VYASA (voice trembling):
"You want me to remember this? All of it? Again?"
VOICE:
"Yes. Tell it as it was. Tell it as it might have been. Tell it from eyes that bled. From the mouths that dared to curse gods. Tell it from the heart of the fallen and the soul of the unburnt."
"Let the children of this world know the truth of what it means to choose between Dharma and Desire."
⚔️ The Vision: Fragmented Futures
Vyasa raised his hand, and the river split.
And in its rippling shards, the stories flowed.
A golden child abandoned by a mother who dared not be shamed.
A woman born from fire, with eyes like rebellion and a scream that shook empires.
A boy born from Dharma, who would never lie but would doom kingdoms by silence.
An archer who could shoot the eye of a fish but never see his own heart.
A prince born of wind, whose strength cracked stone, but whose innocence would be shattered by a single dice.
And behind them all—
A shadow with burning eyes.
A man with bones in his beard and hatred in his smile.
Shakuni.
VOICE:
"Begin where it hurts the most."
VYASA (quietly):
"Then I will begin… with the dice."
Chapter Ending
"They say the gods play dice with the world. But the truth is... it was man who taught the gods how to gamble."
—End of Chapter 1