Raiya didn't sleep that night.
While Dhruv and Meena rested near the relic pedestal, Raiya stood at the threshold of the wind corridor, staring at the glyph that had burned itself into the air: ॐ समीराय नमः.
Wind stirred her cloak, her hair, and her scars.
She remembered none of them.
Which was strange.
Because every scar she bore should have a story.
She traced one along her left wrist, thin, pale, surgical. Another along her ribs, deeper, curved, ritualistic.
And a third, just above her heart.
No memory. No pain. Only emptiness.
Raiya had always moved like someone running toward something, fast, silent, brutal. But in this moment, she realised she had been running from something too.
From a name. From a beginning.
And now, the wind was calling it back.
Meanwhile, in the Vault of the Archive
The lotus drone's feed flickered across a high-lumen data chamber.
Prana sat at the center, surrounded by hundreds of glass tablets, each one replaying Dhruv's journey in parallel projections. She didn't blink, didn't twitch. She simply absorbed.
"Begin memory extraction," she said.
A chorus of synthetic monks began chanting behind her, digitized Sanskrit that activated the Archive's overwrite protocols.
Subject selected: RAIYA.Thread Classification: Forgotten Mercenary / Archive Split Asset.Initiating: The Recollection Process.
As they chanted, an old file emerged from deep storage.
A file with Raiya's original designation: RAI-7 // Archive Enforcer // Project Echo-Chisel
Prana tilted her head.
"She wasn't always Dhruv's blade," she whispered.
"She was ours."
She reached out, touching Raiya's digital signature with two fingers. "Restore her purpose. Trigger Echo Trial, let her remember what she was programmed to forget."
Behind her, Archive operators switched visual threads, watching multiple timelines of Raiya at once. Every version that had ever almost existed.
A Raiya who obeyed. A Raiya who killed without pause. A Raiya who had never met Dhruv at all.
Only one had chosen rebellion. Only one had survived long enough to ask why.
Below — Alangara's Second Chamber
The air shifted. Raiya's eyes snapped shut.
A pulse passed through the room. Not loud. But final.
Dhruv woke first. Meena sat upright immediately, frowning.
"It's her," Meena said. "Prana's begun the overwrite."
Raiya staggered back. Her hand trembled. For a second, her pupils flickered with Archive code.
"I... know this place," she murmured.
Her voice was different. Not scared. Unfamiliar.
The wind no longer whispered to her. It recoiled.
She clenched her fists. "Something's inside me. Unfolding. Rewriting."
Meena ran to her side. "Breathe. Anchor yourself."
But Raiya shook her head. "No. This isn't fear. It's... recognition."
The chamber echoed with a rising hum. Runes carved in the windstones began to glow, reacting to her presence.
"She's triggering something in the temple," Dhruv said. "Her past is tied to this place."
"Or to what it was before," Meena added.
Flashback Initiated: Raiya's Past
Metal floors. Cold lights. Synthetic air.
A girl, twelve, maybe younger, stood in front of a holographic deity, reciting combat verses not from devotion, but repetition. Behind her, a handler took notes.
"Test 23-B. Raiya. Blade-sync complete. Emotional detachment is successful."
Another voice: "Upload ritual suppression protocols."
She wasn't taught faith. She was trained in mythic dismantling.
Every chant she learned was reverse-engineered to disable relic users. Every god she studied was a tactical vulnerability.
Each day, she forgot her name. Each night, she was renamed.
One morning, she woke up screaming, but no one came. The next day, she didn't scream.
They called that progress.
On the fiftieth trial, she broke another trainee's jaw for invoking Ganapati's name mid-spar.
On the hundredth, she wept while gutting a dream-avatar of Saraswati.
They awarded her silence.
Return to Present
Raiya gasped. Fell to her knees.
"I was one of them," she whispered. "I was built to unwrite what you remember."
Her eyes brimmed, not with tears, but with rage. Rage at the void where her childhood should've been. Rage at the loyalty she thought she'd chosen... that might have been assigned.
Dhruv took a step forward. "But you aren't that now."
"I could be. If they reach deeper."
Her voice cracked.
"What if I turn on you?"
Meena knelt beside her. "The Archive doesn't show truths. It shows edits. What matters is who you fight for now."
The wind began circling her again, hesitant, then curious.
Raiya looked at her hands. Steady. But something inside was fraying. Not breaking, shifting.
A burst of wind passed through the chamber.
The relic pedestal flared again.
New Trial Available: Echo Reconciliation.
Participant Required: Raiya.
She looked at them. Then at her blade.
"Maybe they gave me a weapon," she whispered. "But I chose what it means."
Then she stepped forward.
The walls of the corridor shimmered with ancestral glyphs. One of them blinked alive as she passed:
Name Detected: Raiya // Authorization Key Fragment: Echo Signature Reinstated.
She froze.
The corridor opened wider.
Wind swept through, and this time, instead of recoiling, it harmonized.
It sang her back into herself.