On the floor beside the corpse is a symbol scrawled in soot: a wheel with eight spokes, each tip shaped like an eye. Rudra instinctively touches it—and hears a chanting in his own voice, though his lips don't move. He wipes it away as police sirens approach. The manuscript page is back in his satchel—now marked with a single bloody fingerprint that is not his.
---
The soot was warm.
Not metaphorically—truly warm, as if the symbol had been drawn not with powder but with ash still carrying the heat of fire. Rudra's fingertip recoiled on contact, but not before it triggered something in the marrow of him.
He staggered back, clutching his head.
The room dimmed, but not because of the moonlight. It was as if his consciousness had turned inward, folding itself like a paper box collapsing along invisible creases.
Then—
He heard it again.
His own voice. Chanting.
But his lips were still.
The words came through his ears and through his bones, from somewhere behind his eyes. They weren't spoken into the world—they were etched into him.
> "Om karoti netram... Sa bindu dasha... Karuna prabhruta..."
Each phrase rang like a tuning fork struck against his skull. There was a terrible, seductive rhythm to it—wrong and beautiful, like a lullaby composed by someone who had never slept.
His hands shook. The air in the room grew dense, pressing in on him from all sides. The wheel on the floor appeared to ripple. Each of the eight eyes blinked—once, in unison.
He fell to his knees, gasping, forehead nearly brushing the ash.
This is not yours. This was never yours.
The thought did not come from him. But it wore the shape of his own reasoning. It entered like a command cloaked as intuition.
He reached for the embroidered handkerchief in his pocket and furiously scrubbed at the ash. The wheel smeared, distorted, and finally vanished—though the faint warmth remained, radiating up through the wood like a heartbeat.
From the street beyond the library's stone walls came a sharp whistle.
Then another.
Footsteps. Voices. Colonial police, by the clipped bark of the commands.
Rudra froze.
He looked down at Mr. Ganguly one last time, his mouth sewn into a silence that seemed almost… peaceful.
The thought came unbidden:
He didn't scream.
Rudra turned and fled, moving through the hallways with practiced, silent urgency. He didn't use the main stairwell—he took the fire escape at the back of the archive wing, boots slapping softly against rusted iron as he descended into the dark.
---
By the time he returned to his boarding room in Bowbazar, the eastern sky was a dull bruise, bleeding the first colorless light of dawn into the smog.
He locked the door. Triple-bolted it. Wedged a chair beneath the knob.
Only then did he breathe.
The satchel.
It lay on his cot, where he'd dropped it. He opened it slowly.
The cloth-wrapped bundle was just as he had left it.
But when he unwrapped it—
The page had changed.
The original phrase—Ashta-Kala awakens in silence—was still there.
But beneath it, faint and fresh, a new mark had appeared: the same bloody fingerprint he'd seen earlier.
Still not his.
Worse: it now sat squarely over the spine of the skeletal figure inked on the page.
And beneath the figure—where there had been no words before—two characters had bloomed into visibility, as if bled from the page itself.
"Mudra One."
Rudra sat back, fingers trembling. He did not know how the page knew. Or what it meant.
But the blood on the page was still fresh.
And it was beginning to dry.