The stylus glinted in the torchlight — not from polish, but from oil. And blood.
Devika didn't move.
The Scribe's hand hovered casually near the bound woman's chest. Each of her ribs bore a line — not of Sanskrit, not of known language, but of symbols rendered in sharp, bladed script. Not meant to preserve. Meant to extract.
He looked up and smiled.
"The sixth flame always manifests in disobedient flesh," he said softly. "It's a pattern. We know. We've been watching."
"We?" Devika asked.
"You thought the Grantha remained hidden for centuries because no one was searching?" He stepped away from the girl. "We've been tracing it through bloodlines. Wombs. Orgasms. Murmurs in brothels. Tantric echoes in old scrolls and palm-leaf recipes. You women pass it without knowing — in whispers, in hips, in songs sung during your bleeding days."
Devika took a breath.
"And what do you do when you find it?"
"We harvest it," he said plainly. "Before it remembers itself too fully."
The woman on the slab whimpered. Her eyes met Devika's.
Not begging.
Warning.
Devika stepped forward. The glyph above her pelvis began to glow faintly through her kurta. The Scribe noticed.
He lowered the stylus.
"Yours sings," he said, voice almost admiring. "Not just the fifth. The sixth."
He circled her slowly.
"I wondered when she would rise again."
Devika turned with him, shoulder-to-shoulder, keeping distance.
"She?"
"The flame is not a syllable," he said. "It's a woman. One we never bound. One who opened her thighs before ink ever found palm."
He stopped behind her, speaking into her hair.
"You're her echo."
She reached into her shawl.
Gripped the manuscript.
The pulse raced.
"You won't extract anything from her," Devika said quietly.
"You're right," he replied. "Because I've already begun extracting from you."
The glyphs on her skin shifted.
Not vanished — moved.
As if sucked upward, toward her throat.
Her voice caught.
Her spine arched.
He was pulling the verses from her.
Not with touch.
With intonation.
He began to chant.
Not in Sanskrit.
Not in sound.
In breath.
A guttural, near-silent chant that curled under her ribs and tugged the verses from her marrow.
She dropped to her knees.
The manuscript fell.
Pages unrolled across the stone floor like an uncoiling serpent.
She pressed her palms to the floor.
"Naḥ… naḥ… sparśena…" she whispered.
Her lips began moving on their own.
"Smaraṇaṁ na me vikalpaḥ…""Na dehaḥ na śāstraḥ…""Kevalam… vāyurūpī…""Strī."
"I am not memory by choice.""I am not body, nor scripture.""I am only the wind that enters…""The Woman."
A heat built in the room.
Not fire.
Breath.
The glyphs returned to her skin.
But not where they belonged.
Now they ran down the backs of her thighs.
Curved around her knees.
Pressed into the arch of her foot.
And then into the ground.
The woman on the slab gasped.
The shackles broke.
Not cracked — withered.
Rust turned to powder.
Stone to ash.
She rose.
Her skin glowed with partial verses — incomplete, trembling.
Devika took her hand.
"I know your name," she whispered. "You are Ahalya's daughter. The one who remembered her mother's curse not as stone… but as silence."
The woman blinked.
"I was born mute," she said. "But he taught my body to scream."
The Scribe backed away now.
Not with fear.
With calculation.
"You've awakened something you don't understand," he said.
"I don't need to understand it," Devika replied. "I embody it."
He turned, grabbed a scroll from the floor, and vanished through a side passage.
Devika made no move to follow.
He wasn't the danger anymore.
What stirred beneath her skin was.
They returned to the upper chambers together.
Ahalya's daughter was silent, but steady.
Vaidya stood by the window, watching them arrive. His face, for the first time, unreadable.
"You opened the breath-verse," he said without turning.
"Yes."
"The one that moves without language."
"Yes."
He turned to Devika.
"You know what that makes you?"
She said nothing.
"You are now Shruti."
Not the woman.The listening.
At night, as they lay on straw mats beside a dim lamp, Ahalya's daughter took Devika's hand and pressed it to the space between her ribs.
"No glyphs here," she whispered.
Devika listened.
And heard it:
A pulse that wasn't heart.A syllable that wasn't word.A moan that wasn't desire.
The seventh.