Yat sṛṣṭi-śaktir guptāyām bhavati, tat smṛtiḥ strī-tanū-madhye jvalati.""That which creates is hidden—memory burns in the center of a woman's body."
The next day, nothing remained ordinary.
The birds outside her window didn't chirp—they intoned.The ghats didn't bustle—they throbbed.The manuscript didn't lie still—it breathed.
Devika no longer doubted what was happening. Her body was becoming the site of the scripture. Not metaphor. Not allegory. She was no longer reading the Ananga Grantha.
She was remembering it.
She returned to her office only once—to find the lock broken, the drawers rifled through, her notes missing.
Jatin stood in the corridor.
He did not meet her eyes.
"I tried to stop them."
"Who?"
He didn't reply.
Instead, he handed her a single item that had survived: a torn folio from her original Grantha translation.
On it was a line she hadn't translated.
Or rather—couldn't.
It was in a script older than Grantha.Older than Brahmi.
Carved, not written. The letters curved like serpents around a rising sun.
"When the Devī remembers herself in the flame of the womb, the earth shall rise."
She held the page in her hand. It was hot.
Literally. Hot.
Like something from a forge.
Tara met her by the old well near Kamachha. She didn't speak. Just handed Devika a bundle wrapped in red cloth.
Inside it: a black stone yoni-patta, centuries old, smooth with wear.
"Where did you get this?"
Tara's eyes flicked toward the closed-off temple ruins.
"From under the earth. It was buried... under your name."
"My name?"
Tara nodded. "Your full name. Devika Anandā. Inscribed on the underside."
Devika turned the patta over.
It was there.
Inscribed in Nagari, worn and barely visible, but unmistakable.
Her name.
Buried for centuries.
That night, the dreams returned.
She was standing in a cave lit by seven torches. Seven kings, clad in jewels and blood, circled her. Each held a sacred weapon.
One by one, they approached.
Each touched her brow with ash.Each whispered a name into her spine.Each kissed the symbol on her womb.
"You must reclaim us," one said."Before the Bodiless One does."
She gasped awake.
Sweating.
The symbol on her skin was glowing.
The same symbol—three moons around a flame.
It was no longer memory.
It was activation.
She sought the man from the night before—Aravinda—but he was nowhere.
Instead, she was followed.
By shadows.
By a scent she couldn't place—camphor and musk, ancient and intimate.
At the shrine beneath the banyan tree, she sat cross-legged and laid the black stone in front of her.
It throbbed.
The earth beneath it warmed.
She shut her eyes. Began the chant from the verse Jatin had found:
"Yoni-jātā smṛtir jāyate. Kāma anāngaḥ svayam smarati.""From the womb is born remembrance. Desire—the bodiless one—remembers himself."
The tree above her stirred.
Not in wind.
In response.
The leaves whispered.
"You have only seven nights.Seven kings to awaken.Seven memories to reclaim."
She opened her eyes.
There were seven seeds placed around the stone. She had not brought them.
Each was black, ovular, glowing faintly.
She picked one up.
It pulsed.
And in that instant, she saw:
A temple drowned beneath Himalayan ice.A boy with peacock feathers bleeding from his back.A chant carved into her thigh by moonlight.A queen whose mouth spoke Sanskrit and whose kiss burned like Agni.
Each seed was a portal.
Each king—a part of her story.
Each memory—a body she had once worn.
In the distance, a conch shell blew.
Not from the ghats.
But inside her chest.
The time of forgetting was over.
It had begun.
The awakening of the scripture.
And with it: the return of the woman she had once been.
Not Devika. Not Anandā.
But the Yajñinī.
The one who walked between ritual and fire.
The one who remembered God through flesh.