She didn't sleep.
Sleep is too soft a word for what happened.
Sleep requires surrender. This was an ambush.
It began as heat.
Not from the air around her, but inside her ribs — a kindling.
As if someone had crept into her bones with a lit match and said, "Remember."
Then — fire.
Not metaphor. Not dream logic.
Real, hungry, orange fire. Charring a sky that should've been night.
She stood in the middle of a desert gone red, the wind carrying ash instead of sand.
Snakes moved like scripture over the dunes.
Hundreds. Thousands.
They didn't strike.
They watched.
Their bodies moved in spirals, slow and exact — like a ritual, like grief.
Their scales shimmered with light that didn't come from the sky.
A language hissed from their mouths, but it wasn't hissing.
It was whispering.
Older than fire. Older than fear.
And then, in the distance —
The haveli.
Burning.
Not being destroyed.
Becoming something.
The flames didn't devour it.
They revealed it.
Every window bleeding gold.
Every wall trembling like it had secrets to confess.
She moved toward it, barefoot, scorched soles against sacred stone.
She stood now in a courtyard aflame.
The fire licked the haveli's walls like memory run amok.
Snakes slithered from the inferno, forming a writhing path at her feet.
And at the end of that path —
A man inside the fire.
No screaming. No burning.
Just… standing there.
Half of his face was shadow.
The other was made of ash and memory.
The way he looked at her—
She knew him.
Not from a photo. Not from life.
From somewhere older than her birth certificate.
Older than her name.
"You're too late," he said.
The words cut through the fire like a knife through soaked cloth.
They weren't a warning.
They were a sentence passed down.
But this time—
Rasmika didn't run.
Didn't scream.
Didn't crumble.
She stepped toward him, through the fire, through the hissing serpents.
Her body burned.
But her spirit burned brighter.
She opened her mouth.
Smoke spilled out.
No words.
Just grief in vapor form.
"You forgot me," he said.
"You promised."
His voice wasn't angry.
It was betrayed—
Like something inside her had broken long before she arrived at Bhangarh.
The snakes were on her now.
Climbing her arms.
Curling around her shoulders.
Ink black, skin-close.
Moving like veins she'd always had.
Her right palm flared.
A sudden, vicious sting.
As if something bit her from inside.
She screamed.
The fire swallowed her whole.
She awoke with a start — gasping, soaked in sweat.
Sticky air.
Salt in her throat.
And silence that listened back.
The desert night pressed in, too cold, too still.
She sat up, heart sprinting.
Pain.
Her right palm — pulsing, red-hot.
She flipped it over.
There it was:
A red oval, blistered at the edges, deep at the center.
Not blood. Not bruise.
A burn.
And it was… familiar.
Like it had always been there, waiting to be revealed.
She didn't touch it.
Couldn't.
The pain pulsed like an old grief being remembered by the skin.
It wasn't just physical.
It ached — the way some memories ache when you don't have the language for them.
She stumbled to the basin.
Splashed cold water on her face.
Her reflection stared back—calm, but shaken.
No delay.
No mirror tricks.
Just her.
But thinner around the edges.
She leaned closer, searching her own eyes.
Trying to find the fault line.
The crack in the vessel.
The part of her where Alira might be hiding.
She said nothing.
Not to herself.
Not to the water.
Not to the shadow she thought she saw behind her in the mirror.
She wrapped her hand in sterile gauze.
Didn't tell anyone.
Didn't log it as an injury.
Didn't breathe the word Alira.
But something in her — something buried deep and ugly and radiant — had been stirred.
And whatever it was…
wasn't going to sleep again.
That night, sleep did not come — not in the way mortals know it.
Rasmika lay beneath the canvas of her temporary tent, the stars veiled behind thick desert clouds, the silence around her a little too silent, like the air itself was listening.
And then—
The dream began.
But it wasn't a dream.
It was a threshold.
Again she stood barefoot in that burning courtyard.
The stone scorched her soles, but she did not flinch.
Snakes slithered toward her, firelight reflected in their unblinking eyes.
And standing there again —
The man cloaked in shadows, face half-lit by flame, voice bitter with regret.
"You're too late."
This time —
She didn't stumble.
She didn't weep.
She stepped forward, smoke curling around her legs, her voice no longer her own —
but layered, ancient, furious, feminine.
"I've heard that line before," she said.
"Try another."
The dream collapsed.
She gasped awake.
Her fingers trembled as she reached for water — but stopped midway.
There, glowing faintly in the dark, was the mark on her palm.
A perfect spiral.
Still warm.
Still alive.
She traced it once with her thumb.
It pulsed.
Outside, the wind began to howl.
And somewhere in the ruins, the mirror — cracked and waiting — flickered like it had seen the dream too.
The camp remained still.
Except for the wind.
And the spiral.
Some marks don't come from outside.
Some burns begin where memory meets skin — and calls it home.