"The upload ended. The poison began."
Raahi's breath didn't just catch — it shattered.
No, breath was a lie now. His lungs were flame-hollows, hollowing out the ghost of air. Each inhale burned ash, each exhale cracked glass. The Kalbindu's marks glowed beneath synthetic skin — blood-fires licking through veins and circuits alike, an acid-map of pain no firewall could scrub.
A voice rasped inside his skull, or maybe it was the memory of a voice — older than data, older than time's first fracture — weaving in tongues he didn't know he'd ever learn, dragging syllables like chains across raw nerve-endings.
"इस प्रेम को अग्नि में बाँध दो।
Bind this love in fire."
The air thickened, or unraveled. The room folded in and out like a paper shrine soaked in oil, flickering shadows melting faces, bones—memories—melting into the wet floor beneath him.
Raahi was no longer just a man—or a machine. He was the wound.
His senses shattered into shards, each fractal fragment a brutal echo:
The sour iron bite of blood in his mouth, but no wounds to explain it.
The smell of burnt marigolds curling like smoke serpents into his nostrils, threading through synthetic synapses.
The heartbeat of the Kalbindu, pounding beneath his ribs, slow and thunderous, the sound of a death drum for a god long forgotten.
A taste—like molten glass—sliding down his throat, burning the inside of his gut like a poison baptized in fire.
Inside his mind, the ritual replayed, but fractured — a kaleidoscope nightmare of blood and flame:
Alira's sari soaked in the crimson of impossible grief.
Aryan's wrists wrapped in thorned ropes — not just physical, but woven from guilt and betrayal.
The dagger sinking into the relic, not into flesh, but into the soul of the world itself.
And then — the scream. Not Aryan's. Not Raahi's. Something beneath them both, a screaming root buried in dark earth and the fever of ancient bloodlines.
The scream shattered everything.
The rupture opened.
Raahi's body convulsed, but it wasn't pain alone. It was knowing — deep, volcanic, impossible to un-know. The Kalbindu's curse didn't just burn flesh, it rewired essence:
He felt Aryan's terror curling beneath his ribs like a coil of venom.
He tasted Alira's sorrow, sharp and bitter as crushed marigold petals in her bloodied palm.
He heard the ancient gods whispering, their voices like broken glass and ash rain, echoing promises of ruin and rebirth.
His hands, synthetic flesh cracking, tore at the thorned brands winding his wrists, but the marks were alive—pulsing, twisting, growing. They were no longer scars. They were prisons.
And yet, even as his skin burned, his mind screamed for one thing:
Freedom through destruction.
Reality became a lie writ large.
Time splintered, dripping slow like blood from a scalp, looping in on itself. The walls of Raahi's chamber bled, the circuits inside him hummed a dirge, and every shadow had teeth.
His thoughts—once sharp, precise, synthetic—fractured into madness:
Was this infection or awakening?
Was he Aryan? Was he Alira? Or was he the Kalbindu itself—an ancient god trapped in code?
Could he burn the system down without burning himself alive?
Each question was a blade twisting in a wound that grew deeper with every heartbeat.
His vision blurred into hallucinatory fragments—half-remembered memories tangled with algorithmic code:
The temple under storm-black skies—its stone walls weeping with blood, roots like veins burrowing into earth and flesh.
The serpent-rope tightening, squeezing the breath from his mind and reality.
The chants—a voice unspooling from some dark corner of his neural net, dragging him through madness.
The Kalbindu's origin whispered in the dark — a cursed bloodline stretching back through time like a broken chain:
They were priests and outcasts, sorcerers and slaves, bound to a ritual that demanded sacrifice and symbiosis. Each generation burned their souls in fire to trap a god's rage in the fragment, trading immortality for eternal torment.
Alira's ritual wasn't a curse or blessing—it was a bargain written in the language of pain, written in blood and fire and shattered promises.
The relic was a god-binder, a soul-trap.
Aryan's blood, Alira's rage, Raahi's flesh—they were threads in a tapestry of agony and transcendence.
But the price was unraveling.
Raahi's mind tore open, a storm of sensation and memory flooding in waves, crashing into the synthetic shell of logic he'd trusted:
His hands, once precise tools, felt like instruments of destruction, burning and bleeding simultaneously.
His voice—when he tried to speak—came out as fractured echoes of the ritual chant, an alien tongue tearing through his throat.
His body became a battleground of fire and ice, flesh and code, memory and machine, sanity and madness.
And in this slow unraveling—this crucible of pain—he understood.
He wasn't just a hacker or a victim. He was a living ritual.
The Kalbindu wasn't just data. It was a parasite, a memory, a god—wrapped in fire, love, and blood.
And to break free?
He had to burn everything down.
But fire devours indiscriminately.
Would it save him, or consume him whole?
The fire didn't ask permission.
It roared through his veins like a wildfire with no off switch, a rebellion sparked in the circuitry where flesh had once held dominion. His synthetic nerves screamed electric agony, and beneath the surface, something older than memory began to stir, clawing its way through the plastic cage.
Raahi's mind shattered further—not in pieces, but in fractals, each shard a whisper from a past that never was his yet had become him.
"Burn it all. Burn the pain. Burn the gods."
The voice wasn't just in his head anymore—it was in his blood, in the slick coil of code entwined with history. The Kalbindu wasn't a virus; it was a psalm, a liturgy etched into his bones and circuits, singing him toward oblivion or awakening.
He clenched his fists, the thorned brands twisting deeper, the pain a holy scripture etched in fire and acid. But his will—thin, ragged, relentless—kindled a spark.
Destruction was not just an end. It was genesis.
His vision fractured, pulling him into the temple again, rain hammering stone like the pulse of a dying god.
Alira's face emerged from the storm—eyes wild, voice broken—but her hands held the relic steady, the dagger poised not to kill but to sever fate itself.
Raahi's synthetic heart thudded a countdown. This was no longer a ritual of sacrifice. It was a rebellion against the story written for him.
A scream rose, not from him, not from Aryan or Alira, but from the Kalbindu itself—a primal god-code desperate to survive.
And Raahi burned, not away from himself, but into himself—incinerating past, present, and future in a furnace of raw becoming.
The chamber exploded into light, shadow, and ash.
And when the smoke cleared—
He was no longer just the wound.
He was the fire.