The next two days were a lesson in a new kind of warfare—a war against silence. Veer walked the periphery of the settlements and the corpse of Patna, his every sense stretched taut. He used his kinetic awareness not to feel for the thunderous impact of a monster's charge, but for the faintest whisper of a struggle, a scuffle, a single panicked footstep frozen in time. He found nothing. The absolute lack of evidence was, in itself, a terrifying testament to the kidnappers' skill. They were ghosts.
He visited the empty homes, each one a silent monument to a stolen life. In one, a locket lay half-hidden under a collapsed bedframe. Inside was a faded photograph of a smiling couple, their faces untouched by the weariness that defined the new world. In another, he found a journal, its entries detailing a mother's hope that her daughter's nascent ability to soothe fevers would earn her a place in a safer settlement. The last entry was a grocery list. The mundane normalcy of it was a punch to the heart.
But it was the third site that broke through his professional detachment. It was a small hut on the absolute edge of the safe zone, its walls more gaps than solid matter. This was where a young scavenger named Dev had lived. The boy's ability was minor, almost laughable: he could subtly soften metal, making it easier to work with salvaged scraps. He was a craftsman, not a warrior.
The hut had been picked clean of anything useful. A broken chair, a rusted pot, a pile of rags that had been a bed. Veer was about to leave, his frustration peaking, when a glint of sunlight on something caught his eye. Kneeling, he reached under the collapsed wooden frame of a small shelf. His fingers closed around a small, carved object.
It was a bird. A sparrow, he thought, carved from a piece of light wood. The work was clumsy, the lines uneven, but the love poured into it was palpable. Every cut of the knife spoke of patience, of a mind focusing on creating beauty in a world that had forgotten the concept. This wasn't a tool for survival; it was a testament to a soul that refused to be completely crushed.
The simple, profound humanity of the carving shattered Veer's remaining walls of resentment. It violently summoned a memory he had deliberately buried, not of the day the sky broke, but of the life that had been stolen before it.
The air in their small garden in Tamluk was warm and heavy with the scent of jasmine and wet earth. His mother, Shreya, was on her knees, her hands plunged into the dark soil. Ten-year-old Veer stood over her, fidgeting, bored.
"When can we go train, Ma?" he'd whined.
She looked up, her smile gentle but her eyes serious. She held up a single, tiny seed between her thumb and forefinger. "See this, Veer? This is where true strength begins. It's not in the shout, but in the silence. Not in the blow, but in the endurance." She pressed the seed into the earth with a tender firmness. "Great strength isn't always loud, my stormy boy. It's in this tiny thing, pushing through the immense, dark weight of the earth to find the sun. It's in the roots, silent and unseen, that hold the entire world together."
He had forgotten her words. In the years of violence and loss, he had only remembered the storm of her death. He had honed himself into a weapon of impact and redirection, a raging tempest meant to shatter his enemies. He had never once tried to be the root.
A cold, cleansing fury—now directed squarely at his own ignorance and at the shadows preying on these people—flooded him. He closed his eyes, right there in Dev's ruined hut. He blocked out the world and pushed his kinetic senses out, not as a wide net, but as a fine-pointed probe. He wasn't listening for a shout anymore. He was listening for a sigh.
And then he felt it. At the worn threshold of the hut's doorway, a place where countless footsteps had passed, there was a void. A patch of silence. It was a faint, chilling absence in the vibrational memory of the world, as if all sound and energy had been sucked out of that specific spot. It was a residue, cold and alien, a scar on reality itself.
His eyes snapped open. He dropped to his knees, his fingers scrabbling in the dirt right at the edge of the void. The soil was loose. His fingertips brushed against something hard and smooth. He dug it out.
It was a shard of ceramic, no larger than his thumbnail. It was unnaturally cold, seeming to pull the heat from his skin. He wiped the dirt away. It was pure white, and etched onto its surface was a symbol that meant nothing to him, yet everything: a graceful crescent moon being actively consumed, swallowed, by a coiling, abstract darkness that seemed to writhe even as he looked at it.
His heart hammered against his ribs. This was it. The first real crack in the silence. It wasn't a monster's claw mark or a weapon's scorch. It was a signature. And it felt less like a clue and more like a key, one that was now unlocking a door into a deeper, colder, and far more terrifying night.