: The Shadow's Whisper
Sleep had become a foreign country to Mrinal, a land she could no longer visit. Nights were now a time for pacing, for running over the chilling scenes of the day in an endless, torturous loop—the council, the silent meal, the terror in the child's eyes. The image of her brother, a tear on his cheek as his very touch destroyed innocence, was burned onto the back of her eyelids.
On this particular night, a restlessness sharper than usual drove her from her chambers. The moon was a sliver, a pale, sharp claw in a sky choked with clouds. Wrapping a shawl around her shoulders, she stepped onto the balcony that overlooked the main inner courtyard. The palace was submerged in a deep, blue silence, broken only by the distant, rhythmic tread of the night guards.
Her eyes, sharpened by a soldier's instinct and a sister's fear, scanned the grounds. And then she saw it.
A figure.
It stood in the very center of the courtyard, a pool of deeper darkness against the grey stone. It was tall, draped in a cloak so black it seemed to drink the faint ambient light, leaving a void in its shape. Its head was tilted upwards, not towards the moon, but towards the dark, silent windows of Devansh's chambers.
Mrinal's breath caught in her throat. Her hand flew to her waist, where her dagger was always belted, even in sleep. Her lungs filled, ready to shout an alarm to the guards.
But the figure moved.
It didn't look at her. It seemed utterly unaware of her presence. It simply knelt. Its gloved hand reached down and plucked something from the cobblestones—the small, blackened, crumbled remains of the marigold that Devansh had withered the day before. The pile of ash was all that was left.
The figure held the charred petals in its palm. It brought its hand close to where its face would be, hidden in the depths of the hood, in a gesture that was grotesquely intimate. It was smelling it.
A low, soft whisper drifted across the silent courtyard. The voice was thin, rasping, like dry leaves skittering over stone. It was barely audible, but in the profound stillness, every syllable carried with chilling clarity.
"Ahhh... perfection. The bloom of despair." A pause, then, with a note of profound satisfaction, "Mera kaam aadha ho gaya."
My work is half done.
The words hung in the cold air, a venomous confession.
Before Mrinal could process the horror, the figure closed its hand, crushing the blackened remains to dust. Then, it simply… dissolved. It did not run, did not fade. One moment it was a solid form, the next it was a wisp of shadow that bled into the deeper darkness between the stones, vanishing as if it had never been.
Mrinal stood frozen, her knuckles white where she gripped the balcony railing. The alarm died in her throat, replaced by a cold, solid dread that settled in the pit of her stomach. This was no random intruder. This was a watcher. A cultivator.
Driven by a compulsion she couldn't name, she hurried down into the courtyard. The stones were cold beneath her bare feet. She walked to the spot where the figure had stood. There was nothing. No footprint, no trace. Her heart hammered against her ribs. Had she imagined it? A phantom born of stress and fear?
Then her eyes, scanning the ground, caught it.
A single feather.
It lay where the figure's feet had been, stark against the pale grey stone. It was not grey, not brown, not black like a crow's. It was a black so absolute it was a tear in the fabric of reality, a void in the shape of a feather. She knelt and picked it up. It was cold, unnaturally so, and strangely weightless. As she held it, a faint, sickening sensation, a echo of the dissonance she felt from Devansh, prickled against her skin. No bird in all of Chandrapuri, nor in any kingdom she knew of, had feathers like this.
This was it. The confirmation.
The incidents, the coldness, the strange energy, the red glow, the withering flower—they were not isolated tragedies. They were not the symptoms of trauma or exhaustion. They were the deliberate, calculated strokes of a painter creating a masterpiece of corruption.
Mera kaam aadha ho gaya.
The words were a key, turning the lock on a door of pure terror. Someone was doing this to Devansh. Systematically. And they were succeeding.
She did not sleep for the remainder of the night. As dawn painted the sky, she was already at her writing desk. Two messages were written in a swift, urgent hand. One was for Suryapuri, addressed to Prince Aaditya. The other was for their own palace, for Prince Virendra, who had returned to Suryapuri but had left a trusted courier for urgent news.
The messages were identical, and devastatingly simple:
"It is not him. It is being done to him. The shadow has a voice. We must meet. The time for watching is over."
She sealed them with her personal crest, the Chandrapuri moon encircled by a sword. The trust in their prince was not just eroded; it had been systematically, maliciously shattered. But in its place, a new alliance was forming in the shadows—an alliance of those who loved him enough to see the truth.
The stage was no longer set for a reunion. It was set for a rescue. The intervention had just begun.