The portal was ringing as an old god awakening.It wasn't loud, just deep. This was a low, vibrating sense that throbbed under the feet of Sethu and into his bones.
The machine behind him was vibrating, sending long flickering shadows over the deserted laboratory. The alarms started alerting the guards, but he could not hear anything because of sound. He stood alone.
No one would stop him now.Not the guards who never thought of coming down this far.Not the artificial intelligence surveillance that he had diverted hours before.Not even the weight of history itself, handing him down upon its shoulders.
Sethu gazed into the gurling darkness in front of him, a whirlwind of light and darkness, changeable between the confusion and the clear. It was beautiful. Terrifying. Impossible.And it was real.
In his shaking palm, he was holding something, a tiny data chip in a protective casing. It bore files he had found in a few weeks previous which ought not to have been, but which were. It is not time that covers history, but people.
India remembered.But no one else did.
The walls of the future, which he stood back of were sterile, were a prison. History was before him, a world still untouched by centuries of destruction. He was not merely travelling back in time. He was going back to save time.
What if this didn't work?What if he vanished? Or still worse, what should he live and all was different so much? And was anyone to recall what he saw?
He considered the Archives and the cold silence of Sector 9B and the corrupted files that were not supposed to be there. He had pursued a broken connection, had dug more than anybody had dug in decades, possibly centuries.
He had stumbled on forgotten history, but it was more than that, it was erased history.Not by fire. Not by flood. But by those who would fain have India forget.
There should have been someone who had determined the oneness or otherwise of stories.Which names were spoken. What verities were permitted breath. And that was that, empires disappeared off textbooks. Temples became myths. The information was rewritten in form of superstition.
The Guptas. The Mauryas. The Cholas.Not as legends. And, like truths, bright, strong, wiped away.
And the invaders?Not conquerors. Not explorers. Thieves wearing crowns.
He peered at the interface still attached on his wrist. Coordinates locked. Timeline set. A forever trip.Then another.
He was as hot-blooded as war drums. He nearly heard them, voices of the old calling to him, which told him onwards.
He imagined the individuals he would see. Men who shed their blood to save their country. Priests that preserved the knowledge that was sacred. Farmers that fed empires with no demand of their reward. Porus. King Purushothaman.
The man even world conqueror Alexander feared. The man that history strove to forget.
Sethu would find him. Warn him. Help him.Then they would fight the tide together.
He stepped forward.The light took him in the world of darkness.
And when the world fell in stars and silence Sethu said,
"India remembered…And now I will make them all recall India.And now I'll make everyone remember India."