Current Timeline: 1997 Location: Deep Forest, border of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra (Dandakaranya Range)
Chapter 1: The Ash and the Ember
Amavasya (The New Moon), November 1997
The forest did not simply sleep; it held its breath, waiting for something to die.
It was the night of Amavasya—the absolute, crushing dark of the New Moon. In the teeming metropolises of India—Bombay with its glittering Marine Drive, Delhi with its fog-choked boulevards, Calcutta with its tram lines—this darkness was a minor inconvenience. There, it was easily diluted by the orange haze of sodium vapor streetlights, the neon flicker of billboards advertising Gold Spot and cinema halls, and the headlights of Fiat taxis cutting through the smog. In the city, darkness was just the absence of light, a void to be filled.
But here, deep in the ancient Dandakaranya range, miles from the nearest paved road or electric pylon, the darkness was a physical entity. It was heavy, primordial, and suffocating. It pressed against the skin like a cold, damp shroud, entering the pores, slowing the heart. This was the darkness that existed before the first fire was struck by man.
The Dandakaranya was no ordinary forest. In the ancient epics, it was the land of punishment, the exile ground of gods and the playground of Rakshasas. Tonight, those legends felt uncomfortably, viscerally real. The canopy overhead was a tangled, impenetrable ceiling of teak, sal, and bamboo, woven so thick by centuries of unchecked growth that it strangled the starlight before it could touch the forest floor. The wilderness had turned into a cavern of ink, where direction was a memory and time was a flat circle.
The air here was distinct, separated from the rest of the world by a veil of humidity and silence. It didn't smell of fresh rain or blooming jasmine or the sweet rot of jackfruit. It was saturated with the scent of decaying leaves turning to black mulch, wet earth that had never seen the sun, and the metallic, coppery tang of something older—something foul that did not belong to the natural order of the jungle. It was the smell of old blood and rusted iron, a scent that made the hairs on the back of one's neck stand up. Even the nocturnal animals were silent; the crickets had ceased their song, and the owls refused to hunt, sensing a predator in their midst that they could not understand.
Deep within this forgotten expanse, a place the local Adivasi tribes avoided even in broad daylight, the ruins of a centuries-old mandapam stood like a broken, jagged tooth against the skyline. It was a relic of a bygone era, perhaps from the time of the Gond kings or even earlier, a shrine raised to a deity whose name had been eroded by the wind and rain. The structure was now reclaimed by the forest; the roots of massive banyan trees choked its stone pillars like constrictor snakes, crushing the basalt into gravel. The roof had long since surrendered to the monsoons, collapsing inward, but the foundation remained—a stubborn testament to gods long forgotten.
Tonight, however, the gods were not welcome here. The mandapam, once a place of prayer, had been turned into a theater of the grotesque.
In the center of the crumbling stone pillars, a fire pit roared.
The flames were wrong. They were not the comforting, cleansing yellow-orange of a Vedic hearth, the kind that warmed a home or sanctified a marriage. These flames were a sickly, bruised purple and arterial crimson, sputtering and hissing as if in pain. They cast long, distorted shadows that seemed to dance independently of the light source, crawling up the ancient stone columns like seeking fingers, probing the cracks in the masonry.
The fire was being fed not with sandalwood, mango wood, or ghee—the sattvic fuels that purify the atmosphere and carry prayers to the heavens. It was consuming chemically treated timber—scavenged railroad ties that reeked of creosote, sulfur, and gasoline. Mixed into the pyre were the dried, yellowing bones of small animals—monkeys, stray dogs—and bundles of herbs that popped with noxious fumes: Datura flowers, dried henbane, and clumps of human hair matted with clay.
Four men sat around this abomination.
They were not priests. They were not sadhus. They were the dregs of the underworld, men whose faces bore the rough, pockmarked history of violence, cheap liquor, and bad choices. They looked like hired muscle—rough faces marked by scars, bodies smeared not with the fragrant Vibhuti of a temple, but with gray, coarse ash that smelled of burnt hair and cremation grounds. They wore garlands of vertebrae around their necks, clumsy, macabre imitations of the Kapalika style, hanging loosely over their dirty polyester shirts. Their eyes were wide, darting nervously into the darkness, filled with a manic cocktail of greed, superstitious terror, and the adrenaline of committing a transgression they didn't fully understand.
"Krim... Hrum... Phat... Aghora Vadanaya..."
The chant grated against the night air like a rusty saw on bone. It lacked the resonant, vibrational purity of Om or the rhythmic, mathematical precision of a trained sadhaka. In true Tantra, sound is energy; the Beejaksharas (seed syllables) are precise keys to unlock cosmic frequencies. But this... this was butchery.
It was a sequence of guttural, dissonant syllables meant to tear at the fabric of reality rather than heal it. It was disjointed, spoken with the desperate urgency of men who memorized the sounds phonetically but understood none of the meaning. It was like hearing a beautiful classical raga played backward on a broken tape recorder, distorted into a summoning of chaos.
"Khat... Khat... Phat... Swaha!"
The leader, a man with a thick neck and a jagged scar running through his eyebrow, dipped his hand into a brass bowl. He threw a handful of black mustard seeds mixed with iron filings into the fire. The flames roared, turning a nauseating shade of green for a split second, snapping with the sound of breaking bones.
High above them, perched motionlessly on the thick, gnarled branch of an ancient Banyan tree that loomed over the ruins, a pair of eyes watched.
This was Rishi.
Ten years.
It had been ten years since he boarded the Mahanagari Express as a weeping, broken thirteen-year-old boy. The boy who had fled Bombay, who had loved Phantom comic books and his mother's Puran Poli, was dead. That boy had died the moment the first quill pierced his sister's skin in the warehouse. The man who replaced him was forged in the fires of the cremation grounds of Manikarnika and the bleeding, tantric hills of Kamakhya.
He was now twenty-three. Yet, looking at his eyes—cold, hard, and devoid of the spark of youth—one would guess he had lived a hundred lifetimes of war.
He was lean, stripped of any softness or excess. His body was a map of defined muscle, functional and hard like twisted wire. This was not the puffed-up aesthetic of a gym-goer who trains for mirrors; this was the physique of a predator, honed by the brutal, natural resistance training of the akharas (wrestling pits) in Varanasi. He had spent years swinging the heavy wooden gada until his shoulders felt like iron, wrestling in the mud pits until his skin was tough as leather, and holding yoga asanas for hours in freezing rain until pain transcended into focus.
He wore a dark, nondescript shirt that had seen better days, the sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms corded with veins. His cargo pants were faded, the pockets filled with things that would terrify a normal person—pouches of specific ashes, small iron instruments, vials of consecrated water. He blended perfectly into the gloom, a shadow within a shadow, his breathing so shallow it was imperceptible. He was practicing Pratyahara—withdrawal of the senses—focusing his entire being on the scene below.
Rishi did not move. He did not blink. He was calculating.
For six months.
For six agonizingly long months, he had been hunting this specific cell. The trail had been cold and winding. He had started in a dirty lodge in Nagpur, following a rumor of men buying black salt and rare poisonous herbs in bulk. He had tracked them through the tribal belts of Gondia, sleeping in bus stops, eating at roadside dhabas where the food tasted of diesel, and listening to whispers in the dark corners of tea stalls. He had interrogated terrified middlemen, broken the fingers of uncooperative fixers, and bribed corrupt constables with the little money he had earned doing manual labor. All of it led here, to this ruin in the middle of nowhere, on a moonless night.
His gaze, sharp as a laser, dissected the scene below. He peeled back the layers of theatrics with the cold, deductive logic of a forensic scientist analyzing a crime scene.
Amateurs, Rishi thought, his internal monologue clinical, detached, and dripping with contempt. Observe the man on the north side. The fat one. He flinches every time the fire snaps. His fear is polluting the space. His mudra is loose—his thumb isn't pressing the ring finger hard enough to lock the energy. He's leaking intent like a sieve.
He shifted his focus to the chanting. Pathetic. They are slurring the 'Beejaksharas'. They are emphasizing the 'Phat'—the destruction syllable—without the necessary breath control to direct it. They aren't summoning anything; they are just making noise in the spirit world. Like children banging on a locked door they shouldn't open.
Finally, he looked at the ritual focus—the skull placed on a small mound of red earth near the fire.
The skull they are using as a vessel... look at the sutures. They are fused tight. That's an old skull, brittle and dry. Likely dug up from a graveyard or stolen from a medical college. It lacks the etheric residue, the 'prana-dhaatu' of a fresh sacrifice required for a High Summoning. These aren't acolytes of the inner circle. They don't have the stomach for the real work.
Deduction complete.
The disappointment tasted bitter in his mouth. These men were not the high priests of Astoretha. They were not the ones who had been in the warehouse that night. They were hired thugs, scavengers following a Xeroxed manual they could barely read.
But they were dangerous. Not because of their magic, but because stupidity combined with dark intent was a volatile mix. And they were trying to open a door. Even a poorly opened door could let in a draft.
The threat level was physical, not spiritual.
Rishi moved.
He didn't jump; he poured himself off the branch, falling twenty feet through the darkness. He landed in a crouch, silent as a phantom, his impact absorbed by the balls of his feet and the fluid compression of his knees. He had mastered the art of Stambhana—the ability to arrest motion and sound—during his harsh years of discipline under his guru in the caves of Assam. To the men by the fire, he was just a sudden, inexplicable shift in the wind pressure, a flicker in their peripheral vision.
Rishi stood up and walked into the flickering light of the fire pit.
The man closest to him, a burly thug with a crude tattoo of a scorpion on his forearm, turned. His eyes bulged as he processed the figure standing just feet away. A stranger, appearing from the void. Before a scream could leave his throat, Rishi flicked his wrist.
A handful of white powder flew through the air. It glittered briefly in the firelight like diamond dust.
It wasn't poison. It was Vibhuti—sacred, consecrated ash from the morning aarti of the Kashi Vishwanath temple, charged with thousands of mantras.
The ash hit the man's eyes.
"Aaargh!" The man howled, dropping his hands from his mudra and clawing at his face. For a normal person, it would have been just dust, an irritant. But for someone steeped in tamasic (dark/impure) rituals, covered in the filth of grave-ash and bad intent, the highly charged positive energy of the Vibhuti burned like concentrated acid. It was a spiritual allergic reaction, a violent rejection of purity by the impure.
Chaos erupted.
"Who is that?"
"Kill him! It's the police!"
"No, it's a demon!"
The other three scrambled to their feet, kicking over bowls of blood and turmeric, ruining their own mandala. They reached for weapons propped against the pillars—rusted iron tridents and heavy machetes used for chopping coconuts and animals alike.
Rishi didn't give them the chance to organize. He surged forward, his movements a blur of calculated violence. He wasn't fighting like a street brawler; he was fighting like a surgeon removing a cancer. He was using Marma Adi—the ancient Indian martial art of striking vital points.
The second man, lanky and desperate, swung a trident—a heavy, clumsy blow aimed at Rishi's head.
Rishi didn't retreat. He stepped into the guard, moving inside the arc of the weapon. He caught the shaft of the trident with his left hand, guiding it harmlessly past his shoulder, and simultaneously drove his right palm into the man's sternum. It was an open-palm strike, executed with a sharp, explosive exhalation.
Thud.
The sound was sickeningly solid. It was a strike to the Hridaya Marma—the heart center. The man's eyes rolled back in his head. He collapsed instantly, the wind driven from his lungs, his heart rhythm disrupted by the precision of the strike. He curled into a fetal position, gasping for air that wouldn't come.
The third man hesitated. He held a machete, but fear paralyzed him. He saw his comrade drop with a single touch.
Rishi closed the distance in a heartbeat. He dropped low, spinning on his heel, and swept the man's legs out from under him with a crushing kick to the calf muscle. The man hit the ground hard, the breath leaving him in a grunt. Before he could scramble up, Rishi delivered a precise, controlled chop to the side of the neck, hitting the carotid artery and the vagus nerve. The man went limp, unconscious before his head hit the dirt.
Only the leader remained.
He was the one with the scar. He had been leading the chant. He backed away, tripping over the ritual items, knocking over the skull which cracked open on the stone. He clutched a sacrificial knife—a curved, nasty thing—with trembling hands. The blade was smeared with dried blood, likely from the chickens whose carcasses littered the floor.
Rishi stopped.
He stood amidst the groaning bodies, his breathing even, his composure untouched. He looked at the leader, his eyes reflecting the dying, unnatural purple embers of the fire. In the flickering light, the faint scars on Rishi's arms—remnants of training and older fights—seemed to writhe like living snakes.
"Mihir Kutti," Rishi said.
The name hung in the air like a curse. His voice was low, smooth, and terrifying. It wasn't a question. It was a demand for a connection.
"Where is he?"
The leader fell to his knees, his bravado shattering under the weight of Rishi's gaze. The knife clattered to the stones.
"I... I don't know! I swear on my life! I swear on my mother! We don't know who he is!"
Rishi stepped closer, towering over him. He grabbed the man by his sweaty collar and hauled him up effortlessly, pinning him against one of the stone pillars.
"Do not lie to me," Rishi whispered, his face inches from the man's. "You are attempting a Raktha Mandala—a Blood Circle. You are using the calling sequence for the Third Gate. This is not common knowledge found in cheap paperback magic books. Only his lieutenants have the geometric keys for this."
"We were mailed the diagram!" the man sobbed, pressing his head back against the stone, trying to put distance between himself and Rishi's graveyard eyes. "A package! It came to the Khopoli post office. General delivery. With cash—five thousand rupees—and instructions. We were told to burn these specific herbs here at midnight. We were told it would clear the path for the Master. That's all we know! Please... we are just mercenaries! We are just trying to survive!"
Rishi stared into the man's dilated pupils. He looked for the tell-tale shimmer of deception, the micro-expressions he had learned to read in the alleyways of Varanasi.
There was nothing. Only raw, animalistic fear. The man was a vessel of ignorance.
Another dead end.
Six months of hunting. Six months of sleeping in the mud, eating ash, and chasing shadows. For this.
Disgust, cold and bitter, surged through Rishi. It felt like swallowing broken glass. These fools were nothing but pawns, ignorant that they were playing with forces that would eventually consume their souls for a pittance of rupee notes. They were trying to open doors to a burning building just to warm their hands.
Rishi shoved the man away. "Get out."
The man scrambled back, unable to believe his luck. "What?"
"I said run," Rishi growled, his voice vibrating with restrained violence. "Before I change my mind and feed you to the fire."
The man didn't wait. He didn't even check on his fallen comrades. He scrambled into the darkness of the forest, vanishing into the trees, leaving his dignity and his fake rituals behind. The other two, now groaning and regaining consciousness, saw Rishi standing there and crawled away into the undergrowth like beaten dogs, terrified to even look back.
Rishi stood alone in the ruins. The silence returned, heavier than before, but now it was just the silence of the forest, not the silence of the grave.
He turned to the fire pit. The purple flames were still licking at the bones, refusing to die. He couldn't leave it like this. An open gate, even a poorly constructed one, was a wound in the world. It would fester. It would attract things—spirits, energies, entities that fed on decay.
He pulled a small copper flask from his belt. It contained water from the Ganges, mixed with camphor, tulsi leaves, and rock salt. He uncorked it and poured it over the embers.
Hiss.
The purple flames died instantly, strangled by the purity of the water. Thick white steam billowed up, smelling of sweet basil and rain, chasing away the stench of sulfur and burning hair. The oppressive weight in the air lifted slightly. The forest seemed to exhale.
Rishi wiped his hands on his pants. He felt a deep, exhausted ache in his bones—not physical, but spiritual fatigue. The constant proximity to darkness took its toll.
He clenched his fists, his knuckles white.
For ten years, he had prepared for this war. He had hardened his body, sharpened his mind, and walked paths that would drive normal men insane. He had learned the difference between a myth and a monster. But the Cult of Astoretha was a ghost—every time he thought he had a grip, they slipped away like smoke, leaving only hired idiots in their wake.
He looked up at the black sky, where the stars were finally beginning to pierce the gloom now that the fire was out.
"Hide while you can, Kutti," he whispered to the wind.
He did the math in his head, the timeline that burned in his memory like a brand. It was the clock that ticked in his nightmares.
"The entity woke four and a half years ago. In 1992. You have seven years left to feed it before it sleeps again. Seven years of chaos before the cycle closes in 2004."
Rishi kicked a piece of charred bone into the darkness.
"You will get desperate. You will need more fuel. You will make a mistake. And when you do... I will be there."
He turned and walked into the forest, disappearing as silently as he had arrived, a lone warrior in a war that most of the world didn't even know was being fought. The shadows swallowed him, accepting him as one of their own.