Part 1 — The Void
Darkness.
Not the kind you find at midnight under a covered sky, but the raw absence that exists before any star is lit. It pressed on me from every direction, not like a space I could move through but as though I myself was suspended in an endless ocean of ink.
Then came the warmth — as if a sun had bloomed in the marrow of that darkness. The void didn't vanish; it bent around the light, threatening to swallow it back up.
A voice emerged from the heart of that glow. Steady. Ancient.
Familiar.
"Son…"
Not a call, but a confession. A tone of someone who had carried regret for ages and finally found the courage to let it escape.
"I have failed you."
The words sank into me like arrows into wet earth — no impact at first, then slowly they began to hurt.
It was his voice. My father's. Surya — the eternal Sun, whom I had met once in flesh, and in spirit countless times since.
"You stood for your truth, Karna. You refused to bend to mockery, to pity, to injustice. You gave without thought of return. But what did it grant you? Betrayal. Isolation. Death written not by righteousness, but by deceit."
I saw bursts of memory in the dark:
Arjuna's bow drawn tight.
The wheel of my chariot sinking deep in rain‑soft mud.
Krishna's eyes, calm as still water even as he urged my end.
The scream of my last breath.
"In the wheel of fate, even the gods are pawns."
His voice trembled then — just slightly — like the surface of a lake moved by hidden current.
"I was too blind to protect you. But I can give you one gift — a new dawn, far from the curses and chains of the last Yuga."
The darkness rippled, revealing more of that unbearable light. And I understood what he meant — not return, but exile: a sending into another time, to another battlefield where the weapons would wear different shapes.
"You will walk in an age where my name is forgotten, where temples are dust, where no scripture speaks your fate aloud. They will not know you… unless you choose to reveal yourself."
Part of me resisted. I wanted my bow back. My honor. The thunder of wheels and hooves. But even as I raged, I felt myself being pulled, the golden cracks widening in the darkness.
"Live without shame, my son. If you find greatness again, let it be because you shaped it — not because destiny shackled you to it."
The warmth turned into burning. My thoughts blurred into pure light.
And then — I began to fall
Part 2 — The Descent into Birth
The fall became pressure.
Heat wrapped me in a pulsating cage — warm, wet, alive. The walls around me shifted with slow, muscular ripples. A great muffled drumbeat thundered above and beyond me: thump… thump… thump.
At first I thought it was the war drum of an advancing army — but no. It was slower, more patient. A heart. Not mine. Hers.
The liquid world muffled all sound, yet I picked up vibrations — shudders in the fluid, faint and distorted. Voices. Not the guttural Sanskrit of Kurukshetra's camps, not the formal cadence of kings' courts, but clipped syllables in strange patterns:
"BP stable… fetal heart good… prepping for delivery."
The pitch was urgent, but the words meant nothing to me. They were not mantras, not orders I recognised. Every fragment was stored in my mind like an unfamiliar weapon — to be learned, to be used.
Then came the surge.
The walls tightened on all sides, squeezing with relentless force. My head was driven down, my body curled into passage. The ancient warrior in me resisted — but this was not a battlefield I knew, and resistance was crushed by inevitability.
The world went from dim red to a blaze of cold white.
I was yanked out into an air that bit like ice and reeked of strange smoke — acrid, chemical, biting. No incense of sandalwood or oil lamps. No scent of earth after rain. Just this sharp, manufactured purity.
Above me burned not the sun, but long glass tubes caged in metal, buzzing with a constant hum. Cold fire, as if lightning had been trapped and forced into obedience.
Figures loomed. Not soldiers in armor, not priests in white dhotis — these wore full‑body cloth skins the colour of bone. Faces hidden behind square masks, eyes rimmed in fogged glass frames. Hands gloved in thin blue that wrinkled like water skin.
Warriors afraid to breathe the air? Prisoners of their own uniforms? Or the shamans of this gleaming fortress?
A masked woman leaned closer. Her gloved fingers pressed my chest, pausing over the mottled pale marks that patterned my skin from collar to upper arm — remnants not of fire in this life, but in a hundred lifetimes gone.
"Doctor, unusual markings here… symmetrical. And the earlobes — notched? Born that way?"
"Keep him under observation. NICU. Full scans. He hasn't cried yet, has he?"
came the deeper voice from behind the white mask.
Crying would have been the expected signal of life. But I would not. A soldier entering hostile territory does not announce himself unless attack is certain. Instead, I watched.
To my left stood metal idols with glowing eyes — boxes breathing in steady beeps: beep… beep… beep. One box sighed like winter wind trapped in a flask; another clicked rhythmically, releasing whispers of vapour into the air. Every sound was alien; every flash of red or green light seemed like a signal for war I couldn't yet decipher.
A thin tube was pressed into the bend of my arm. Inside it snaked colourless liquid. The ancient part of me flinched — in my first life, if an enemy wanted your life, he drained your blood. Here, they fed something into me instead.
"Oxygen level's fine… start IV drip… call Dr. Rose," said the flat, dispassionate voice of the tall doctor.
None of these words belonged to any tongue I had mastered. They were noise without meaning, but meaning would come — I would make sure of that.
My eyes tried to map the room like a battlefield: bright rectangles on the walls, swinging arm‑lamps, a ceiling broken into white squares, occasional black circles — holes, vents, or watchers?
But the greatest shock was the absence I felt — not absence of warmth, but of god.
No welcomed light from my father. No blessings murmured by a brahmin. No gold aura aflame at my arrival. This age did not care for avatars. It cared for measurements.
And with that realisation, I lay in my plexiglass prison, silent and unblinking, already learning the ways of this godless battlefield.
Part 3 — Preeti and the First Vow
The corridor was pale and polished, lined with half‑closed doors. Only the fluorescent hum and the soft squeak of rubber soles broke the quiet.
Behind the glass wall of the NICU, I lay like an exhibit — tubes snaking into my veins, coloured lights blinking soft warnings. Around me moved the masked ones in silent precision.
I wasn't alone.
At the far end of the corridor stood the grey‑suited man with the red tilak. He had the posture of someone accustomed to waiting for news of death or birth — and calculating the meaning of either. His gaze rested on me too long, not with affection but with assessment.
His lips moved. I caught a single word through the glass: Agni.
Then he was gone, melting into the turn of the corridor.
Not long after, a younger doctor — still in green scrubs, hair damp from the humidity — picked up the wall phone. His voice was pitched low, but I had spent lives catching the whispers of conspirators.
"Yes, Guruji… born today. Male. The marks are exactly as you said — shoulders, chest, ears. No crying. The mother's name is Preeti… No, she doesn't know. We'll run the tests and update you before nightfall."
My pulse — this small human heart's pulse — barely changed. But the old part of me, the one that once stood between thousands of soldiers, understood: the game had already begun.
Someone, somewhere, thought I was theirs.
In the Ward
Two rooms away, Preeti stirred in the hospital bed. The world came back to her in fragments — a cream‑painted ceiling, the ache in her muscles, the sour dryness in her throat. She remembered screaming, the burn of labour, the room tilting under the weight of voices telling her to push. And then… absence.
No swaddle placed in her arms. No bundle of warmth against her chest.
She hit the call button.
The nurse appeared with a smile learned from years of deflecting worry.
"Rest first, madam. The baby—"
"Where is my son?"
"He's in NICU, just observation—"
"Take me to him."
The nurse hesitated. "Walk slowly, the stitches—"
Preeti was already pulling the blanket away, feet sliding to the cold tile floor. Her body trembled under its own weight, but her jaw was set. Some roads you walked even if you bled with every step.
The Meeting
When she reached the NICU, the nurse tried again to dissuade her.
"Please, madam, let the machines work—"
Preeti stepped past her, into the hiss of the automatic glass door.
I had watched warriors walk into hopeless battles with less certainty.
She came straight to my crib, eyes searching my face as though matching me to someone she'd seen in a dream. The wires, the monitor leads, the scars — none of it startled her.
Her hand slid through the porthole of the incubator and touched my forehead. Her palm was warm, slightly rough, smelling faintly of antiseptic soap. She left it there, her thumb brushing once at my temple.
"Hi, little one…" she whispered. The words trembled, but the voice was steady beneath. "Already watching everything, aren't you?"
In that moment, the past life that clung to me like shadow shifted. This was not a queen to serve for duty's sake. Not a commander's wife to obey for honor. This was my mother — the woman whose survival would be the foundation of mine.
The VowIn another age, my loyalty had been a chain. This time, it would be a shield.
She bent a little closer, speaking so quietly the nurse by the door could not hear.
"I don't care who or what you are meant to be. You are mine. Remember that."
My given name in this body didn't exist yet — but the soul wearing it knew exactly what it was making: a soldier's promise.
Fate will not take you from me. Time will not take you. Nothing will.
If this age had no gods left to witness such oaths, I would be enough.
The LampEventually, against her will, the nurse convinced Preeti to return to her room. The ward dimmed. Most machines switched to softer beeps. Outside, monsoon rain streaked silver lines down the tall hospital windows.
In the far corner sat a tiny clay diya before a curled‑edge print of Ganesha. Its weak flame shouldn't have mattered amid all the electric light — yet my eyes fixed on it.
The ceiling's cold tube‑light buzzed indifferently; the monitors glowed with the lifeless pulse of circuitry. But that small lamp's trembling ember seemed alive in a way nothing else in this place was.
I made my second vow: not to be the brightest light, but to be the one that lasts, however small, however besieged.
For that, I would burn in the open. Always.
Part 4 — Night Watch
The hospital at night was not silence; it was a different kind of warfront.
The day's rush sank into the hum of machines and the distant echo of wheels on linoleum. From my plexiglass crib, I could see half the ward — neat rows of tiny forms like mine, each tethered by thin lines to their own mechanical guardians. Some cried in weak bursts, others slept heedless of the world.
I remained still.
I listened.
From beyond the glass, muted voices drifted — two nurses at the counter.
"NICU's full again… two premature twins last night."
"And that boy in bed six—did you see those marks? Burn scars, they said. Imagine, from birth?"
Their language was strange, a mix of Tamil with clipped English. Words like premature and bed six meant nothing yet, but I separated tone from content. The first voice held fatigue; the second, curiosity tinted with fear.
Even without understanding, I knew the roles: the weary veteran and the gossiping recruit. Armies are the same in all ages.
A phone rang somewhere far down the corridor. A man's voice — the same green‑clad doctor from before, though fainter now — answered in hurried low speech.
"Yes… no change. He's alert, eyes following. No crying still… Yes, the mother came in. No, she didn't ask questions."
Again, the sense eluded me, but I caught the rhythm — somebody somewhere measuring me not as a child, but as a thing to watch.
The Ceiling and the Snake
Above me, the ceiling's white squares glowed softly in the dimmed lights. I tracked each as though mapping a roof for potential breaches. A small black circle at the far corner — a vent? Or an eye? In battle, you learn early that some eyes do not blink.
At my right, the monitor's green line moved in sharp peaks, trailing a beep… beep… beep that matched the pace of my new heart. A thin tube fed clear liquid into my arm. I followed its path up — saw it hanging from a transparent bag, swaying slightly with each sigh of the air‑conditioner.
In my last life, snakes carried venom. In this one, they carried… something else. Life? Poison? I didn't yet know.
The Mother's Passage
Hours later, the door at the end of the corridor whispered open. Through the glass, I saw her again — Preeti — walking slower now, one hand on the wall. She shouldn't have been here. Nurses liked their rules. But warriors — the good ones — learned when to ignore them.
She didn't speak, not to the staff, not to me. She just stood at the glass, both hands pressed against it, watching my chest rise and fall. Her eyes were the only reason I believed I was real in this place. After a long time, she nodded once, turned, and vanished into shadow.
The Lamp and the Promise
Not long after, the nurse made her rounds, adjusting each crib, checking each display. When she passed mine, she paused, straightened my blanket almost absently — then went to kneel before the tiny shrine in the corner.
The oil lamp still burned.
A flame no taller than a fingernail, trembling in its own heat yet stubbornly alive against the air‑conditioned chill.
When she left, I turned my head toward it. The light caught the edge of the plexiglass, refracting into my crib like a ghost of sunlight. For a heartbeat, I imagined it was my father's glow, sneaking through the walls of this steel temple to check on me.
It was not magic. It was not divine power. It was persistence — and in that, it was everything I needed.
I fixed my eyes on that lamp flame until the shapes around it blurred into darkness.
Somewhere in the rhythm of beep… beep… beep, I sank toward sleep, my second vow echoing through me:
I will burn, however small. I will last, however besieged.
The world outside my glass prison would not remain still.
And neither would I.