Day One: The Test
The deeper they walked, the heavier the air became. The soil seemed to breathe beneath their feet.
Aarav bent down once to touch it. "Feels alive," he murmured.
Neel, as always, didn't respond. His eyes were scanning their surroundings—sharp and calm.
Parth led from the front, his senses sharpened. Something about this place stirred his blood, the ancient warrior in him awakening in each step.
They were walking along a stretch of glowing moss when a shadow moved—fast, silent, and massive.
From the mist emerged a being—taller than a horse, broad as a tree, with skin like burnt bronze and eyes that shimmered crimson. It was no rakshas in the usual sense. Its form was divine and demonic both—more like a Daitya, a being from an older world, neither good nor evil, simply powerful.
Before they could even breathe, the creature roared, shaking the trees around them.
Parth didn't flinch. His hand went to his bow instinctively—he had no arrows, but he felt them form, made of sheer energy.
The Daitya lunged. Parth moved faster. The two collided with a crack of sound that sent ripples through the fog.
They fought as if the fight had been practiced by a dozen past lives. The creature was not foolish. It changed form as it received blows: where a horn had been, a wing unfurled; where a tail had been, smoke curled. Each time they struck, sometimes the flesh of the thing recoiled like fabric and then reknit.
Parth felt his breath nitid and focused. The fight was not simply physical; it had a moral cadence, like a question in muscle. Each strike asked something of him: Will you kill because you can? Will you slay to prove you are strong? Or will you hold back because there is another way?
He parried and struck and in the pivot of a moment saw, in the creature's eyes, a flicker — a recognition. As if it knew who they were, as if it had once served a king or been a general who had seen the pages of Kurukshetra turn.
He drove his blade — his imagined blade — a hair's breadth from its throat, prepared to end it with the same decisiveness he had once known centuries ago.
And then the voice came.
Not a roar. Not a scream. It laughed—an ember laughter, low and tired.
"You passed," it said.
Parth stilled. The entire space seemed to inhale with him. He took one backward step, bewildered, blade still ready, chest rising.
"You passed," the creature said again, and its tongue flickered — suddenly human — through its mouth. "Now I shall tell you."
Aarav—who had been red-eyed with that all-too-familiar eager wrath of youth—had to rise on his knees to get the creature's attention. "Couldn't understand. Will you collaborate a bit?" he asked, half wild laugh, half sarcasm, but his hands were steady.
The creature's coal eyes glimmered with an old kindness. "Listen," it said. "Listen, and remember before the stories die."
And then, in that place where words are old and heavy as metal, the creature began.
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He spoke of Raja Parikshit.
He did not speak in clean dates and genealogies; he spoke in the language of story, where cause is moral and consequence is the hinge on which history swings.
There was once a king, the creature said, a grandson of a great warrior. He sat on a throne not of wood but of responsibility, and his court glittered with the spoils and petty songs of rulers. This king's name was Parikshit. He was born into the echo of war and the hush of peace that followed it. He grew under the shadow of an epic whose pages had left the land raw with lessons. He received counsel, he bore the hymns of his lineage, but he was also young and tired of being told how to be.
One day the king found a sage meditating, removed of hunger and need, deep in some forest grove. Parikshit, driven by boredom or a small cruelty of spirit, placed a dead snake around the sage's neck — or in some tellings he put a garland where a garland was not wanted; the point is the same: he did an indignity, not out of necessity but as a proof of self. It was an offense. The law of words took shape through the grief of an offended seer, and a curse was pronounced: a death delivered by serpent, a fate bound by destiny.
The king, told of the doom, surrendered to the weight of time. He did not rage or attempt to flee. He sat by the river, and in the last days he asked to be told the truths of the world. The sage's son — Sukadeva — came and spoke to him. He told him the great story, the Bhagavata, the long redemptive song. Parikshit listened; he did not die in panic but with a mind softened, a heart learned, and with stories being read into his final hours — stories that became a lamp for men who would come after.
The creature's voice slowed. "People stopped listening," it said, with a sorrow sharpened like a blade. "They began to forget tales like this. Songs abandoned the hearth and moved to the market; the market bought comfort and discarded memory. The more they stopped knowing why kings and sages moved as they did, the more the old ropes of dharma frayed."
It paused. The thing looked at Aarav, then at Parth, then at Neel — as if to measure the echo they made of that ancient royal line.
"And so," it continued, "a snake bit, a son burned his vengeful fires. The revenge—the sarpasatra—was done, and blood was fed to blood. In the gap between rage and remembrance Kali found fecund soil. He grew where stories had ended."
Parth listened, the words punching a soft hole in the fabric of his panic. "Your grandson is somehow connected to how Kali drew his first breath of power. He gave Kali the space he needed to grow. The weakness of man's heart, the rage, the pride—it all began there. That's why you are bound to this story. That's why the Lord sent you here." " the creature said. "So you—each of you—are tied to this unraveling."
Aarav frowned, half-confused. "Wait—hold up. Grandson? Bro, he's like, barely twenty-two. Why are you calling him a grandpa?"
The Daitya smiled faintly.
> "Because Parikshit was your grandson too, O Sahadeva. Have you forgotten your own grandson?"
Aarav went quiet. He blinked. Then looked at Parth, eyes wide.
> "You're telling me I was someone's granduncle? Bro, this timeline is broken. Wait... Parikshit, putra Abhimanyu's son."
Now Aarav sounded weird as he called Abhimanyu putra. Even Neel smiled faintly at that.
"Why tell us?" Parth asked at last, voice low. "Why test us with a fight and then tell us stories that are half-mournful history?"
The creature's face softened. "Because," it said, "stories teach what the godlings forget. Without memory you cannot know mercy. Remembering is a weapon against the hunger that wears a human face."
It bowed its terrible head. "You struck because you had to. You passed because you did not strike to break. You struck because you would defend, and then you stopped. That is a rare thing."
Its ribs expanded like bellows. The creature — part guardian, or perhaps a spirit called a vetāla in other tellings — straightened. "Go on," it said. "Pātāl is a long place. Walk. Cross the black rivers. Learn." It turned away, ambling into a corridor that drank light like a mouth.
---
The rest of the first day became a lesson in oddities.
They walked through orchards whose fruit sang when touched. They crossed a river where the fish told stories in syllables. They met spirits who offered bargains: knowledge in exchange for loss, treasures in exchange for time. The tests were small but moral: a ghost offered them gold in return for leaving a kitten orphaned ; a thin woman asked for a name and offered a prophecy in exchange; a child sold them a map that showed one path that was shorter but would cost someone's memory.
Every choice bent them. Every refusal and acceptance taught them.
That night, in a plain where the stars fell like coins into a dark pond, Parth took watch. He realized that in a world that forgets stories, forgetting is an instrument of death. If memory dies, then the roots of dharma rot and the new monsters grow from the garbage of unremembered acts.
On the second day, their pace quickened as the lessons got sharper.
They encountered a village that had been nearly eaten by time: houses built of old vows where the inhabitants were thin as paper, trailing their days like rags. A plague of small, goat-like cattle (half deformity, half myth) gnawed at the roots of the survivors' last crops; the villagers in turn had begun to believe that these beasts were sacraments. Parth and his friends intervened — not with anger but with action: they mended the fence, they shared their food, they told the villagers how to boil a soup that would help the sick. In return the villagers told them about a name — Taksha. A spirit-snake that had once been welcomed and then deceived by kings.
They were attacked at dusk by forms that were less beast than grief: people turned inside out by hunger and sleep. Each engagement challenged their restraint. Parth had the impulse to simply end the creatures with force, to cut their misery off and be done. But the lesson repeated: killing without meaning is the seed Kali loves. Instead they bound, they burned roots to purify the earth, they set small fires to lure away the swarm.
Aarav's visions came in fits— flashes of a boy sitting on a ruined throne, then a snake devouring a king's crown— and with each vision he grew pale but resolute.
By the midnight of the second day, they found themselves at the edge of a field sown with bones — an unreal harvest of old wars. They walked through it in silence. Parth felt ancient names brush his feet like banners: Abhimanyu, Uttara, Janamejaya, names that made him feel happy and sad at the same time. He realized that someone was trying to trap him in the lane of memories. So he snapped out of it soon.
They were attacked again — not by a single creature now but an army of whispering shapes that wanted them to turn on each other. The whisperers promised safety to each man for an act against his neighbor. Their human bonds, tempered in shared silence and laughter, proved stronger than the whisperers' bargains. They fought off the shapes together, and the shapes shrieked and fell back into the soil.
On that second night, a small thing changed in Parth. Where earlier the future had felt like a pressure behind his eyes, a new shape of resolve took root. Each test had been a refining. The vetāla's story had been a key; other scenes fit into locks. He understood now, with a clarity that was almost cruel: their lineage, their stories, their errors — all threaded together. The world did not break because of a single war; it broke because memory was cut, because children forgot the names of those who had taught them right from wrong.
On the third day they walked slower. The terrain was colder and the colors of the sky used more melancholy pigment. They were shown deserts that had once been cities; they walked among ruins where lamps still burned — not from oil but from stubborn faith. The final fights were less dramatic now; less physical and more of will. A creature offered Aarav a vision of seeing Parth die if he did not give up his own sword. Aarav chose to give his cloak instead. A spirit tried to buy Neel's silence with the memory of Neel's mother; he refused and remembered her face until the memory hurt.
The three days passed away just like that.
As they walked back, they could see the distant outline of Maharaja Bali's court, its doors glowing faintly gold against the darkness of Paatal Lok.
Parth paused before the massive gate.
He looked at Aarav and Neel and whispered, "Three days. Exactly like he said."
Aarav exhaled. "And not a moment of peace in any of them."
Neel smiled faintly. "Guess the next part starts now."
The doors began to open, light spilling out from within—soft, divine, and familiar.
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