Priya leads Rudra through a hidden stone stair beneath a ritual platform behind the temple. They descend into the catacombs of Kalighat—tunnels once used by Aghori sadhus to meditate inside burial vaults. The walls are inscribed with fossilized mantras. The deeper they go, the more the air grows sweet with decay. Rudra begins to hear the faint breathing of something that isn't them.
---
Rudra didn't speak again until they had left the hut behind. The air outside seemed sharper than before, dense with incense and the distant tang of burnt flesh. Kalighat's temple bells still rang in irregular intervals, but from far away now—strangely muffled, like underwater music.
Priya moved without hesitation. She led him past the cremation pit, down a narrow passage that curved behind the old priests' quarters. Her bare feet padded over brick and ash without sound. The hem of her white sari dragged across dried blood and dust and did not stain.
They stopped behind a sunken platform of cracked sandstone, half-covered by a fallen banyan branch.
Rudra opened his mouth to ask—
Priya pressed a finger to her lips.
She knelt and swept away a layer of ash, revealing a stone hatch carved into the ground. No handle. Just a circle of iron hammered into the center, blackened and corroded.
She gripped it, exhaled, and pulled.
It groaned upward with a sound like wet teeth grinding.
A spiral staircase descended into pitch.
The smell wafted up immediately—sweet rot, sulfur, and old milk. Rudra gagged.
"Aghori meditation chambers," she said, her voice a whisper. "Built before the temple. Before Kalighat was even called Kalighat. Back when this was just the edge of the burning plain."
Rudra stared down into the dark.
"What are we going to find down there?"
"Not what. Who."
She stepped into the dark without waiting for him.
Rudra hesitated.
He thought of the warning in his father's script. Choose silence over revelation.
But that's not why he moved.
He moved because the pages in his satchel had gone still. Quiet. Not cold—but watching.
And he could no longer bear the silence they left behind.
He followed.
---
The stairwell descended far longer than it should have. At least four stories underground, but with no sense of depth—just a tight spiral, the air growing warmer, thicker, until breathing felt like drinking spoiled water.
His foot slipped on the last step—bone dust.
The chamber opened into a corridor, low-ceilinged and curved, like a throat carved through earth and silence.
The walls were covered in embedded carvings—not inked, not chiseled.
Fossilized.
Human bones fused into the stone, each rib or femur etched with mantras in minuscule detail. Skulls protruded here and there, faces twisted mid-chant.
Rudra traced his fingers over one.
The script was Sharabhra.
Each line read like a riddle with no answer.
"When I forgot my name, I remembered my god."
"The mantra ends when breath becomes shape."
"My tongue ate the syllables until silence fed me."
He shuddered.
"They didn't write these," Priya said behind him, crouched at another wall. "They meditated until the mantras imprinted into their bones. It's called osteoglyphia. You have to fast until your blood forgets how to lie."
She spoke as if quoting, not believing. But her voice held respect. Almost reverence.
The tunnel curved left. A dim orange glow pulsed at the far end, flickering like candlelight—but slower, thicker. Like flame underwater.
Rudra followed, heart beating faster now.
As they moved, a sound joined them.
Breathing.
Not theirs.
Low. Long. Hollow.
Like an animal hibernating beneath stone. Dreaming. Dying. Waking again.
It came from nowhere. And everywhere.
Each breath seemed to pull the air toward the walls, tugging the dust into faint eddies.
Rudra's fingers grazed one of the etched skulls.
It was warm.
The pages in his satchel began to whisper.
Not with words. Just friction. Paper against paper. A dry, pulsing rasp.
He turned to Priya.
"How much deeper?"
She pointed to a narrow arch ahead, no taller than a crouched man.
"Through there. The ritual chamber."
"And after that?"
She looked at him.
Eyes dark. Calm. The pupils—no longer round. They had narrowed. Slit-like.
"Then we ask the Sutra what it wants."
Rudra stepped beneath the arch.
And entered a chamber that was already listening.