Arjun stared at the ancient map he'd just found—its parchment yellowed with time, its edges crisp but untouched by decay. The spiral symbol drawn in deep crimson over the Himalayan region wasn't a landmark. It was a message.
His fingers traced the faded words below:
"The river remembers those who walk backward."
"Who wrote this?" he muttered.
The room, once bright and full of voices, now seemed to echo with a heavy silence. The humming of the projector had stopped. The lights flickered. Arjun shook his head—maybe he was tired. Maybe he was imagining things again.
Still, the map felt real. More real than anything he'd seen in a textbook.
---
Later that evening, Arjun sat cross-legged on the floor of his tiny apartment, surrounded by books, old printouts, and scribbled notes. His laptop blinked beside him, half-forgotten. On the center of the floor lay the mysterious page and the book it had fallen from: "Sanskrit Codes of Time – An Interpretive Study."
He flipped through the pages again, slower this time. Near the back of the book, in a chapter most would have skipped, he found a legend about an object lost to history—the Chrono Key.
According to the passage, it was not just a key, but a conduit—a creation of divine design, passed down through lineages of sages who once walked through time as one walks through mist. The object would reappear only when time itself was in danger.
Arjun's heart raced. The small metallic disc he'd found hidden in the book the night before—it matched the descriptions.
"Chrono Key… so it's not just a symbol. It's real."
He rose and retrieved the artifact from his drawer, its metallic surface glowing faintly as if acknowledging him.
---
Suddenly, a sharp pulse of energy burst through his fingertips.
Images—no, memories—rushed through his mind like a flood:
A warrior in a blood-soaked battlefield.
A boy running through the ruins of a futuristic city.
A sage holding the sky apart with mantras.
An empire built and destroyed in seconds.
And in all of them... Arjun saw himself.
---
The pulse stopped. He dropped the Chrono Key, breathless, sweating.
"What is this thing… and why am I seeing these?" he whispered.
Before he could gather his thoughts, his phone buzzed. A message from his friend Ravi:
[Bro, meet me tomorrow. Big news. Some weird stuff happened at the museum. Also... you okay? You vanished after class. Looks like you saw a ghost.]
Weird stuff at the museum? Arjun stared at the message, his thoughts spiraling.
---
Arjun turned back to his desk, but the page with the map was gone.
In its place lay a new paper—aged, inked with care—yet he'd never seen it before.
It had one sentence in flawless Sanskrit:
"He who holds the Key must not seek the river… for the river now seeks him."
Outside, thunder cracked across the sky. And in a dark alley not far from his apartment, a figure cloaked in shadows whispered Arjun's name—even though no one else was around to hear it.