Mira Dakshini did not trust the gods, but she trusted the stars. The gods were silent, their wills interpreted through the flawed and ambitious mouths of men. But the stars were mathematics. They were cold, beautiful, and predictable. Their movements were a grand, cosmic clockwork, and for a scholar like Mira, their precision was the only form of divinity she could truly believe in.
She sat on the cold stone roof of the monastery's observatory, hundreds of leagues away from the hidden valley of Vaishnava. The night air was sharp, carrying the scent of pine from the forested slopes below. A heavy parchment, filled with her own meticulous calculations, lay spread across her lap, weighted down by smooth river stones. By her reckoning, this was to be a night of perfect celestial harmony—a trine of planetary alignment so rare it was spoken of only in the most ancient texts, promising an age of peace and enlightenment.
It was a lie.
The feeling began as a subtle dissonance, a single, sour note in a perfect symphony. The air, which should have been crisp and clear, grew heavy, thick with a strange, static charge that made the fine hairs on her arms stand on end.
"That's not right," she murmured, her brow furrowed in concentration. She ran her fingers over the complex charts, cross-referencing her work. The numbers were perfect. The sky was wrong.
Her guru, Bhaskaran, sat nearby, his back against the observatory's dome. He was a statue carved from stillness, his blind eyes aimed at the heavens as if he could see more without sight than she could with it. "The stars are not just burning gas and rock, child," he said, his voice a calm river in the unsettling silence. "They are the nail heads that hold the tapestry of reality in place. And tonight, one of them has been pulled loose."
As if his words were a cue, the sky began to bleed.
The constellation of the Divine Protector—a formation of seven bright stars that formed the shape of a seated lion—began to flicker. One by one, the stars dimmed, their brilliant white light turning a sickly, corpse-pale yellow before being snuffed out entirely. Within moments, the proud lion was gone, leaving a gaping, terrifying hole of blackness in the night sky.
Mira stared, her scholarly mind rebelling against the impossibility of what she was seeing. "Stars don't... go out," she whispered, her voice trembling.
"When the faith that fuels them dies, they do," Bhaskaran replied, his tone grim. "An anchor has been severed. A great light has been extinguished."
Panic, cold and sharp, lanced through Mira. She had spent her life questioning the flowery, metaphorical language of the priests. But this was no metaphor. This was a physical violation of the natural order. This was real.
And then the thunder came.
It was not the familiar, rumbling peal of a storm. It was a dry, cracking sound, like the universe itself was breaking apart. It erupted from the clear, starless patch of sky where the lion constellation had been. The sound was cosmic in scale, a vibration that did not just travel through the air but through the ground, through the stone beneath her, through her very bones. It was a sound of immense, catastrophic loss.
Mira cried out, clapping her hands over her ears, but it did no good. The sound was inside her. In her mind's eye, she saw a flash of an image—a single, golden flame, impossibly bright, being clenched in a fist of shadow and extinguished. The psychic agony of that moment was so intense it stole her breath.
But the thunder was not the final omen.
As the last echoes of that cosmic crack faded, a new sound rose to take its place. It was faint at first, a distant, primal rumble that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. It grew in volume, in power, a deep, guttural roar that vibrated with a fury so profound it felt like the earth itself was voicing its rage. It was the roar of a predator, of a king, of a god denied its throne.
The sound clawed at the edges of Mira's consciousness, and another vision slammed into her. This one was not of loss, but of terrifying birth. She saw the face of a lion, not of flesh, but of burning, stellar fire. Its eyes were twin supernovas, its mane a corona of solar flares. It was a visage of pure, untamable, divine wrath. And in its golden eyes, she saw her own reflection, small and terrified.
The vision shattered, leaving her gasping on the cold stone, her heart hammering against her ribs. The roar was gone. The sky was still. But the silence that remained was different. It was no longer empty. It was watchful.
"What was that?" she breathed, her voice ragged. "Bhaskaran, what was that sound?"
The old guru was silent for a long moment, his head bowed. When he finally spoke, his voice was filled with a sorrow and an awe so deep it chilled her to the core.
"That," he said, "was a promise. An oath of vengeance sworn at the dawn of a new, terrible age." He turned his sightless eyes toward her, and though he could not see her, Mira felt his gaze pierce through her doubt, through her fear, and into the very center of her soul.
"The Age of the Scholar is over, my child. The Age of the Priest is over." He took a slow, deep breath, as if bracing himself for the weight of his own words.
"The Age of the Lion-God has dawned."
Mira looked from her guru's solemn face back to the wounded sky. The neat, predictable clockwork of her universe lay shattered at her feet. In its place was a terrifying, blood-chilling certainty. Everything she had ever known, every law she had ever trusted, was broken. The world had changed. And in the heart of that change, she could still feel the echo of that roar, a promise of violence and miracles, of a faith that would be tested not with words, but with blood and fire. And for the first time in her life, Mira Dakshini was truly, profoundly afraid.