Consciousness returned not as a gentle dawn, but as a slow, agonizing crawl out of a deep, black pit. The first sensation was a singular, throbbing pain that seemed to originate from the side of his head and radiate through every bone in his body. The second was a thirst so profound it felt as if his tongue had turned to dust and stone.
He pushed a piece of charred timber off his chest, his muscles screaming in protest. For a long moment, he simply lay in the rubble of the alley, his breath coming in shallow rasps. The world was a mosaic of blurry shapes and muted, grey light. He blinked, and the face of Bhairav, contorted in a final, defiant shout, flashed behind his eyes. The memory was so vivid it was like a fresh wound.
Slowly, painfully, he got to his feet. He was just a boy again, small and terrified, stripped of his title, his guards, his entire world. He stumbled out of the alley and into what had once been a bustling thoroughfare.
Silence.
The oppressive silence of a graveyard. The air, once alive with the scent of spices and flowers, was now thick with the cloying, sweet smell of death and the bitter tang of cold ash. Buildings stood like blackened skeletons against the grey sky. Bodies lay in the streets, contorted and still, their fine silks now indistinguishable from the rags of a beggar. A lone dog, ribs showing, lapped at a puddle of dark, brackish water before slinking back into the ruins.
Aditya walked. He did not run or hide. He simply walked through the corpse of his city, a ghost among ghosts. There was no destination in his mind, only a primal, instinctual pull towards the river. Water meant life. It was the only thought his battered mind could hold.
He reached the banks of the Tungabhadra an hour later. Here, a semblance of life clung on. A scattered collection of survivors dotted the shoreline, perhaps two hundred souls in all. But they were not living; they were merely not dead. They sat staring at the sluggish, brown water, their faces vacant, their bodies slumped in the universal posture of absolute defeat. A merchant, a priest, a soldier, a farmer—all their stations were erased, leaving only the shared identity of the vanquished.
Aditya was just another one of them. He collapsed at the water's edge, plunging his head into the murky current and drinking deeply, ignoring the film of ash that coated the surface. The water was warm and foul, but it was water. He lay back on the muddy bank, the world tilting precariously. The gash on his temple, caked with dirt and washed with unclean water, began to burn with a fierce, radiating heat.
The fever took him quickly. The grey sky began to shimmer, the muted sounds of the riverbank warping into a low drone. The faces of the other survivors seemed to melt and stretch like figures in a poorly made tapestry. He closed his eyes, seeking the solace of darkness, but the darkness offered no escape. It pulled him down, deep into a churning, feverish void.
And the void screamed.
It was not a sound, but a feeling—a violent, telepathic shriek of information. Five hundred years of history, not observed, but experienced, slammed into his fourteenth-year-old mind.
He felt the jarring jolt of a carriage moving at impossible speeds on iron rails, the rhythmic clack-clack-clack a brutal industrial heartbeat. He smelled the coal smoke, felt the grime under his fingernails as he worked a machine in a vast, deafening room alongside hundreds of others, their faces grim. The concept of a factory bloomed in his mind, fully formed and horrifying.
He was on the deck of a ship, a behemoth of steel with no sails, its engines churning the ocean to foam. He felt the cold spray of a northern sea on his face and saw a coastline that was not India—green, wet, and ruled by pale men in dark clothes who looked at his maps with the predatory gaze of a wolf studying a herd of deer. The word corporation settled in his thoughts, a legal entity with the power of a king and the conscience of a shark.
The scene fractured. He was standing in a trench, mud up to his knees, the air screaming with invisible things that tore through flesh. He felt the terror of a man waiting for a whistle to signal a charge into certain death for a patch of land he had never seen, for a king he had never met. The idea of nationalism became clear, a force that could make millions kill for a flag.
Then came the images, faster and faster, stripped of context, leaving only raw sensation. The sterile, antiseptic smell of a hospital. The cool, blue glow of a screen that held all the knowledge of the world. The roar of a metal bird carrying hundreds of people through the sky. The taste of food made of chemicals he could not name. The dizzying, terrifying height of a city where the buildings were so tall they scraped the clouds.
And through it all, the recurring image of his own people. Subjugated. Impoverished. Their culture dismissed, their wealth siphoned away, their famines managed with cold, bureaucratic indifference. He saw their faces, millions upon millions of them, looking to their foreign masters for salvation and receiving only ledgers and laws designed to perpetuate their own power.
The torrent reached its crescendo. A silent, blinding flash. A sun that was not a sun. A city turning to vapour. A perfect, beautiful, horrific mushroom cloud climbing into the sky. The final, absolute expression of a power so vast it could write the last chapter of humanity. Annihilation. The end.
Aditya's body arched on the muddy riverbank, a silent scream trapped in his throat.
When he opened his eyes, it was dusk. The sky was a deep, bruised purple. The fever was gone, leaving behind only a profound exhaustion and a cold, crystalline clarity. He sat up. The other refugees had vanished. He was utterly alone.
He looked at his hands, the slender hands of a boy. They looked alien to him now. The grief for his city, for Bhairav, for his family, was still there. But it was now a small, contained thing, like a single stone at the bottom of a deep, cold lake. The lake was the knowledge. The certainty.
He was no longer Prince Aditya of Vijayanagara. That boy had died in the alley. He was something else now. He was a survivor of a shipwreck that had not yet happened. He was the sole guardian of a future that must never be allowed to come to pass. His war was not with the Sultans who had burned his home. They were merely the first, predictable variable in a five-hundred-year equation. His war was with history itself.