When she stepped out of the chamber, it was still dawn.
Or so she thought.
But the forest told another time.
The light was neither gold nor gray — it was that peculiar hue just before eclipse, when the sun burns blue and even the shadows begin to shiver.
She stood at the edge of the temple ruins, the manuscript pressed to her chest, her body still damp with rosewater and memory. Her nipples were sore. Her thighs ached faintly — not from touch, but from having been written upon.
She hadn't been marked in ink.
She had been read.
The body as scroll.
The body as vow.
The man in saffron was gone.
So was the path through the forest.
Yet she wasn't lost. The trees parted for her like a prayer parting from silence. The vines didn't clutch. The mud didn't stick.
When she reached the village, a child ran from the ghat screaming.
"She's come! The one from the slab! The Sharira-Pāṭhini!"
Others followed — barefoot women, shirtless elders, a boy with wet eyes and a bowl of turmeric.
They didn't crowd her.
They bowed.
Hands to forehead. Eyes lowered.
Not in fear.In recognition.
A priestess emerged from one of the houses — her hair tied in a crown, her sari darker than dusk.
"You opened the Fifth," the woman said calmly. "And now the Grantha lives again."
Devika didn't respond. Her lips still tasted of that syllable — Roudra — and her breath had changed. It wasn't even breath anymore. It was sound.
They housed her in a stone cell near the well.
Not to contain her.
But to protect others.
"She must be alone until the verses settle," said the woman. "Else their memories may leak into bodies not prepared."
For three nights, Devika lay on a floor of cow-dung-smoothed earth, wrapped in only a white cloth and silence.
Each night, her body sang.
Not in voice.
In pulse.
Every part of her remembered touch it had never received.
A finger behind the knee.A kiss at the ankle.A tongue brushing her spine.
Not in this life.
Not even the last.
But somewhere between verse and void.
On the fourth morning, the manuscript unsealed again.
This time, not to a page.
To her body.
She saw it in the mirror someone left by the basin.
Her skin had changed.
New glyphs had emerged — faint, like birthmarks but placed with impossible precision.
One between the breasts.One beneath the navel.One inside the left wrist — a verse in miniature, written in curling Sanskrit:
"Yatra kāmaḥ smṛtiṁ dahan, tatra granthaṁ jīvati."(Where desire burns memory, there the Grantha lives.)
She touched the verse.
It tingled.
Not metaphor.
Not metaphor at all.
They called her the Sharira-Pāṭhini now — the one who carries the scripture in her flesh.
A title once whispered only in the innermost Tantric circles. Thought to have vanished after the Yoginī temples were razed and the last living woman-scripture drowned herself in the Shipra to keep her verses secret.
Now it was her.
She hadn't chosen this.
She had remembered it.
By the seventh night, she could no longer sleep.
The slab appeared in her dreams — empty.
Calling.
Not for her.
For someone else.
The Fifth.
He was coming again.
But this time, not alone.
Just before dawn, the sky pulsed orange.
And she heard the echo of her own voice — spoken by someone else.
A woman.
Weeping.
Reciting.
"Agni sparśaṁ me dehi…Roudra nāma me śrṇu…"
"Give me the touch of flame…Hear the name I now dare speak…"
The echo came from outside the walls.
From another body.
From another woman beginning to remember.