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There was a boy.
Not a chosen one. Not a cursed one.
Just a boy with scuffed knees, sun-warmed skin, and an alarming lack of shoes.
"Wait up!" he yelled, chasing after a pack of other equally dangerous children through the grasslands, a stick in one hand, a stolen mango in the other.
Someone shouted that he was cheating. Someone else fell into a ditch.
No one cared. No gods were watching.
By late afternoon, the shadows stretched longer than the games, and the village began to simmer down into that sacred hour—veranda time.
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He sat on the old wooden steps of his grandmother's home, one leg swinging, the other tucked under.
She handed him something fried and questionably shaped.
"Is it…a fish?" he asked, tilting his head.
"Eat it before it eats you," she replied, already knitting something that would never be finished.
He ate it. It was spicy. He loved it.
Then he told her everything.
Every hill they ran down. Every insult traded. Every secret shortcut.
How he found a weird blue beetle and named it Commander Shrivastava, but then it flew away mid-ceremony.
How one of the older kids said ghosts live near the banyan tree, but he went anyway and only found a goat chewing someone's shirt.
He talked and talked. She laughed and hummed, pretending to knit.
---
Later, tucked under a cotton blanket with his hair still smelling like outside, he turned to her with wide, sleep-fighting eyes.
"Tell me the story again," he whispered. "The one about the Voice."
She sighed like she always did.
"Don't you want to hear about the Monkey General and the Glass Mountain?"
"Noooo," he groaned. "That one's got a happy ending."
She chuckled.
"Fine. You want the real one. The deep one. The one the gods tried to burn from the skies."
He nodded. She looked up—not at the ceiling, but somewhere behind it.
And then she spoke.
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"Before gods had names... before the first prayer cracked the silence... there was only the Voice.
Not a voice like yours or mine. Not something you hear.
Something you feel. Something that chooses to be heard.
It sang the world into rhythm. And from rhythm, came pattern. And from pattern, came time.
And from time... came possibility.
The Voice did not want to rule. It did not even want to be. But even silence, when held too long, begins to split.
And so—one became twelve.
Not children. Not siblings.
Refractions.
Each a fragment, believing itself whole.
One became law. One became decay. One became storms and another—memory.
One loved everything and another forgot everything. One wore a helm so none could see its grief.
And one... was lost.
Not dead. Not forgotten. Just… missing.
They called it Vayujit. The Wind That Would Not Kneel.
The only god who said 'No' to the rest.
So the others ripped him out. Tore the wind from the sky. Buried rebellion under silence.
But the Voice... doesn't end when you cut it. It just... finds a new mouth."
---
The boy blinked.
"…Did the other gods ever find the missing one?"
The grandmother looked at him.
And for a moment, just a flicker, her eyes did not seem old.
"…They're still looking," she said.
---
Outside, the wind shifted directions.
Inside, the boy dreamed of names he'd never heard before.
And far away, in a place even gods forgot to check,
a hammer began to hum.
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