The Serpent's Gate burned behind him, its coils collapsing into sparks that dissolved into the void. Aadi stood at the heart of a battlefield that was not a place but a wound in reality—sky fractured, rivers flowing upward, mountains suspended in shards of light and shadow.
Before him loomed Rahu and Ketu united: one head, one body, their forms twisted into a grotesque whole. Their presence tore time itself, past and future colliding in an endless scream. Lightning seared the ground, storms howled with the voices of countless generations, and Maya's veil fluttered like a torn cloth, barely clinging to existence.
"Aadi," Rahu's voice slithered into his mind, "you are nothing but a mortal spark. But you can burn brighter than gods. Choose me, and I will give you the power to mend your brother, to write your own truth."
Ketu's body writhed, its void pulling at the fabric of the world. "Or resist, and be forgotten with your tribe—another nameless casualty in the gods' endless war."
The fragments of the trident spun around Aadi, their glow cutting through the storm. They hummed with unbearable tension, as if they too knew their moment had come.
The Naag sadhus cried out from the distant ridge, their voices rising in mantra, holding back the collapsing veil for one last breath of time.
Aadi's heart thundered. Arul's pale face filled his vision, broken yet smiling. Kripacharya's words echoed: "Cycles repeat because men refuse to choose differently." And he knew. To cling to life, to victory, to memory—it would all bind the wheel tighter.
With a cry torn from the marrow of his soul, Aadi seized the shards of the trident. They seared into his flesh, fusing into a weapon not whole but jagged, born of fracture and truth. He raised it high.
The world split.
The trident's light lanced upward, striking Rahu's head and Ketu's body. With a shriek that curdled the stars, their unity shattered—head and body ripped apart, hurled into separate dimensions, never to unite again. One into the abyss of shadow, the other into the endless horizon of void.
But the Gate demanded balance.
The same light that split Rahu and Ketu now curled around Aadi, binding him in chains of serpent-fire. He felt himself being pulled into the wound between worlds—not dead, not alive, but erased.
"No!" Arul's voice cried faintly in the distance, lost beneath thunder.
Aadi looked one last time at the fractured world, at his brother, at the tribe he had failed and loved. And then he whispered to the storm:
"Let them remember only the dawn."
The trident dissolved in his hands. His body blurred, becoming nothing but fire and shadow. The wound sealed shut. The veil mended.
Silence fell.
When the light cleared, the battlefield was empty. The villagers stirred as if waking from a dream, their memories of war fading like smoke. The gods retreated. The demons dissolved into the shadows of myth.
But Aadi was gone.
No songs, no stories, no scriptures would remember him.
Only the Naag sadhus, watching with tears burning their eyes, whispered his name into the wind.
And in the space beyond history, where shadows and serpents coil, Aadi walked forever—guardian of the fracture, nameless and eternal.