There was no sky here.
No earth, no stars, no air—only a vast twilight where time hung still, suspended like a breath that never ends. Aadi drifted through it, weightless, his body neither alive nor dead, his thoughts echoing in a silence that felt older than creation.
He had sealed Rahu and Ketu. He had ended the war.And yet, he existed in a place that was not the world.
Fragments of light floated around him—memories not his own, drifting like ashes on invisible wind. A child laughing in Wayanad's fields. A storm breaking. A shrine hidden beneath stone. A brother's voice crying his name.
But the memories never stayed. They dissolved before he could hold them, like smoke escaping his fingers.
He tried to speak, but his words fell without sound.He tried to move, but every direction led to the same horizonless void.
Then, faintly, a whisper touched him—distant, fractured, but achingly familiar.
"Let them remember only the dawn…"
It was his own voice, echoing back from the moment of sacrifice.
Aadi closed his eyes, feeling something warm stir in his chest. Not life, but remembrance. Somewhere beyond this twilight, his brother lived. His people lived. The world moved forward. And though they no longer knew his name, their peace was the proof that his choice had meaning.
Still, even peace carries a shadow.
In the world below, monks in secluded temples sometimes murmured strange hymns before sleep. The Naag sadhus spoke of a "nameless guardian" who walks the line between illusion and truth. And sometimes, in the drifting space between dream and waking, wanderers swore they saw a figure standing at the edge of dawn—eyes burning faintly, cloak rippling in a wind that came from nowhere.
An outcast between worlds.A forgotten savior who could never return.
Aadi's gaze turned upward, though there was no sky to see—only the shimmer of existence itself, veined with the faint glow of the serpent sigil that once marked his palm.
He breathed the silence, and the silence breathed him back.
"If truth is a fire," he whispered into the void, "then let me be its ember."
And for a heartbeat—just one—he felt time stir. Somewhere, faintly, Kairava shuddered in his cave of iron veins, sensing the pulse of another immortal burdened with memory.
Two souls—one within time, one beyond it—bound by what they could not forget.
Then the void quieted again, folding him into its endless dusk.
And the Outcast walked on, unseen, between worlds that would never again remember him… yet could never truly forget.