The next morning, Arka woke up feeling hollow. He had resigned himself to his fate. He no longer knew what was real and what was madness in this house.
His head felt heavy, as if the night hadn't offered him sleep—only a pause in the chaos.
And the morning ritual began again.
The usually comforting aroma of toast and warm coffee felt like a jarring backdrop, framing the new absurdity that awaited him.
He hadn't even finished breakfast when his Mother—who somehow already looked flawless in a business suit (even though she didn't work)—was standing before him. Her gaze was fierce.
Her lips were pressed into a neat line, her chin lifted, and her steps were as precise as someone heading to a crucial board meeting.
She was no longer praising Arka cheerfully like yesterday. Today was a mission.
"Change your clothes," she ordered flatly.
"Mom, I'm just going to campus..."
"Change."
She shoved a new outfit at him: a designer cream-colored hoodie that looked casual but cost a fortune, paired with ripped jeans that were (naturally) equally expensive, and a pair of new high-top sneakers that were still stiff.
The fabric fibers were fine, the smell of the store still lingering; everything was too new, too expensive, for an ordinary student.
"And wear these," she added, handing him designer sunglasses.
"But it's drizzling outside, Mom..."
"Wear them."
Once dressed, Arka grabbed his backpack. He was mentally prepared to face the drama of his Mother's red Bentley again.
His shoulders lifted slightly, a long breath escaping him—like a dress rehearsal for a social execution.
But his Mother didn't move. She just stood there, holding out a different key. A key bearing the prancing horse logo of a Porsche.
Arka froze.
The world seemed to stop for half a second. The sound of the rain outside felt louder.
"Mom. Don't," Arka said, his voice quiet and full of pleading.
The hand he extended to reject the key trembled slightly.
"I... I'll just take a motorcycle taxi."
His Mother's fierce gaze turned sharp.
Her eyes pierced him like shards of cold glass.
"What did you say?"
"I don't want to take that car," Arka begged.
His tone cracked—somewhere between fear, shame, and exhaustion.
"Mom, you saw it yourself yesterday, right? Just driving your Bentley made people think I was a kept boy! It's crazy, right?!"
He pointed out the window, toward the yellow monster parked in the yard.
The body of the Porsche, wet with drizzle, reflected the morning light like a neon danger sign.
"If I go to campus in that... alone... won't that just add oil to the fire of the gossip?! It's like pouring gasoline on it, Mom! They'll go even crazier!"
His Mother crossed her arms. She stared at Arka coldly.
Her posture was rigid, authoritative, almost aristocratic.
"It would be a waste," she said, brief and final.
"But, Mom—"
"Listen, Arka," his Mother cut in.
"Your Grandfather spent a tremendous amount of money to buy that car. That car belongs to you. If you don't use it, that is called disrespect. Do you want your Grandfather to be offended?"
"But my reputation—"
"What reputation?" His Mother laughed cynically.
Her laugh was thin, cold—without a shred of empathy.
"Reputation as a sugar baby for older women? Forget it. Better to be a sugar baby who looks filthy rich than a pathetic one."
Arka fell silent. His mother's logic was truly twisted.
His chest felt tight, as if being pulled in two directions at once.
"Besides," she continued,
"I've already dressed you this stylishly. You want to ride a motorcycle taxi wearing sneakers worth tens of millions? Don't be ridiculous. That would be weird."
She tossed the Porsche key at Arka's chest.
The impact was light, but it felt like the sledgehammer of a final verdict.
"Get going. And don't scratch it."
Arka stared at the key in his hand, then at his Mother's steely face. He had no choice. He sighed in defeat.
His heart sank, while his body moved on autopilot.
✧ ✧ ✧
It was the same morning, in two different worlds.
The yellow Porsche was a disaster.
Even as the door opened, the scent of fresh leather and an expensive engine made him feel increasingly unworthy.
The semi-circular public lecture hall was packed. Hundreds of students—perhaps more than five hundred—filled the tiered seats.
The smell of raincoats, cheap perfume, and static electricity filled the air. White neon lights pierced the eyes.
When Arka entered, the roar of chatter instantly dimmed, replaced by the collective whoosh of hundreds of heads turning toward him.
The synchronized movement was like a cold wave washing over his body.
Then, the whispers began. Thanks to his accursed hearing, Arka could hear everything clearly.
"That's him."
"Crazy, he actually came..."
"Yellow Porsche... I saw it in the parking lot..."
"Insane. So he really is a sultan's kept boy."
"Right, that's a tycoon sugar mommy, isn't it?"
"Look at his hoodie. That's the latest release, the price is..."
Arka felt himself shrinking. Every pair of eyes felt like a needle pricking his skin. He was no longer seen as Arka. He was a walking rumor.
His fingers squeezed the straps of his backpack until his knuckles turned white. He hunched deeper into himself.
He didn't dare sit in the front, or in the middle. He walked fast—almost running—up the stairs, toward the very top seat, in the furthest corner, hidden behind the shadow of a pillar. He collapsed into the seat, pulled his hood lower, and stared down at the floor.
His breath was short, the hard seat felt like a block of ice.
Amidst these hundreds of students, surrounded by judgmental stares, Arka felt utterly alone and isolated.
No matter how large the room was, it felt like a narrow box pressing in from all sides.
✧ ✧ ✧
Meanwhile, in another part of the city, in a completely different hall.
This was not a modern hall with folding plastic chairs. This was a classic hall, majestic and elegant. The ceilings were high, adorned with ancient fresco paintings. The walls were panelled in dark teak wood aged hundreds of years. The air inside was silent, heavy, and smelled of history.
Every breath felt like inhaling centuries of authority and ritual.
This hall was not filled with whispering students.
In the first row of seats sat the highest officials of the Kingdom of Carta. Their faces were tense and serious.
Their formal attire shimmered softly under the light of the antique chandeliers, reflecting authority and suppressed anxiety.
There, looking familiar, was the Minister of Security—the man who had braved the storm to come to the Sanjaya Mansion. Beside him, the Minister of Spirituality—the Grandfather's best friend—sat upright, his face grim. Around them, dozens of cabinet ministers, military generals, and other palace advisors sat in solemn silence.
On the stage, an old man stood behind an old wooden podium with intricate antique carvings. He was wearing his most grand official temple robes.
The texture of the fabric was heavy, flowing like a living shadow under the hall lights.
An MC in a formal uniform nodded respectfully toward him, his voice amplified by the microphone.
"We yield the time fully... to The Honorable Professor Rajendra."
Arka's Grandfather—Professor Rajendra—lifted his head. He did not look at his files. He looked straight into the eyes of the kingdom's leaders. The entire hall held its breath, waiting for his words.
His gaze was piercing, carrying the weight of countless generations.
He was the only person in the room holding absolute authority.
The grand hall was silent. Very silent.
Even the sound of the officials breathing sounded neat and restrained.
The MC's voice announcing his name still echoed for a moment before dying out completely. Hundreds of pairs of eyes from the most powerful people in the Kingdom of Carta—ministers who managed war, spies, and state treasury—were fixed on the single thin figure standing majestically on the stage.
Professor Rajendra did not clear his throat. He did not flip through the stack of files in front of him.
He placed both of his thin but strong palms on the edge of the antique wooden podium. His sharp eyes, which had held back tears last night and scolded his son this morning, now swept across the front row.
His authority did not need volume. The silence worked for him.
"Your Excellencies, Ministers, Generals, and Palace Advisors," his voice rang out.
It wasn't a loud voice. It was calm, raspy, and old. Yet, the voice cut through the silence of the hall like a knife, clear all the way to the back row.
Its low tone was like an ancient gong that made hearts tremble.
"We gather today not for pleasantries or academic seminars."
He paused, letting the weight of the silence press down on the officials' shoulders.
"For thousands of years," he continued,
"The Kingdom of Carta has not survived because of our soldiers. Not because of our gold. We survived because we knew."
"And what we know," he said, tapping lightly on a large, old leather-bound book lying on the podium,
"Is recorded here. In the Dark Star Calendar."
The Minister of Security and the Minister of Spirituality stared at the book with a gaze of both respect and fear.
The symbols on its cover seemed to gleam faintly under the yellow light of the hall.
"To the modern world out there," Rajendra said, his tone slightly mocking,
"This is nonsense, ancient superstition. But for us, whose families have served the Palace for dozens of generations, this is the only truth."
He lifted his head, staring straight into the eyes of his audience.
"Once every five hundred years," his voice lowered, sounding increasingly heavy.
"Without fail. The cycle repeats."
"This calendar does not predict the future," he explained.
"It records an unavoidable pattern. A cosmic cycle beyond human control."
"Every five hundred years," he repeated,
"The balance shifts. The veil between our world... and something else... thins."
Several officials in the middle row looked uneasy in their seats.
The old wooden chairs creaked softly, as if they too were restless.
"The weather anomalies you see on the news," his eyes fixed on the Minister of Security,
"Are merely the first symptoms. Crop failures will follow. Plagues that science cannot explain will emerge. And darkness—true darkness, possessed of a will—will seek a crack to enter."
He paused, letting the horror of his words seep into the cold hall.
The air felt heavier, as if the temperature had dropped a few degrees.
"The night before last," Professor Rajendra said,
"Coinciding with the great storm... the new cycle officially began."
"Ladies and Gentlemen," he looked at them one by one.
"The Period of Darkness has returned."
✧ ✧ ✧
Professor Rajendra's announcement fell like a sledgehammer in the silent hall.
Instantly, the solemn calm shattered. The hall grew restless.
The sound of murmurs spread immediately like dry fire. Military generals in the front row whispered sharply to each other, their faces rigid. Economic ministers looked deathly pale, muttering anxiously about stock markets and the risk of public panic. Palace officials in the back row hurriedly opened their notebooks with slightly trembling hands.
The muffled tone of panic sounded like the hum of a giant beehive.
"Is it confirmed?"
"The Period of Darkness... in the modern age?"
"What protocols do we have for this?"
Professor Rajendra raised one hand. Slowly.
Miraculously, the murmurs subsided immediately. Not into dead silence, but into a tense, anticipatory quiet.
Just one small movement from him felt like a supernatural command.
"Your fear is natural," Rajendra said, his calm voice remaining clear across every corner of the hall.
"But panic is a luxury we do not possess."
He bowed, not to look at files, but to retrieve something hidden within the wooden podium. He lifted it up.
It was an old compass. Very old. The object was hexagonal, made of blackened metal, perhaps ancient bronze. Its surface was incredibly intricate, engraved with dozens of astrological symbols and extinct scripts rotating in several concentric layers.
The object shimmered grimly, as if holding light from another age.
"This is an instrument older than the Kingdom of Carta itself," Rajendra said, his eyes on the object.
"It does not predict storms. It predicts fractures."
The strange needle in the center of the compass seemed to vibrate softly under the hall light.
The vibration was subtle, yet enough to make hair stand on end.
"During the great storm two nights ago, this needle stopped spinning for the first time in five hundred years."
His eyes now stared straight at the Minister of Security.
"It has pointed. The first opening point... the first crack in the veil... will fall in 30 days."
He paused, letting everyone in the room calculate in their heads.
The long silence was filled with held breaths and rapid pulses.
"November 1st."
In the left wing of the hall, in the rows dedicated to the analysts, the tension was most palpable. This was the core team of the Department of Non-Material Investigation.
The moment Rajendra mentioned "November 1st," they moved in unison.
Sophisticated laptops were opened without sound. Their screens did not display Word documents or Excel sheets, but incredibly complex computational models, rows of code, and rotating three-dimensional mathematical graphs.
The blue light of the monitors reflected on young faces that suddenly turned pale.
This was data they had been gathering for months, the result of ceaseless overtime since the first weather anomaly was detected by their satellites. They were trying to predict when and where.
The head data analyst—a young woman with a serious face—typed the date "November 1st" into her final simulation variable.
She pressed 'Enter'.
The mathematical model on her screen spun wildly for a split second, then stopped, locked onto a single result. Probability: 99.99%.
The head analyst looked at her minister (the Minister of Security) sitting in the front row. She didn't need to speak. She just nodded once, slowly.
A small movement that demolished the hope of the entire room.
One by one, the analysts in that row closed their laptops.
They all sighed.
It wasn't a sigh of relief. It was a heavy collective sigh, a sigh of resignation from people who hoped their calculations were wrong, only to be confirmed by a thousand-year-old superstition.
The Minister of Security stood up.
"Professor," he said, his voice heavy and echoing.
"Our computational models... confirm the same result."
The Minister of Security had just sat down, and the hall was still digesting the "November 1st" confirmation.
Professor Rajendra nodded slowly at the Minister, as if accepting his report.
"Your modern computations succeeded in confirming the date," he said, his calm voice filling the hall again.
"But this ancient instrument," he patted the hexagonal compass on the podium gently,
"Provides details."
He swept his gaze across the hall once more.
"The first opening will occur exactly at 13 hours past 13 minutes."
If the announcement of "November 1st" made the hall restless, the announcement of "13:13" made them panic.
In the left wing, the Department of Non-Material Investigation team moved in unison. No longer murmurs, but the sound of dozens of laptops being opened roughly.
They were panicked. Their data, their trillion-value mathematical models, might have found the date. But a specific time? Down to the minute?
Their fingers typed with incredible speed.
The hall fell into a terrifying silence. A different silence than before.
For seven full minutes, the only sound in that grand hall was not coughing, not the rustle of paper, not even whispers.
It was the uniform sound of click-click-click-click-click. The sound of dozens of laptop keyboards being soft-pressed with frantic speed simultaneously by the kingdom's best analysts.
Like a modern ritual built upon ancient fear.
Their young faces bathed in the blue light of screens, entering the variable "13:13" into their cosmic simulations, re-running calculations they had labored over for months.
Seven minutes felt like forever.
Then, the typing stopped. One by one. The analysts froze, staring at their screens in horror.
Suddenly, a voice was heard. Not from the podium. From the left wing.
It was a young male voice. His voice was hoarse and trembling, as if he wanted to cry.
A voice that pierced the silence like the first crack in glass.
"Professor..." he called out, his voice cracking.
The head analyst sitting in front of him looked back, then looked at Professor Rajendra. She nodded at the young analyst, telling him to report.
The young analyst stood up. His hands were shaking. He stared at his laptop screen as if it were a bomb.
His Adam's apple bobbed up and down, his eyes full of terror.
"The results... the results match, Sir," he said, his voice choked.
"Our computational simulation... confirms... not just 13:13."
He swallowed hard, tears beginning to pool in his eyes from a mix of fear and awe.
"Our model shows it... right down to the 13th second."
The hall broke.
The low hum that was previously controlled now exploded into chaos.
Officials who had been sitting solemnly jumped to their feet. Heavy wooden chairs scraped harshly against the marble floor.
The sound of the scraping was like a panic scream that couldn't be contained.
"Crazy!"
"13:13:13!"
"This... this defies logic!"
Military generals immediately swarmed the Minister of Security, shouting suppressed demands for protocols. Economic ministers looked deathly pale, shouting orders to their aides on the phone.
"How can that ancient instrument be more accurate than our satellites?!"
"What does this mean?! What is coming out?!"
On the stage, amidst the low roar of panic from the kingdom's leaders, Professor Rajendra simply stood still. He was not surprised.
His face was like old stone, weary of seeing human folly repeat itself.
He simply stared at the hexagonal compass in his hand, its needle now vibrating faintly. He looked very, very tired.
Instantly, the grand hall was in an uproar.
The solemn calm vanished, replaced by chaos muffled by panic. The high officials leaped from their chairs. Their deep voices overlapped, creating a tense, low roar.
"November 1st, 13:13:13!"
"Call all department heads! Emergency meeting now!"
"Prepare the Highest Level Quarantine protocol!"
The ministers and generals immediately got busy. They turned their backs to each other, huddled in small, anxious groups. Satellite phones that were usually hidden now came out.
They called each other. Who knows who. Maybe their aides, maybe military headquarters, or maybe their families—ordering emergency preparations in rapid coded language.
The scene in the hall was split between two eras.
On the right side, near the row of palace officials, an old man in robes—the Royal Scribe—was incredibly busy. He used no laptop. On a small folding table, he hunched over a long parchment.
His brush danced fast, black ink etching elegant and decisive lines.
As soon as one section was filled, he quickly rolled the parchment, tied it with red ribbon, and sealed it with wax.
On the other side, in the left wing where the investigation team sat, the scene was the opposite. There was no ink.
Click-click-click!
The sound of keyboards returned, but this time not to calculate. They were typing concise reports and emergency orders. Dozens of emails were sent in a fraction of a second, all marked with the highest secrecy status the kingdom possessed:
ABSOLUTE SECRET - DARK STAR PERIOD BEGINS.
Amidst the chaos, Professor Rajendra remained standing still at his podium, staring at the sea of panic among his kingdom's leaders with an ancient, sorrowful gaze.
A flash of loss crossed his face—not fear of the darkness, but fear of the humans who were unprepared to face it.
_______ ✧ _______ ☾⚜☽ _______ ✧ _______