Rain blurred the world into streaks of gray and ash. Above them, Bhūtala groaned; below, the ruined street smelled of oil, wet plaster, and the coppery tang of old blood. Abhi's voice floated across the rubble, thin as a thread.
"Aryan… wake up."
The voice hit nothing. Aryan lay a few paces away, collapsed among shattered masonry, breaths shallow and fast, eyes fixed on nothing. He had the look of someone who'd been hollowed from the inside—scabbed wrists, a jaw clenched so tight a vein stood out. The failures stacked on him like stones: first the orphanage, then the mentor, and now this—this third ruin that crowned his life in ash. He was a shell, a man with a child's wounds.
A small sound escaped him—half-whisper, half-broken prayer.
I failed them… I failed them all…
Memory opened like a wound.
When he was twelve the orphanage was a place of small, stubborn warmth. A narrow building with a crooked sign, two rooms that smelled of stew and soap, a battered radio that played for an hour in the evenings. Six children—scraps of names, voices he could still hum—ran in the courtyard. The woman who kept them was soft-handed and fierce in the way of those who refuse to be broken; she braided stray hair, kept plates warm, read harsh stories, taught them to tie knots and how to keep faces dry when the world cried. To Aryan she was everything: mother, sister, guardian. He trusted the world enough to sleep there.
Then Varrik came.
It began like a splintering: wood giving up its shape, a metal gate torn at its hinges. The air changed—cold, smelled of old iron and rot—and then the silhouette filled the doorway: tall, lean, every movement exact. There was a smile that had no warmth and eyes like chips of black glass. He walked like a man who had rehearsed the ruin of people.
The orphanage erupted.
Children's shoes slapped on warped floorboards. Plates fell and shattered. A scream cut the room in half—the woman's voice, sharp and sudden—a sound that would live in Aryan's head forever. He moved toward it and his body betrayed him; his legs locked, heart pounding so loud his ears were full of it. In front of him, time narrowed: a slap of light, a flash of hands, the soft thump of flesh meeting floor.
Varrik worked with a deliberate cruelty. He rounded the small rooms like a surgeon at a table. He took the children from their hiding places, broke them down, and left ruin in every palm strike and twist. The sounds were exact—wood splintering under force, shoes skidding on blood, the wet slap of bodies thrown against walls. The air filled with fear: high, piercing cries, the choking burst of someone gurgling on their own blood, the low animal grunts of someone smashing a small face into floorboards. The soundscape was almost surgical in its efficiency—huffs, sobs that hacked into the silence, the metallic hiss of a blade dragged across timber to frighten.
When he took the woman there were no graceful euphemisms left. Her screams were immediate, ragged; they filled the hall, lodged in corners, and would never leave him. Varrik violated her in the way monsters enact power—no tenderness, no mercy—only the crushing of a body meant to destroy the spirit that had sheltered them. The detail is ugly and plain: her clothes torn, the smell of sweat and fear and blood; the sounds of hands that would not stop—what matters is the violence, the theft of safety, the way a room of laughter turned into an autopsy of lives. The orphanage—home, food, bedtime stories—died on that floor.
The six children were not spared. The descriptions of the injuries were small, bright, and cruel: a wrist snapped under force, a throat clamped until eyes rolled, a small body stunned where it fell. One reached for Aryan, gurgled his name, and then stilled; another clutched the woman's skirt and would never let go.
Why did Varrik leave Aryan? Not out of mercy, not out of oversight. It was deliberate.
He left one survivor like a trophy. Aryan's paralysis mattered; it made him a witness. Varrik liked to measure his work by who lived to remember it. Leaving a single child alive—eyes burned into memory—meant the story would carry the exact weight he wanted: fear, testimony, a human ledger of his achievement. He wanted the echo of despair to extend beyond the walls; he wanted it to seed itself in the world. So he left Aryan shaking and vomiting in a corner, alive but broken—an artifact of his cruelty.
When it was over, the orphanage stank of smoke and sour blood. The radio had fallen silent. The sounds of the city filtered through the cracked windows like distant thunder, indifferent. Aryan crawled, the world reduced to a horizon of blood and splinters. The woman he loved was broken in ways that would never fully heal. The children—his family—were gone.
He wanted to scream. He had no voice left.
Time did not heal him; it polished the edge of his hatred. From twelve onward he learned how to survive in the city's underbelly. Nights tasting of smoke and cold, days with pressure in his ribs where his chest had been kicked in. He slept in doorways, picked at rusted trash for coins, learned which corners of Bhūtala were least likely to host a patrol. He grew thin and watchful, his muscles tightening into a coiled animal. He moved like a shadow so the city did not remember his shape.
At fifteen or sixteen—years after the orphanage—he saw Varrik again. This time the predator crouched in a narrow alley outside a building where only women worked; a place for the kind of people that attracted predators. A woman fought, breath ragged with fear. Aryan lunged, an instinctive, raw strike from a body that had spent too long on hunger. He was a teenager throwing all his small courage at a giant.
Varrik turned almost lazily. He did not look surprised. The boy's punch was as wet and soft as a child's blow to a grown man.
Varrik's response was immediate, brutal, and intended to teach. He seized Aryan, twisted a wrist until a small crack sounded like breaking wood. He wrenched and the pain tore through with crystalline precision; a knee drove into a rib, a palm came down with a force that sawed through the fragile courage the boy had brought. He threw Aryan into a gutter. The street tasted of iron and rain, and when Aryan tried to lift himself Varrik's boot found his jaw again, and he tasted teeth.
It was not defeat so much as demonstration: you are nothing. You will be nothing. His bones ached, his breath came in bubbles. He crawled, swallowed bile, and carried the imprint of humiliation like a brand.
It was a deliberate lesson—Varrik taught him the depth of his own weakness.
Days turned into limps. He bled in silence. He watched Varrik from shadows and learned the shape of his cruelty, the cadence of his cruelty. And as the years scraped by, something in Aryan hardened into cold intent—a spindle of purpose where the small, bright things had been.
He might have died in those alleys if not for the shadow that appeared like a folding of light. Siddharth did not announce himself. He was a presence that folded into the world: a man who showed up at the end of the night, who watched Aryan move, who waited until the boy could not stand and then placed a hand where a teacher's hand should go. He did not rush in with speeches. He watched, spoke with a low, spare voice and an insistence that did not beg for gratitude. He taught Aryan to breathe when pain came; he taught him to straighten a broken stance; he taught him how to throw a weight and where to aim so a blow broke spirit and not just bone.
There was no sudden transformation. Two years of work made him taller, more precise. Pain became training: the same synapses that recorded trauma learned to hold a blade, to read a footfall, to compress a breath. At seventeen he was not the street kid who lunged at a beast; he was a student with a single, sharpened intention. At eighteen, he could bend a man's will like steel.
But the ghost of the orphanage never left him. When the wind hit just right, the laughter returned in shards. When the rain hit the cement, the smell of smoke and stew would rise up—what he had once known and lost. His vow was not rhetoric; it was the slow accumulation of every night he had spent awake remembering how small hands had reached for him and how the world had turned them to dust.
Siddharth never called himself a savior. He did not promise vanquishing or miracles. He taught strategy and endurance, how to take anger and turn it into leverage. And always he watched from a step behind, like the shadow of a teacher who does not want his pupil to depend upon him.
Back in the present, the rain beat an unrelenting percussion on the carcass of the city. Abhi's calls grew thin. The ruins smelled of wet steel. Aryan's breath was a broken rhythm. He tasted salt along his jaw—tears he had not permitted himself before. The armor of detachment cracked.
He let the grief take him for a moment: he felt the flood under his ribs—sobbing that came up raw and ragged, not soundless this time. Tears ran down his face, carving clean lines through the grit. For a long minute it was quiet but for the storm and the sound of his own chest, collapsing and rebuilding itself.
"Varrik," he whispered—name small, sounding like a verdict.
The vow was not rhetorical anymore; it was carved into his bones. He thought of the woman's last eyes, of the small hands that had reached for him and been taken, of the way the orphanage had burned. Each image was an ember feeding the same flame.
Abhi crouched, the urgency in his voice frayed into pleading. Aryan's lips moved; a single syllable tried to follow—he reached for it—but the strength to speak fled. Instead he let the storm take the sound. He closed his eyes slowly, letting the rain and the pain carry him into something near sleep, or a rest, or the thin mercy of momentary oblivion.
When he finally slept, it was like a wound clotting: not healed, only paused. And somewhere under the smoke and ruin, the promise hardened.
Varrik had made his mark on the world. The world would return the mark.