By the time Rudra's training reached its sixth course, his days had settled into a quiet, relentless rhythm. Every lesson opened a new door, and behind every door stood a hundred more he hadn't even known to look for.
His body had grown hard and responsive. His chakras, once dormant, now hummed with a life of their own. Under Devi Jyoti, Sister Anvi, and Devi Aranyani, he had learned that power was never just force; it was emotion measured, knowledge earned, and perception sharpened until it cut clean.
And yet, beneath all of it, one question had followed him from lesson to lesson, unanswered: where was it all coming from?
Devi Narmada came for him herself.
He found her at the edge of a slow, silver stream, a quiet corner of Kailash she seemed to have claimed as her own. She didn't train like the others. She didn't push him past his limits or bark corrections from a distance. She simply stood, still and certain, as if the world had already arranged itself the way she wanted it.
"Rudra."
He turned. "Devi Narmada."
The faintest smile crossed her face. "Come with me."
She said nothing more. He followed her out past the training grounds, past the last of the familiar paths, into an open valley cupped between towering, snow-crowned peaks. The land here was wide and empty and utterly silent, as if it had been waiting for something.
"Devi, what am I supposed to be learning today?" Rudra asked, glancing around at the bare expanse.
"Yourself."
He raised an eyebrow. "I thought that's what I've been doing this whole time."
"You've learned what your body can do," she said. "You have shaped your elements, opened your channels, disciplined your form. But no one has yet shown you what feeds all of it."
He frowned. "Prana?"
"Prana sustains the living," she said, shaking her head. "What lives in you is older than that." The wind moved through the valley, cold and clean, as she took a step nearer. "Rudra, from the moment Mata Parvati accepted you as her son, something was born in you that has nothing to do with breath or blood. A supreme energy. The origin all other energies borrow from."
She let the silence stretch a moment before she said it.
"Parā Shakti."
The words settled over him like frost. He repeated them under his breath, testing their shape. "Parā Shakti..."
"The Supreme Power," she said, quiet and reverent. "Not an element. Not a technique you can be taught to cast. It is the origin itself; it woke the instant Shakti called you hers."
Rudra stood very still, letting that land. He'd always known his growth was too fast to be ordinary: the way the elements seemed to lean toward his will before he'd fully decided anything, the way the air itself sometimes stirred a breath before he moved. He had assumed it was simply his own energy, expanding. He had never once imagined there was an ocean beneath it, and that he was only the shore.
"How much of it is there?" he asked.
"Enough that you will never need to worry about running dry," she said.
"...Is it infinite?"
"Do not confuse abundance for infinity," she said, a note of warning under the calm. "Nothing in this existence escapes cosmic order. But the store of Parā Shakti inside you is so vast that in your current state, you could not exhaust it if you spent every waking moment trying. What you can channel right now is a single drop lifted from a sea that has no visible far shore."
Rudra looked down at his own hands and flexed his fingers slowly, as if expecting them to look different. "So all of it, my strength, my elements, everything I can do, that's Parā Shakti?"
"No," Devi Narmada said. "Parā Shakti is not the technique. It runs beneath everything you do, like a river running under stone, feeding it, strengthening it, answering your intent even when you aren't aware you're asking."
"Then why haven't I felt it? Any of it, this whole time?"
She lifted a hand toward the mountains ringing the valley. "Because Kailash has been carrying it for you."
Rudra stiffened. "What do you mean?"
"Since the moment it woke, your body has been shedding Parā Shakti constantly," she said. "Not by your will; your soul simply produces more than your vessel currently knows how to hold. So by the will of Mahadev and Mata Parvati, this mountain itself has stood as your seal. The stone, the soil, the very air of Kailash, all of it has been quietly drinking in what spills out of you, before it could ever reach beyond these peaks."
Rudra turned slowly, looking at the mountains as if seeing them for the first time. That old, ambient weight he'd always felt in the air here; he'd taken it for sanctity. It had been a container. Built around him.
"You're about to take that away, aren't you?" he said. It wasn't really a question.
Her smile returned, small and certain. "Yes."
He looked around at the wide, empty valley. "That's why we're out here. Away from everyone."
"Precisely."
"Devi. You're about to let loose something you just told me might as well be an ocean."
"I am aware."
"And you're not even slightly concerned?"
"Not in the least."
He exhaled long and slow. "...Fine."
She stepped closer, her voice dropping into something more careful. "Listen to me, Rudra. I am only removing what has been holding it back. I am not giving you power, and I am not taking any away. What comes out is only what has always been yours: what you've been giving off since the day you were born into this."
She lifted her right hand and traced a slow glyph into the air.
The world changed.
Rudra felt it before he understood it: something gave way, not in his body, but in the air around him, like a held breath finally released. The invisible pressure of Kailash, the one he'd never known to notice, simply vanished.
Then his Parā Shakti broke free.
He hadn't moved. He hadn't called anything. And still, energy tore outward from his centre in a silent, staggering wave, black, not like shadow or smoke, but like looking into open space itself, endless and starless-until-you-looked-closer. Because within that black were countless pinpricks of silver and gold light, drifting like distant stars, and along its churning edges rolled thin veils of pale white mist, like nebulae unravelling in real time.
It swept across the valley in seconds.
The grass beneath his feet disappeared into it. The far stream vanished under its tide. The mountains themselves dimmed, swallowed by an endless dark pouring out of him without sound, without end, without asking his permission.
His breath caught. He reached outward with his senses, trying to find where it stopped.
He couldn't.
"Devi..." His voice cracked.
"Make it stop!" he shouted, panic rising fast in his chest. He clenched his fists and pulled inward with everything he had, trying to force the tide back into himself. It only made things worse: the starlight flared, the mist churned harder, the black expanded faster.
"Devi Narmada, stop it!"
She walked through the rolling dark toward him, entirely untouched by it. "No."
"I can't control this!"
She placed a steady hand on his shoulder. Her touch cut through the noise in his head like an anchor dropped into a storm. "You cannot control it yet."
"That is not helpful right now!"
"Listen," she said, and something in her tone made him listen. "You are not in danger, Rudra. This is not trying to hurt you. It is not trying to escape you. It is simply lost, because you have never once given it a direction to go."
He forced himself to meet her eyes, chest heaving. "A direction..."
"Parā Shakti answers to your soul. But it has never known a border. So give it one."
He looked out at the black tide swallowing the mountains whole. "How?"
"Start by calling it home."
"All of it?"
"No," she said gently. "Just enough that you can find where you end, and where the world begins again."
What followed was the hardest week of Rudra's life.
He stood at the centre of the valley, buried inside a universe of his own making, and tried to drag the power back by force. It didn't work. Energy on this scale did not bend to strength: the harder he pulled, the harder it resisted, surging outward like a tide refusing the shore. When frustration crept in, the silver stars flared and scattered wider, as if mirroring his temper.
Devi Narmada never once stepped in to help. She stood at the edge of the storm and watched, patient as stone.
"Again," was all she said.
And he tried again.
The first real progress came on the fourth night, when exhaustion finally beat his pride into something quieter. Instead of dragging the energy back, he simply reached outward with his awareness and searched, not for control, just for an edge. Far past the valley, past the mountain range itself, he found it: a faint, trembling line where his energy finally met the natural pull of the earth.
He could see the border. For the first time, it had one.
Devi Narmada gave a small nod. "Good."
He dropped to one knee, sweat running down his jaw and vanishing into the dark aura pooled beneath him. "Good?" he rasped.
"Again."
From there, the border began, slowly, to shrink.
Day by day, he called it in from where it had spread: first down out of the high atmosphere, down past the thin, cold reaches of the mesosphere, until the boundary was something he no longer had to search the sky for. Then it became a distance he could actually measure with his eyes: hundreds of feet. Then less. Forty. Then twenty.
Every foot reclaimed felt like moving a mountain with his bare hands. He wasn't crushing the energy or burning it away; he was folding an endless sky down into something that could fit inside a single body. Devi Narmada called it, simply, restraint.
By the end of the sixth day, the black tide that had once swallowed the valley whole was gone.
Rudra stood in the centre of the open field, and the mountains of Kailash stood exactly where they always had, untouched. Wrapped tight around his own body now, no more than a few inches from his skin, was a thin, living cloak of star-flecked black, silver light drifting slowly along its surface, pale mist clinging to his arms like something worn rather than summoned.
It held. It was quiet. It was his.
Rudra stood there, breathing hard, arms trembling from the effort of holding it in place.
Devi Narmada walked up beside him, something like pride in her steady eyes. "Now," she said. "We begin."
Rudra looked at her, wide-eyed and utterly spent. "...We haven't yet?"