Kalinaya: Blood of the Forgotten Gods

"Some walls keep things out. Some were built to trap something in."

The shelter was quiet that morning.

A strange quiet — not peace, but pressure. The kind that makes birds stop singing, wind stop blowing. Mira noticed it first.

She stood in the east wing of Ashtashram, inside what used to be a collapsed school corridor. Cracks spidered through the concrete. She squatted beside one and tapped the floor with her wrench. Hollow.

"…What the hell?" she muttered.

Mira was many things: hacker, scavenger, and unofficial chief of maintenance. She wasn't superstitious — but lately, things were different. The shelter felt like it had started… watching them.

She pressed her ear to the floor.

Whispers.

Not real ones. But something close. The vibration wasn't natural — a pulse, soft and irregular, like a heart buried under stone.

She grabbed a chisel.

Yash sat alone on the roof.

White hair caught the morning light. His eyes, still glowing faintly from yesterday's sparring, were distant — fixed somewhere far beyond the skyline.

Khushi's laughter echoed faintly below. For once, he didn't go to check on her. He couldn't. His body was here, but his mind…

…was back in the moment Ankita almost died during the last breach. The image hadn't left him.

His power had saved them — again — but it also grew heavier. Every time he called on the Vira Mark, something inside him fractured. Time bent. Emotions stretched thin. Lately, he'd started seeing things before they happened.

A gift. Or a warning.

He didn't know which.

Back in the corridor, Mira struck the floor one final time. The concrete gave way, collapsing into a shallow hollow chamber no one had known was there.

Dust billowed. Metal clanked.

Then she saw it.

A sigil — red, etched in something that looked like blood, pulsing gently like a sleeping eye.

At first, she thought it was a trap. Some old-world tech. But when she touched it, her Vira tracker — the prototype she'd built to monitor Yash's energy surges — began spiking.

"Shakti signature... but reversed?" she whispered.

Suddenly, the symbol flared.

Mira staggered back, vision filled with afterimages: claws, blackened gods, a burning mirror.

She screamed.

Yash was already running before she called out.

By the time he reached her, Mira was slumped near the hole, nose bleeding, muttering fragments of code and names she didn't recognize.

He pulled her up gently. Her eyes flicked open.

"I saw… you," she whispered. "But not you."

"What did you see?"

"A mark. Buried here. Same shape as yours—but wrong. Inverted."

"…A Rakshasa-Vira?"

She nodded slowly.

"They didn't just attack us from outside," she said. "They're already inside."

Later that night, Yash stood at the edge of the hollow, staring down at the pulsing mark.

It matched his.Same curve. Same divine geometry.

But reversed — like a mirror held to corruption.

He didn't speak.

He just touched the hilt of the ash-black blade on his back, and whispered,

"I see you now."