Ashwan had not burned for a century.
Its spires—white-stone and mirror-gilded—had once glistened for the sun like blessings. Its mantra-etched streets vibrated under the pilgrims', scholars', and saints' feet. Spirit-wardens had maintained the balance over generations.
But now?
Now, the city screamed.
The Wraith ripped the upper ring apart like a curse made flesh. It advanced in a jagged, stuttering pace—flesh and memory and hatred given form. Whatever it touched, glyphs carved into walls recoiled. Weeping statues shed dust. Spirit trees withered.
It swooped—no, charged—through the air, leaving behind vaporous ribbons of mantra-exhaust that clogged the sky itself.
And it was attracted to power.
It did not stalk by vision, or by sound, but by spirit-dens—where the energy of centuries of devotion, faith, and effort had accumulated in unseen reservoirs.
Temples. Libraries. Vaults.
The shatmantra Scriptorium fell first. Constructed over a buried leyline, its walls of copper had repelled lightning and curse in days gone by. But when the Wraith came in a whirlwind of screaming echoes, the spirit-seals disintegrated like tawdry glass.
The monk-librarians, unarmed but knowing, stood reciting the old mantras of protection.
Their petitions became cries.
Mantra-flame curled in reverse like ribbons, unraveling language. The building fell inward in silence, as if time itself had recoiled. The last chant was a echo into nothing.
Then the Chakrik Temple, a three-domed place of moon mantras. The Wraith touched its rim but barely—and the walls darkened. Murals of gods withered to white lines. Bells rang themselves apart. Ghosts of old priests flickered to life, trapped and screaming.
And all across the city, a spreading knowledge unfolded:
The Paatal Rasoi experiments had not remained underground.
Spirit-streams had been polluted. Bindings had been twisted in the ground. All chants thrown now were distorted, twisted like a heat-warped mirror.
The balance was shattered.
Kids in the Low Ring grabbed their chests, crying about echoes. Courtyards so long dedicated to evening prayers exploded with inverted glyphs. A river temple not far from the west bank flowed backwards—time jerking under the weight of desecrated mantras.
Above all, in the black sky rent by fire and wind—
The Wraith roared.
It had no quarry. Only hunger. It desired not revenge, but incorporation. Memory. Strength. Fulfillment.
Its wings outstretched above Ashwan's heart.
And deep beneath the city, in the command tunnels where spiritual regulators once breathed balance into Ashwan's soul, a mantra engine faltered.
Then died.
Close to the ruined Old Temple District, where glyphs of spirits fall like ash, Mira moves quick—too quick.
A fallen prayer-hall lies atop a mother and child under smashed stone. The onlookers in the area stand motionless, paralyzed between wonder and terror of mantra residue still vibrating in the wreckage.
Mira kneels, face calm, arms oozing with chant-burns. Wordlessly, she cuts three stabilizing glyphs into stone itself—not textbook precise, but clean and tight.
"Don't touch them," she warns the crowd, voice gentle but with a cutting edge. "The glyphs are binding residual echo."
She reaches through mantra smoke, picks up the stone bare-handed, shuddering under the weight. Her aura burns—but she does not cry out.
When the family is released, the mother sobbing calls her name.
Mira does not respond.
She's already moving to the next fire.
In the Ring of the North Market, spirits are running wild—unrestrained temple echoes infecting bystanders with hallucinations and hysteria.
Udai slings a chanting elder across his shoulder and bellows down a frenzied mob, shouting commands like a war captain.
"This isn't war, but you'll behave as if it is! Lantern lines! Children within the circle! If I lay eyes on anyone fleeing alone, I'll shatter your legs and carry you myself!"
A rogue spirit attacks—half-formed, built of flame and anguish.
Udai doesn't flinch.
He tackles it directly, no glyphs, no shield—just strength and aura-channeling through his fists. He absorbs the spirit into a mantra binding circle scraped into the dirt using his knife.
A child hides behind his cloak, eyes wide.
Udai kneels and offers him his father's old army sigil.
"You're braver than me," he says.
By a rich villa presently vacated, Bhuvan discovers three street robbers pilfering jewelry from a collapsed gallery amidst screams from a neighboring collapsed house.
"You kidding me?" he snarls, thumping one on a spirit-shattered pillar. "People are dying."
"We have to survive!" someone shouts. "You do not know!"
"I do know.
He throws them out of the gallery and runs towards the sound of weeping. There, he drags a young guard's battered body from a destroyed spirit-cart. The guard sports a Mithra crest.
He hesitates. Loathes what he has to do.
Then drags the boy to safety anyway.
Behind him, the thieves gape. One drops their pilfered necklace.
Kiri weaves through the middle-tier artisan quarter, where unstable mantra wards are collapsing in a chain reaction. Every third step might trip a forgotten glyph.
Instead of brute strength, he uses precision.
sHe whistles—off-key, deliberate—tuning into the sympathetic vibration of the glyphs and "singing" one of them inert.
"You're flirting with disaster," Mira would say.
"I flirt with everything," she mutters.
He rigs a spirit siphon out of snapped metal hooks, smashed mantra orb, and husk of a spice grinder in order to disable a cascading ward from gobbling up a squad of schoolchildren who are taking refuge underneath a fruit cart.
A woman tugs at her sleeve. "How did you learn that?"
Kiri grins.
"My mom wouldn't let me go to temple. So I learned how to break in."
The city blazed.
Shaurya looked from the tip of the Sapphire Tower and saw the arc of fire sweeping through Ashwan's temple precincts. Flames danced down mantra-adorned side streets, reducing sacred geometry to ash. And above it all—at the devastation-hulled Agnikund Plaza, draped in spirit-storm—floated the Wraith.
It had increased.
It was now three stories high, covered with translucent limbs and hundreds of glyph-eyes dancing across its skin. The ring on its chest glowed like a defect sun. Screams resounded throughout the district.
Rasmika came down next to him with a crash of broken tile, her armor splintered at the shoulder, blood flowing from a deep cut along the length of her thigh. "That monstrosity ripped right through the wards on the East Gate like paper," she spat.
"I saw that," Shaurya grunted, sidestepping a descending girder with a tangle of vines. "And if we don't get it out of here fast—"
The city shuddered again—one block away, a building caved in with screaming spirit-echoes tearing through the air. Shaurya winced.
Rasmika gazed in that direction. "Evac's not complete. We can't push to capacity here."
He returned her look with grim determination. "So we fight with a hand bound."
The Wraith's voice shattered the sky—not sound, but feeling. Despair. Anger. Shattered grief amplified ten thousand times, released like ripples.
Those around him fell to their knees, holding their ears—not from agony, but spiritual sickness.
Shaurya acted first.
He hurled himself into the air on aura vines, going around behind the Wraith. Mantra-light blades flashed from his arms. Rasmika sprinted forward, uncoiling a lash of shining chain glyphs, each lash aimed at the creature's under-limbs.
It screamed.
But even wounded, it was quicker than ever.
A tendril snapped out, colliding with a water tower. The metal exploded, and the falling debris raced toward a family of trapped shopkeepers.
Rasmika didn't hesitate—she leapt toward the debris, catching it with a shield-glyph midair, channeling all her aura into holding it back.
The weight crushed her to one knee.
Shaurya landed beside her. "Move! I've got it."
"I can hold it," she snarled.
He dropped one vine to reinforce her shield, then flung the other out to snag the family below and toss them clear. The weight relented, just enough.
"We're bleeding for them," Rasmika muttered, as they both stared up at the Wraith now hovering over Vajrana Street—an orphanage row.
"We always have," Shaurya said.
The Wraith fell again—destroying a whole shrine with one swipe. The sound of its voice crashed into them like a wave of sorrow:
You left me.
You lied.
You made me this.
It wasn't speaking to them. Not in the sense that they understood, anyway. But they felt it.
Shaurya hurled his blade—a hobbled arc of spirit-iron mantra, tearing through the Wraith's flank. Light exploded. The Wraith contorted and punched a spirit-fist into the earth, sending shockwaves in all directions.
Rasmika was tossed through the window of a second floor.
Shaurya slammed into a wall—blood in his mouth. He lurched up, vines quivering.
Children around him wept. An old man attempted to remove a snapped beam from his wife's leg.
The battlefield was not merely a battlefield.
It was a city where broken lives abounded.
And they were losing.
Rasmika returned to him, limping, cloak in tatters.
Her eyes blazed. "We can't keep distributing our energy. We either fight it like gods, or we die like saints."
Shaurya faced her—exhausted, soul-deep. "If we go all-in and one civilian is killed—what have we gained?"
Her jaw shook. Then hardened.
"I hate that you're right."
The Wraith let out another scream, and the sky broke apart—a vortex of unstable mantra clouds twirling about its head. Glyphs started erupting all over the Ashwan skyline, indicating terminal overload of spirit-balance.
It was falling apart not merely individuals—but the city's own soul.
"Then we die keeping it together," she breathed.
And together, once again, they rose.