In the sadhu's hut, Priya chants a mantra in the Sharabhra dialect that causes faint writing to appear on the charred ceiling beams. Rudra realizes it is a warning from his father, written in code: "Don't combine the pages. Unless you want the Yogi to wake up." Despite this, the two fragments begin to hum softly in unison, reacting to one another even through their wrappings.
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The doorway was empty.
Priya had vanished into the narrow alleys behind the cremation pit without a sound, leaving only the echo of her words behind.
"If you want to know what your father truly died for… you'll come."
Rudra stared after her, unsure if she was a messenger or a trap—or both.
He turned back to the body of Sadhu Tapan Bhairav.
The room felt tighter now, as if the walls had crept inward to listen.
The entrails-lotus glistened dully in the flickering light. The lotus seed at its center, smooth and black, looked far too deliberate to be ritual. It looked placed. Like a key.
Rudra knelt beside the corpse, careful not to touch anything. His hands still clutched both manuscript pages—his own, and Priya's.
The moment they were near each other, something strange happened.
They began to vibrate.
Faintly. Rhythmic. Like the pages were breathing.
He separated them. The sensation ceased.
Brought them back together. It returned.
His skin prickled.
He wrapped the second page in a scrap of silk from the sadhu's abandoned bedroll, tied it off, and slipped it into his satchel beside the first. The fabric felt damp—though his fingers were dry.
He rose and glanced around the hut.
Something else was here. A presence—not a ghost, not quite.
More like the residue of a ritual. A waiting.
His gaze moved upward.
The charred ceiling beams sagged under the weight of smoke-black soot. But between the streaks of darkness, shapes shifted.
Writing.
Faint, nearly hidden in the burn marks. The soot had blackened around the letters as if fire had revealed them rather than destroyed them.
But they were incomplete. Broken. Fragmentary.
Rudra pulled a half-melted candle from his pocket, one he'd used for translating during outages. He lit it and held it up toward the ceiling.
No change.
Then, without a word, a whispering sound came from behind him.
He turned.
Priya was back.
No sound of footsteps. No motion. Just there—beside the doorframe once more, her eyes on the ceiling.
She stepped past him and stood beneath the beams. Closed her eyes.
And began to chant.
The words were not Sanskrit. Not even Bengali. Older. Wrong. Sharabhra.
Her voice—quiet, steady—curled through the room like smoke through a keyhole.
Rudra felt the words tug at something behind his eyes.
Then the ceiling shifted.
The soot reshaped itself, pulled inward as if the wood exhaled, and the letters clarified.
Not Sharabhra.
Brahmi.
He blinked, heart thudding.
He could read it. Barely. The phrasing was archaic. The sentence broken by burn scars.
But he could make it out.
If you are reading this, you found what I buried in fire. Good.
But do not combine them. Not yet. Not unless you want the Yogi to wake up.
The Sutra doesn't teach. It consumes.
Choose silence over revelation.
Choose loss.
No signature. But the last line carried a symbol.
A small triangle of three dots—a sigil his father used to mark his private notebooks.
Rudra's throat tightened.
He reached up and touched the ceiling beam gently. The soot flaked beneath his fingers.
But the words remained.
Priya's chant faded. She opened her eyes slowly, as though returning from very far away.
"He knew someone would find it."
Her voice was flat. No pride. No surprise.
"He used my blood to write it. He didn't tell me why."
Rudra stared at her, then down at the satchel where the pages pulsed softly against each other like two hearts trying to sync.
He remembered the phrase from his father's fevered ramblings in the final year of his life:
"The Sutra is not to be read. It reads you. When it's complete, it will speak in your own voice."
He whispered, "We shouldn't have them together."
Priya didn't answer.
Because the pages had begun to hum.
Louder now.
Through the silk. Through the leather satchel. Through the room itself.
Rudra took one step back.
Then the candle flame twisted sideways—like wind had pushed it, but the air was still.
And in the corner of the hut, behind the corpse's unmoving body, came the sound of something breathing.
Not from lungs.
From walls.