The helicopters cut through the pale morning sky, their shadows racing over the emerald quilt of Kerala's fields. They did not head for any city or airport. They descended toward a stretch of earth that had been emptied of walls and roofs — a vast, silent ground that once cradled thirty homes. It was not just land. It was memory.
It was where a boy named Mirshad had once run barefoot through monsoon puddles, his laughter lost between rusted gates and narrow streets. The soil remembered him before the world knew his name, before the storms obeyed him, before evil feared him. Now, that same soil awaited his return not as a boy, but as the god who had walked through death and come back carrying the sky.
The lead helicopter touched down. Mirshad stepped out first, unmasked, his eyes calm, his presence heavy as the horizon. Behind him came Sophia, Baba, Rayyan, Malik, Amir, Jabir, Sara, and the Reapers with their families. They did not walk like conquerors. They walked like those who had come to stand where it all began.
He paused, his foot pressing into the earth. Around him, there were no jeers, no doubters. Only ghosts of a time when the world was small. "Mirshad, come! Let's race to the end of the street!" "You forgot your slippers again, boy!" "Careful, you'll break your neck climbing that gate!"
The echoes of old voices drifted through his mind. The scent of wet red earth. The taste of rainwater. The dreams of a child who never imagined that one day, the sea would bow to him. He smiled — not for cameras, not for crowds. For the boy he once was. He knelt, pressed his hand to the soil, and whispered. "I'm home."
The journey to the house was only a single kilometer, but the distance was heavy with years. The convoy of cars waited, engines low, but no one hurried. On rooftops and balconies, locals stood in stunned silence. Some gasped, some murmured. "That's Mirshad… He was just a boy like us."
The convoy began to move. No horns. No fanfare. Only the quiet procession of a man returning to the place that had shaped his soul. As the gates of the house opened, there was no red carpet waiting. Only a single banner of white cloth, its letters sewn in gold thread, swaying gently in the morning wind, "From Mirshad… to MRD… welcome home." And for the first time since he left, the land itself seemed to exhale.