He awoke in silence.
No wind stirred the ash-coated leaves. No birds sang. Not even the heartbeat of the earth could be heard beneath the roots.
Only the breath of his own lungs, unfamiliar and uncertain, broke the stillness.
His hands trembled as they touched the cracked earth, fingers brushing something rough—ritual thread, half-burned and flaking like old skin. His wrists bore the marks of restraint, as if tied once in devotion… or in punishment. Around him, great gnarled roots coiled through shattered stone, massive and ancient—veins of something older than time.
Above, the sky was hidden by a vast canopy. No sun. No stars. Only a faint red glow that pulsed like the beat of a sleeping heart. And the tree—the great, inverted Ashvattha—its roots stretched into the heavens while its branches plunged deep into the world below.
He rose, slowly, bones creaking like dry wood.
A stone tablet stood nearby, half-buried in ash. On it were etched words, sharp and deliberate:
"Remember your name to earn your death."
His name?
It eluded him.
He searched his mind and found only echoes: fire, screams, a chant in an unknown tongue, and a silver flame dancing on blood.
Then—voices.
Whispers from hollow trunks. Faces in bark. The moan of pilgrims who had knelt in prayer until their skin turned to bark. He passed them carefully—motionless figures fused with the roots of the Ashvattha, hands still pressed in supplication. Their lips were open as if mid-prayer, but no sound came. Only emptiness. Only dust.
Then he found her.
A figure bound to a throne of thorns, half-swallowed by the tree itself. Her face was blindfolded with strands of her own hair, lips cracked and smiling.
"You have awoken again," she said.
Her voice was like dry leaves crushed underfoot. She did not move, yet the vines around her pulsed as though in breath.
"You are a child of the flame. Not born, but broken. Not risen, but returned."
He tried to speak. Only a rasp escaped.
"Do you remember your sin?" she asked gently.
He shook his head.
"Good," she whispered. "Mercy blooms in forgetting. But not for long. Not here."
She extended a hand, skeletal and trembling. In her palm sat a talisman—old, cracked, and warm.
A single word was etched into it: Asma-Ra.
"Perhaps this was your name once," she said. "Or perhaps it was one of many. Take it. You'll need something to burn when the truth returns."
He took it. The metal stung his fingers. A spark—a vision—flashed behind his eyes.
Fire. A temple. Blood. And laughter—not his own.
The vision vanished.
The woman smiled again. "Now walk, Asma-Ra. Walk and see what root remembers. The world you knew has wilted. The gods do not answer. And the dead… they pray only for sleep."
He stepped beyond her into the Hollow of the Root, where nothing lived, and nothing truly died.
As he walked, shadows watched him—some hunched in corners, others drifting like smoke. One of them looked like a monk, head bowed, but when he approached, it turned and revealed his own face.
"Thief…" the shadow hissed. "You stole Agni's flame."
He staggered back.
Then another—this one broken, limping, calling him Father.
"Why did you burn me?" it whispered. "Why did you give them the mantra?"
They closed in—shades from lives he could not yet recall, deaths he had not yet earned.
He ran.
Through twisted trees, through roots that hissed with memory. And then—
A scream. Not human. Not god.
A thing burst from the earth—part beast, part man, part root. Its body was wrapped in bark and gold, its eyes hollow but full of recognition.
"Asma-Ra!" it roared. "Give it back! Give back the fire you took!"
He fought with nothing but instinct, driven by memory he had not earned. The talisman in his hand pulsed, glowing red. The creature wept even as it attacked, screaming in pain between every strike.
"We trusted you… you promised us moksha!"
And then—it fell.
Twisted and burned, the creature collapsed, whispering a final word:
"Rain… you are the rain… and we are the root…"
Ashma-Ra fell to his knees, chest heaving. The ground beneath him trembled. Not in anger—but in memory.
A fragment returned:
He was there. The ritual. The fire. He had fed the tree.
And so, death had become a loop. And karma a prison.
The voice of the woman returned to him in the wind:
> "You will kill again. And again. Until nothing remains but flame.
And only when the flame dies, shall the root release you."
He stood once more, alone beneath the tree that remembers.
And above him, the branches twisted toward a distant sky he could no longer see.
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END OF CHAPTER I
Next: Chapter II — "The Man Who Could Not Die"