Date: April 15, 2023
Location: Bodh Gaya Excavation Site – Theta Ruins
Written by: Advait Sen (fragmented?)
---
If you are reading this…
No—if you are still reading this—
you're too close now.
I told you not to continue.
I begged you in the last entry to stop.
But curiosity…
That's how Bhantaragya begins.
---
The diary wrote all night.
Not in paragraphs. Not in ink. Not in the flow of sanity.
In scratches. In curled red symbols.
In a black, weeping residue that bled through the paper like veins in rotting skin.
The pages hissed.
I woke up with ink under my nails.
My mouth—tasted of ash and salt.
My fingers—moved on their own, like they were remembering something I didn't learn.
I found the others' names scribbled on the walls. Over and over.
Liang. Zhang. Lu. Sandeep. Nikita. Aiko.
Overwritten.
Crossed out.
Then below it:
"NOT ENOUGH."
Their deaths weren't offerings.
They were appetizers.
---
I tried again to bury this diary.
Dug with bare hands under the altar stone.
Three feet. Six.
The soil turned red.
The deeper I went, the warmer it became.
By the time I hit something hard—
It was a ribcage. Human. And it grinned.
The diary was back in my tent when I returned. Open. Fresh ink.
My name across the top:
> "YOU ARE THE SCRIBE.
YOU ARE THE SEAL."
I don't remember writing that.
But the ink matched my veins.
Black. Slow-moving. Alive.
---
Now it speaks in dreams.
Last night, the Black Bodhi Tree cracked open.
From its hollow trunk, the monk emerged.
Bhantaragya.
His head was smooth and glistening with ritual oil,
but beneath the surface, faces screamed.
Thousands of voices—all his.
All former scribes.
All those who came before me.
He whispered:
> "You are my parchment now."
I woke up mid-chant, the mantra burning in my throat,
and a sigil scorched into my chest with no fire nearby.
I didn't feel pain. Only clarity.
A clarity that terrifies me.
---
I now know this diary is not just writing itself.
It is writing me.
Shaping my thoughts.
Splitting memory from meaning.
Soon, you won't be able to tell where Advait ends and Bhantaragya begins.
I already hear my voice in third person sometimes.
I saw my reflection grin when I wasn't smiling.
---
This next part is not advice. It's a warning:
The diary has begun speaking to you, hasn't it?
Look at your screen.
Do you feel the air shift around you?
A cold behind the neck?
A whisper in the pattern of the fan or the tick of the clock?
The chant is embedded in this entry.
Hidden in the rhythm.
In syllables that don't belong to language.
Try to find it.
Go ahead.
> "Sūnyatā manas vargaṁ—
Bhedaṃ ananta—
Dvāraṁ praṇaśyati."
That wasn't me.
That came from the page.
Or from you.
Read it aloud, and the b
ark will open.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
This isn't a story anymore.
It's a gate.
And Bhantaragya is listening.
—Advait (?)