"You can erase names from records. Not from flame."
---
8 Years Ago — The Final Memory
Astha sat alone at the peak of Maalayagiri, the last mountain that still remembered his people's footsteps.
The battlefield behind him still smoked from the fight against the three avatars.
He hadn't slept. He hadn't spoken. The White Flame inside his chest had stopped flickering. It now flowed — steady, terrifyingly calm.
Before him stood a single surviving relic: the Shrine of Kaalasmaran, a forbidden monument said to be older than the pantheon itself — untouched by divine influence, carved by the forgotten mortals of pre-history.
Smritidhaara coiled loosely around his arm, its faint glow pulsing like a heartbeat.
Astha stepped inside.
---
Within the shrine, there were no gods.
Only names — carved into the stone. Every surface etched with the lost, the erased, the damned.
A voice called out.
Not aloud. But from within.
"Do you remember them?"
"Even if the world does not?"
"Then you are one of us."
The Elders of Flame-Memory, ghosts of a forgotten order, surrounded him.
They had no faces. Only voices. Fragments of those who had been removed by divine will across millennia.
"Will you carry us?"
"Will you strike for those who no longer speak?"
"Will you burn what even the gods fear?"
Astha didn't hesitate.
"I will."
---
The chain-sickle ignited — not with normal fire, but with memories too painful to forget.
Its blade no longer rusted. It shone with molten tears and screams of children. Its links became semi-spectral, some showing glimpses of faces from Astha's past as they wrapped around his arm.
The shrine pulsed.
Smritidhaara was now alive.
A weapon of anchored memory.
It would bind. Suppress. Remind.
And with it, Astha would carry the pain of all forgotten lands — not just his own.
---
At that exact moment in Swarnalok, the Divine Archive — a living library where the fate of every being was recorded — trembled.
The scribe-god Devgyaan looked at his scroll. Astha's name turned black, then vanished.
"His name no longer belongs to us," Devgyaan whispered.
"He has chosen memory over fate."
The gods tried to seal him from prophecy. But all they did was make him unwritten.
And that made him unpredictable.
---
Return to Present — Temple Ruins
Luv stared at the inscription on the wall of the temple: "AARYAVRAT."
He whispered it aloud — and the air seemed to respond.
"They really did try to erase it all," Naira said, shocked.
"But the flame... it remembers everything."
Astha nodded silently.
Then turned to leave.
"We've lingered in the past long enough," he said.
"Now... it's their turn to remember who I am."
---
As they step outside, the camera (metaphorically) shifts upward.
In the golden heavens of Swarnalok, a figure watches Astha.
Rings of light float behind his head. Eyes closed. Palms clasped.
"The aberration walks again..."
"Then it is time we awaken... Sharvaka."
A distant temple door creaks open.