Those Who Cannot Die
The wind rolled down from the Himalayas like a warning. At sixteen thousand feet above sea level, the world had no memory — only stone and silence.
In a crumbling monastery carved into black granite, an old man sat cross-legged in the dark. His nails had grown through his palms. His beard was tangled with cobwebs. He hadn't moved in eighty years.
Until now.
His eyes opened. Not slowly — violently, as if light itself was an offense.
He inhaled through cracked lips and spoke a single name, dragging it from his throat like it burned.
"Ashwatthama."
The sound cracked the ceiling. A slab of stone split in two above him. Far below, in the valley, the monks heard it, though no wind carried sound at that altitude. One of them — the youngest — fell to his knees. He had dreamt of that name for years but had never dared say it aloud.
Hundreds of miles away, in the dry underbelly of Rajasthan, a woman died in labor at precisely midnight. No relatives. No father on record. Just the child — born silent, bloodied, marked.
On his left shoulder, a scar. Faint, but undeniable. Shaped like a broken bow.
The midwife gasped and stepped back. The temperature dropped six degrees in under a minute. The lights flickered. The backup generator refused to start. The child opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling, unblinking. The nurse crossed herself without knowing why. The birth wasn't logged.
Seven seconds later, digital clocks across the hospital blinked twice. Then resumed.
No one spoke of it again.
Far south, deep in the Indian Ocean, a satellite lost orbit. No distress signal. No external cause. It slammed into the sea with classified payload. The wreckage was recovered within hours.
Inside its scorched titanium shell was something that shouldn't have been there — not a weapon, not a device. A copper seal.
It bore no writing, only an engraving: a spiral, coiled inward, with seven dots aligned like a constellation.
The divers who found it felt heat pulsing through their gloves. One of them passed out during ascent. The artifact was transferred to a naval lab under full secrecy.
One man — a defense analyst assigned to catalog anomalies — saw the spiral and went still. He whispered a phrase under his breath that hadn't been spoken aloud in centuries.
And then he vanished.
Security footage shows him walking into the corridor. He never came out.
Elsewhere, on the edge of a forgotten island, a boy with fractured dreams drew the same spiral in the sand, without knowing why. A tribal elder saw it and dropped the fruit she was carrying. Her face paled. She had seen that pattern once before — carved into the bones of a dead monk washed ashore during her childhood.
There was no sound. No thunder. No divine blaze in the sky.
Only a soft crack in the fabric of the world.
A shift.
The first tremor of something returning.
There are seven.Not gods. Not ghosts. Not heroes.They were not made immortal by mercy.They were condemned by purpose.
For thousands of years, they waited. Some asleep. Some watching. One — hiding from the others. One — wishing for death.
And now, one of them is awake.
The cycle that held time in balance is beginning to bleed. Someone — something — is trying to erase them, not from history, but from memory itself.
Because the war that ended last time was never finished.And the cost of immortality was never fully paid.