The air in the cave was thick—thicker than it had any right to be.
Aarav Sen crouched low beside the exposed rock wall, flashlight trembling slightly in his grip. He wasn't sure if it was the cold or the thrill. Probably both. The echoes of dripping water bounced from unseen corners, and the scent of wet stone and ancient dust filled his lungs. His breath steamed in the dim beam of light.
The inscription was unlike anything he had ever seen.
Not Brahmi. Not Kharosthi. And certainly not any known script found in the Gangetic Plain. The lines etched into the wall were deep, deliberate, and arranged with the symmetry of mathematical precision. What disturbed him was the last symbol in the bottom-right corner. It wasn't ancient.
It was a year.
2047.
Aarav swallowed hard. "No... this can't be right."
---
Three days earlier, he had received a phone call from Professor Raman Iyer, his mentor and the man responsible for igniting his obsession with India's buried past. Iyer was never the kind of man to panic—but on that night, he sounded afraid.
> "Come to Varanasi. Alone. Trust no one. And Aarav... it's real."
Those three words had haunted Aarav since: It's real.
But the professor hadn't been here to greet him. His number was unreachable. His hotel room untouched. The front desk clerk only said, "He left early in the morning. Looked like he'd seen a ghost."
Aarav's instincts—finely sharpened over years of fieldwork, decoding forgotten manuscripts and unrecorded dialects—had drawn him to this cave just beyond the southern edge of Sarnath. A place supposedly sealed off after a minor earthquake. But the cave was open, its stone gate fractured unnaturally, as if forced open from the inside.
And here it was. An inscription no archaeologist or historian should have ever found.
He reached out, brushing the carved symbols with his gloved hand. They vibrated faintly—no, they hummed. A soft vibration danced up his arm. He recoiled instantly.
The humming stopped.
---
Aarav straightened slowly. Something moved behind him.
He turned, his flashlight sweeping through the shadows. Dust danced like fireflies in the beam. For a moment, he thought he saw a figure—tall, cloaked, motionless near the rear of the chamber.
"Hello?" he called.
No answer.
He edged forward, flashlight flickering. The moment he stepped over the strange circular symbol on the floor—etched like a sunburst—the temperature dropped sharply.
His fingers numbed. His breath caught.
There was no one there.
But when he turned back to the wall, the inscription had changed.
One line had vanished.
In its place, a new line had appeared.
"The Emperor Will Rise."
---
Aarav staggered back, heart pounding. "What the hell is this place?"
Was it some modern projection? An archaeological prank? A hallucination?
But no... this was something else. He snapped photos quickly, hands shaking. Then he turned to leave.
Only to hear a voice.
Ancient. Metallic. Like stone grinding on stone. It came not from the air, but from inside his own skull.
> "Initiate identified. Code: Sen-Ara. Legacy recognized."
He gasped. The flashlight slipped from his hand and cracked against the floor.
> "Lineage match: Ashokan Archive. Awaiting Command."
His legs buckled. He dropped to one knee, grabbing the flashlight, which now flickered erratically like it was struggling against interference. "Ashokan Archive? What is this?"
The floor beneath him began to tremble. Not an earthquake. Something deeper.
Beneath the stone mural, a seam in the rock began to part with a soft hiss—like ancient hydraulics releasing after centuries. Dust puffed out as a crack widened, revealing a narrow stone stairwell descending into the black.
Aarav stared.
This wasn't just a cave.
It was a vault.
A hidden facility sealed under the ground for gods-knew how long. A place even the Archaeological Survey of India hadn't catalogued. Or maybe they had—and were told to forget.
His instincts screamed run.
But his obsession pulled harder.
If this was real—if this was connected to the Maurya Empire, to the ancient edicts of Ashoka, to the lost years the textbooks refused to talk about—then his life's purpose had just changed.
He stepped onto the first stair.
The light snapped off.
---
Present Day – New Delhi
In a quiet, nondescript office beneath the Ministry of Culture, a middle-aged woman in a grey sari stared at a blinking red light on her tablet. Her eyes narrowed behind silver-rimmed glasses.
She picked up a secure phone line.
"Asset 22 just activated the Ashokan Archive," she said calmly. "Location confirmed: Sarnath Vault Theta-Seven."
There was silence on the other end.
Then: "Kill him before he descends."
She nodded once, hung up, and whispered to no one in particular:
> "The empire must remain lost."
---
⚡ To be continued...