Jyoti opened her eyes in a room of swallowing dark. The air clung to her skin, damp and thick with the metallic tang of rust. At once, she knew—she was trapped. Her wrists were tied with heavy shackles and tied to the floor with chains, and every inch of her body felt numb and cold.
Yet something was wrong—or perhaps too right. Her senses were sharpened beyond reason. Every drip of water rang out like a bell, every scratch of stone against stone grated like a knife across her mind. Even the skitter of small insects in the cracks pulsed like heartbeats. Without shifting an inch, she gauged the chamber to be about four armspans wide, twice her height, a coffin masquerading as a room. Her eyes cut through the dark with unnatural ease—the darkness seeped backward and she could see clearly.
Fragments of memory fluttered back. Guards lunging. Her body set aflame from within. Her voice, a howl of defiance aimed at the Head. And then—she remembers the pain and she quickly ran her hands across herself, bracing for bruises, bones out of place, torn skin. But there was nothing. No pain. No wounds. Only a faint sense of warmth pulsing beneath her flesh, as if her body hummed with energy. Dried blood crusted her clothes, and her face felt moist maybe from all that blood but she could care less about these things.
Her mind dragged back to that moment when the world had ripped open. She had seen through it—past it. Walls, people, even air itself had unraveled into shifting lines of scripture, living symbols that glowed and pulsed like breathing veins. They were etched into her memory now, impossible to unsee.
And then her heart clenched. Maya. Jyoti could not shake the certainty: this was connected to Maya. The old woman's silence, the riddles hidden in her tales, the way her gaze lingered too long as if measuring something unseen—it all pointed here. Maya had her own way around Jyoti but she never came out as suspicious. She believed in Maya more than anyone, yet the weight of suspicions pressed between them like stone.
Closing her eyes, Jyoti steadied her breath. Deep within her chest, near her heart, she sensed… something. Not her. A quiet presence, sleeping but alive. She reached for it, Called it forward, begged for the golden scriptures to return. Her whole body trembled with the effort. But the silence stayed. The door she had touched once was gone. Frustrated, she let her breath escape in a ragged hiss. It was applaudable that she begged for it as the feeling even though faint was heavenly, not that she would know what heaven feels like
Then out of nowhere—footsteps.
Slow. Deliberate. Heavy enough to set her bones on edge. They echoed in the chamber like war drums, measured and merciless. She didn't need to see to know someone approached. She felt it, like a hand closing around her throat. A presence pressed down on her, thick, suffocating, alive—but wrong. Her skin crawled as if recognizing prey meeting its predator.
The air itself shifted, bending to make room for whatever walked toward her.
She traced the walls with her fingers and found them to be metal, thin and hollow. When she pressed, they answered with a low ring, like a bell. She was in a cage, she realized. One of the Ash Binders' torture rooms whispered about in alleys—rooms no one returned from, only remembered in rumor.
A crash split the silence. The wall buckled, screeching like a wounded animal. The chamber shivered under the blow. Another strike followed, heavier, crueler, each one rattling the metal shell around her. The walls groaned and bent inward, a beast straining against its cage. Then came the final strike—sharp, ringing, merciless. A crack ripped open across the wall.
Through the fracture, an enormous eye glared in—cold, unblinking, carrying a weight that felt bigger than the cage itself. The silence spread, hinting at the wide, hollow space around the cage. Each heavy breath of the creature rolled like thunder against something far-off, making the chamber seem even larger than she could imagine. The low, guttural huffing echoed again and again, proof of something huge just beyond, its presence turning the room uncanny and oppressively vast.
The silence was broken by the loud screech of a beast as the metal was torn apart. A monstrous dog-like bipedal creature forced its way in, its body towering nearly seven meters high. Its face split into four grotesque sections, each jaw snapping wetly as saliva dripped in thick ropes from its uneven, unsettling skin. The beast's claws ripped the cage open with terrifying ease, lifting the entire box of metal as though it were weightless. Chains yanked Jyoti upward, suspending her helpless in the air as the box cracked wide, its openings exposing her completely five to six meters above the ground. Below, the massive beast huffed, its gaze fixed on her, every breath rattling like a storm through its terrible maw.