The tunnels beneath Bhaktapur were older than most of the houses above them—arteries carved when kings still rode with bronze-tipped spears and priests kept secrets no one dared write down. Mira knew the entry like a childhood scar. She hauled the metal grate aside, shoved Arya through, and dropped after him. Stone swallowed the festival noise. Only their breathing and the thin slap of water on rock remained.
"Left," she whispered, choosing without hesitation.
Arya followed the wet curve of her braid, his soaked sneakers squeaking on the worn steps. The mark in his palm kept time with their feet—pulse, pulse, pulse—like it had its own heart. Each beat pricked his nerves into keener focus. He could feel water beads clinging to the ceiling, feel the faint static dancing along the tunnel walls as if they remembered the lightning from the courtyard.
"You've been down here a lot," he managed.
Mira glanced back, a ghost of a smile in the low light. "You think I let you have all the good hiding places?"
They slipped into a narrow passage where bricks gave way to fitted stone. The air cooled, and the damp turned sharp with the metallic tang of old incense. On the wall, a frieze emerged from shadow: a three-pronged trident flanked by coils of cloud. Someone had traced the lines in ash not long ago.
"Wait." Arya slowed. The frieze hummed at the edge of hearing—no real sound, more a pressure in teeth and bones that matched the mark in his hand. He reached out. The stone was slick with condensation, but warmth bled through into his fingers as if a fire burned on the other side.
"Arya," Mira warned.
He pressed his palm to the central prong.
Light spidered through the carved channels—faint, then brighter, then blinding. The wall trembled. A seam appeared where there had been none, and the stone split along it with a sigh, revealing a small chamber tucked like a hidden heart behind the passage.
Inside, offerings had long since crumbled to dust, but the pedestal at the center remained—another trident shape, smaller than in the courtyard, cut from a single block of black stone. Around it, etched into the floor, a circle of script ran in a language Arya didn't know yet somehow almost recognized. The air smelled of rain even though not a drop had touched this place in centuries.
Mira stared. "How—?"
"I didn't know," Arya said, and it was true. He hadn't known, but the shard inside him had.
Footsteps thudded above, muffled but moving. Voices, angry and urgent. The guards were sweeping block by block.
Mira's hand found his sleeve. "We can't stay."
"Just a second." Arya knelt, drawn. The script around the pedestal pulsed as his shadow fell across it, each curl and hook answering the mark in his palm. He couldn't read it, but meaning scraped at him like fishbones: bearer… storm… oath… gate.
He swallowed. "This is a way out."
"Or a way deeper," Mira said. "And we don't know what's deeper."
The chamber trembled again—this time not from the wall's movement. A low growl crept along the stone, wrong in a way that made Arya's scalp lift. He turned toward the doorway.
A thing uncoiled from the tunnel's darkness: hound-shaped, all ribs and shadow, fur like smoke, eyes like banked coals. Wet stone steamed where its drool fell.
Mira took a step back, then another. "That's not one of the King's."
"No," Arya whispered. The growl vibrated in his bones. "It's someone else's."
The hound's nose twitched. Its gaze snapped to Arya's hand, where the trident mark had begun to shine through the damp fabric again. It bared smoke-white teeth.
Arya lifted his palm without thinking.
Power leapt at the chance.
Lightning lanced from his skin to the stone circle, ricocheting through the etched script. The chamber flashed white-blue. The hound yelped—if a shadow can yelp—and flung itself backward, half-vanishing into the tunnel wall like smoke torn by wind. The pedestal absorbed the rest of the current, drinking it down until the light dimmed to a throbbing glow.
Arya swayed, suddenly hollow. The power had answered him, but it had taken something on the way out.
Mira caught his elbow. "You with me?"
He nodded, throat dry. "Yeah."
Boots slammed against the tunnel steps now, closer. Torches threw jittering light.
Mira's eyes flicked from the doorway to the circle. She made the choice he couldn't. "Deeper," she said, and shoved him into the ring of script.
The pedestal's glow climbed the walls, braided into a helix, and folded the chamber around them like a closing fist.
For a heartbeat, Arya felt the world tilt again, like stepping from a moving cart onto still ground—except there was no ground, only wind and pressure and the taste of iron.
Then the floor steadied beneath his feet, new stone, colder than before. The chamber was gone. The air smelled different—pine, snowmelt, a hint of smoke from a faraway fire.
Mira exhaled a curse. "Where did we—"
A voice cut cleanly through the dark: "Far enough to live through the next five minutes. Not far enough to be safe."
They turned.
The figure from the rooftops stood at the edge of the circle, rain gone from the cloak, the red eye dimmed to a coal in a bank of ash. Up close, Arya could see the other eye was a normal dark brown, human, with old lines fanning from it. A scar cut through the eyebrow and vanished under the hood.
"You," Arya said.
"Me," the figure agreed. He cocked his head, listening to something only he heard, then nodded. "Your hunters can't follow through that door. Others can."
Mira stepped between them, chin up. "Name. Now."
The figure's mouth twitched. "Rudra. Once a monk. Now a watcher with a debt." He pointed at Arya's palm. "And you just woke an oath older than the kings whose men you're running from."
The mark in Arya's hand warmed under Rudra's gaze, as if recognizing something. Arya resisted the urge to hide it. "What oath?"
Rudra's smile didn't reach either eye. "The one that will kill you if you don't learn to carry it."
A chorus of distant howls rose outside the chamber, echoing along stone. Not guards. Not dogs. Something in between.
Rudra's head turned. He held out a string of worn prayer beads. "Wrap this around your wrist. It won't hide you from the gods, but it will make you less appetizing to what's sniffing the wind."
Arya hesitated, then looped the beads over the glowing mark. The light dimmed to a sullen throb.
Mira's fingers brushed his arm. "We can argue later. Which way?"
Rudra nodded toward a slit in the rock. "North."
"North to what?" Arya asked.
"To a place where the storm knows your name," Rudra said. "And to people who will tell you the price for carrying it."
The howls came again, closer. Mira tightened her braid with one tug and set her jaw. "Then we run."