The sea near Bet Dwarka had its own language.
Not in waves. Not in wind.
In timing.
Old Jhunjhar knew it like his own breath.
For fifty years, he had cast his net into the dark water before dawn, when the sky was still bruised with night and the gulls slept on the rocks.
He knew when the sea was full.
When it was angry.
When it was hiding something.
But tonight, the sea was not hiding.
It was returning.
The net came up heavy — not with fish, not with coral, but with a slab of black metal, smooth as polished stone, cold as a temple idol in winter. It did not shine. It absorbed light. The fishermen's torches bent around it, as if afraid to touch.
"What is this, Papa?" asked young Manoj, his son, kicking it with his foot.
Jhunjhar did not answer.
He knelt.
His fingers trembled as they traced the surface.
Carved into the metal were symbols — like Sanskrit, but not. The letters moved. Not physically. But in the mind. When you looked away and back, they had shifted. Rearranged. Like living things.
And in the center, one phrase glowed faintly, pulsing like a slow heartbeat:
"अहं जागरणमस्मि"
I am the Awakening.
Manoj laughed. "Some tourist's joke. Toss it back."
But Jhunjhar could not move.
Because the moment his skin touched the tablet, a shloka echoed in his skull — one he had never heard, yet knew by heart:
"O Krishna, the gem upon my forehead burns…
The earth remembers what I have forgotten.
The sea speaks with Your voice.
I am awake.
And the time of silence is over."
His breath stopped.
His eyes rolled back.
And in a voice not his own — deep, broken, ancient — he whispered:
"Ashwatthama… is awake."
Then he collapsed.
The fishermen screamed.
They carried him to shore.
They called the village healer.
But no medicine could explain what happened next.
That night, every dog in Bet Dwarka howled at the moon.
That night, a priest in the Dwarkadhish Temple awoke screaming, his hands clutching his chest, crying, "The foundation is breathing!"
That night, far away in a cave near the Narmada River, Vyasa opened his eyes — and for the first time in centuries, he remembered his name.
And in the great temple of Jagannath in Puri, at the exact moment the midnight aarti ended, the wooden idol of Lord Jagannath — motionless for 5,200 years —
blinked.
Just once.
Slow. Deliberate.
Like a man waking from a dream of ten thousand years.
And deep beneath the temple, where no priest dared go, where the walls were carved with mantras older than memory,
something hummed.
A sound like a conch blown at the edge of time.
A sound like a heart,
beginning
to beat.