The Temple of a Thousand Eyes
The temple breathed. Not metaphorically — the air moved with the slow, tidal inhale of something ancient that had outlived the kings who built its spine. From the carved lion-mouth vents, the breath came scented with hot ghee, charred cinnamon, and the copper tang of freshly spilt sacrifice.
Drums, deep as the marrow of mountains, pulsed like a great unseen heart. Each beat crawled up through the soles of Alira's bare feet, climbed the ladder of her bones, and rooted itself behind her sternum until her ribs ached with its command.
She moved because they told her to move. Because the High Priest's eyes — sharp as ritual knives — weighed on her every curve and hesitation. Because the treaty between her father's court and the serpent tribes was not signed in ink but in her body's compliance.
The silver anklets bit at her skin with each step. Once, long ago, they'd been a gift for her sixteenth birthday — a celebration. Tonight, their hidden chains anchored her to the altar's perimeter, the links draped like decoration but heavy with truth.
The mandala spread beneath her like a map of the worlds — each spiral a cycle of birth, conquest, and ash. She had learned its steps before she could read. Now she danced them to keep the blood moon from turning the truce to dust.
Priestess. Pawn. Prophet.
Her wrists cut through the smoke-heavy air, carving blessings she did not believe in. The crowd, packed shoulder to shoulder, watched with parted lips and damp foreheads. They thought her beauty was the miracle. They thought her sway of hips summoned gods. They thought her stumble — when it came — was divine ecstasy.
They did not see the fracture.
It began at the edge of her vision, a seam in the tapestry of the present. Smoke bent unnaturally, as though a wind from some other century had disturbed it.
She blinked — and the temple floor fell away.
Sand. Endless, blistered sand, rolling beneath a sky the color of forged steel. The drums were still there, but sharper, mechanical, rattling like breath in a dying man's chest. A figure approached across the dunes: a man in armor, the plates scorched, his gauntlets dripping with something thick and red. Not blood. Oil. The smell of it clung to her tongue, metallic and sour.
Then — back.
The priest hissed at her to keep moving. She obeyed.
The crowd roared their devotion. She spun.
And the vision cut through again, quick as lightning splitting cloud.
A city built in bone-white spires, its gates sealed with molten glass. People in rag-wrapped garments huddled by a riverbed long dry. And at the center of it — a woman with a mirror for a face, turning toward her, whispering a name that was not hers but still made her throat tighten.
She landed the next step, her heel pressing against the mandala's sun-symbol. The High Priest nodded — a fraction — in approval.
The serpent chieftain sat in the front row, his amber eyes like frozen honey. Beside him, her father, the Rajah, held himself with the brittle dignity of a man whose kingdom was already half gone.
The treaty was simple: the girl dances, the gods are fed, the tribes do not burn the fields. But the air between the two men was sharp enough to draw blood. Alira could feel it cutting into her lungs.
The drums deepened.
She raised her arms in the gesture that meant binding, but in her mind, she was still in the desert-future, the heat peeling skin from her lips.
There — a shadowed alley. A pulse under her palm — fast, terrified — belonging to someone whose face was hidden by the hood of a sand-cloak. She lifted the hood and saw —
The crowd gasped. She realized she'd stopped mid-step, ankle twisted at an angle that hurt more than she let show.
"The goddess speaks through her!" a woman cried from the back.
The High Priest's gaze hardened.
She forced herself onward. The chains at her ankles rattled like snakes impatient to strike.
Kālī's statue loomed ahead — obsidian black, tongue lolling in bloodlust, ruby eyes burning in the firelight. The sculptor had set those gems deep, but tonight, they seemed to surface, watching her with a glint of shared understanding.
The temple floor shifted again.
A storm — not of rain, but sand so fine it could skin you alive. She stood at its edge, scarf wrapped over her mouth, and the armored man was there again. His visor lifted, and she saw his face was smeared with soot, his eyes fever-bright with exhaustion. In his hands — a bundle. Small. Shivering.
She reached for it —
And the drums snapped her back.
The High Priest began the verse of invocation. She echoed, her voice steady though her heart's rhythm faltered. Around her, the crowd swayed as one body, lips murmuring prayers older than their names.
The air thickened until each breath tasted like boiled roses.
And then she understood — the visions were not glimpses of a future. They were her future. The treaty would shatter; the fields would burn; the temples would crack. She would walk that desert with her own chains melted into her skin.
The knowledge didn't crush her. It steadied her.
Because in that future, she wasn't just a pawn. She was moving without permission.
The drums became the sound of her own blood.
Her dance shifted — subtly at first. The circles widened. The heel-stamp landed a half-beat off, enough to force the drummers to follow her lead. The priests' eyes narrowed.
In the desert-future, the storm broke. The armored man pressed the bundle into her arms, and she felt the fragile weight of a child — fevered, whispering a language she had never learned but somehow understood.
In the temple-present, she cradled her arms as if holding something invisible. Gasps rippled through the crowd.
The High Priest hissed.
The serpent chieftain leaned forward.
Her father's knuckles whitened on his throne.
The child's whisper grew louder in her mind, spilling into the rhythm until it became the rhythm. The words looped like a mantra — not prayer, not prophecy, but command.
The mandala's final step called for her to kneel before the altar. She didn't. She took one more step outward, onto the forbidden inner ring, the space where only the gods were permitted.
Chains scraped stone.
The priests lunged.
She spun — not in supplication, but defiance — and the desert bled entirely into the temple, the stone floor becoming sand under her feet, the pillars becoming bone-spires, the crowd becoming shadow-figures ringing the horizon.
Kālī's ruby eyes blazed like twin suns.
The drums broke into chaos.
And Alira — Rajkumari, Priestess, Prophet — lifted her face to both centuries at once and began a new dance, one no one had taught her.
A dance that was hers alone.