The temple stood perched on the jagged edge of the world, a monolith of forgotten gods and whispered secrets. Its walls, once pristine alabaster, were now scarred with centuries of fire, time, and neglect. In the dimming light of dusk, its gilded pillars caught the dying sun like veins of molten gold, sending fractured rays into the thick, incense-choked air.
Inside, the crowd huddled like prey, each face a mask of fear and fascination, their breaths shallow and collective heartbeats loud enough to drown the crackle of flames. At the temple's center, the tantric knelt—his body bound to a pyre of dried sandalwood and ancient scrolls. His skin was mottled with soot and ash, a canvas blackened by flame, but his eyes? His eyes burned with a light that no fire could claim.
The king—regal in crimson and cold as marble—watched with a predator's satisfaction. This was justice, he told himself. The man who dared prophecy doom deserved to be consumed, an offering to both gods and order.
But the tantric's mouth was sealed with a sacred gag, a silencing spell woven by the high priests to mute the curse that threatened the fragile threads of reality.
Then the flames found his feet.
They licked upward like cruel serpents, consuming flesh, searing bone, but his gaze never faltered. The smoke twisted from his lips in thin, serpentine spirals, carrying words that shattered silence:
"Naagkanya ke prem se kaal ka vighaat hoga — samay tootega!"
A sentence—a promise—a razor slicing through the temple's oppressive air.
The crowd stiffened; a tremor shivered down the spine of every stone. Mirrors along the walls warped, gilded pillars seemed to twist unnaturally, as if the temple itself recoiled from the weight of the curse.
The king's smile faltered.
The tantric's scream ripped through the suffocating silence, a chorus of agony and prophecy fused into one:
"नागकन्या के प्रेम से काल का विघात होगा—समय टूटेगा!"
The gag shattered between his teeth, the holy binding snapped, spilling broken syllables into the sanctum like shattered glass.
And then—
The pyre exploded.
Not a fiery blast of destruction but a void. A black fire that swallowed light, a living absence. The temple walls rippled like liquid obsidian, melting and remolding, twisted by some invisible hand. The air turned viscous, suffocating.
The king's triumphant sneer froze mid-contortion, his skin cracking like ancient clay, fissures spiderwebbing across his flesh as the curse gnawed.
And in that space—a silent vacuum—only one thing remained:
The tantric's voice, disembodied but searing, whispered on the wind, a ghost of power lingering:
"You cannot burn a curse. You can only feed it."
The prophecy hung in the air, a shadow stretching beyond the temple's walls, beyond time itself. The people fled, leaving behind the ruins of what was once sacred. But the curse did not vanish with their fear; it grew. It seeped into the earth, the water, the sky—a creeping rot gnawing at the foundations of reality.
The Serpent Maiden.
Who was she? What love could fracture Time?
Legends, half-forgotten, spoke of a creature woven from serpentine magic and mortal heartbeats. Not just a goddess, but an embodiment of chaos and desire—whose love could unravel the linear chains of existence. Her name, whispered in the dark, carried the promise of both creation and destruction.
The tantric—an exile of fate, branded a heretic and burnt alive—was a prophet, a conduit, a living vessel of ancient truth.
But what happens when a curse becomes a wound that refuses to heal? When the timelines splinter, dragging fragments of past, present, and future into an impossible knot?
Days later, the village around the temple fractured under strange omens.
The sky bled strange colors at dawn—purple bleeding into sickly green, the sun's face distorted like a cracked mask.
Time stumbled.
Clocks spun backward, hands jerking in frantic denial.
Old wounds reopened without cause, memories twisted into nightmares.
People vanished into thin air, only to reappear years older or younger, trapped in mismatched moments.
The king—once proud, once untouchable—was found wandering the ruins, muttering prophecies. His skin peeled in flaking shards, his voice cracked like a dry well. The curse had consumed him not with fire but with unraveling time.
The tantric's curse was no longer words but a living pulse.
It was a hunger, a void expanding.
In a darkened room, beneath the cracked dome of the shattered temple, the Serpent Maiden appeared—not in fury but in mourning.
Her eyes, pools of liquid obsidian, held the weight of infinite sorrow. She was both mother and destroyer, lover and harbinger.
She whispered through the fragments of reality, weaving threads of fractured time.
The tantric had not cursed the world out of spite. He had foreseen a cosmic imbalance—an ancient love's rupture that would break the very fabric of existence.
He had tried to warn them.
But silence, and fire, were their answers.
Now, the curse feeds.
It feeds on time itself—on memory, on history, on the dreams yet to be dreamt.
Every tick of the clock is a bite, every moment a wound.
The world trembles on the edge of dissolution, and the only salvation lies in embracing the love that breaks time.
But how do you love a curse?
How do you hold a fracture without breaking yourself?
I cannot tell you when it happened—when the days began folding into themselves like damp parchment.
One night I dreamt I was a boy again, running through the temple corridors with a wooden sword.
When I woke, my hands were bleeding from splinters.
The corridors were gone. The boy was gone.
The curse is not fire, no—fire has mercy.
This is hunger that remembers the taste of you.
Every time I speak, my words echo before I say them.
The courtiers I once commanded now speak in riddles I gave them in their future.
I think… I think I met her.
Her eyes were black as the ink of decrees I once signed to silence men like the tantric.
She said my death had already happened. She said it was beautiful.
We were told the tantric's mouth must stay closed. That his words were poison.
Now I hear them anyway, in the silence between my heartbeats.
Sometimes my spear turns to ash in my hands.
Sometimes I wake to find it still dripping with blood, though I haven't fought in years.
I saw the Serpent Maiden when I closed my eyes in prayer.
She did not look at me. She looked through me.
I understood then—her love is not for mortals, not even for gods.
It is for Time itself. And Time is jealous.
They call me destroyer.
They do not understand: love has always been the cruelest god.
I was not born of man or beast but of a promise broken before the world began.
He—my beloved—walks in every era, yet we are never aligned.
When he reaches for me, centuries stand between our hands.
When I touch him, the moment collapses into nothingness.
The tantric knew this.
He knew my love was the stone in the river that splits its current, the fracture in the clock's spine.
He called to me with his death, and I came—not to save him, but to bear witness.
I dream in loops now.
I am always running toward the pyre. I am always too late.
Sometimes I reach it before the fire starts. I cut his bindings—only to find my own wrists tied.
Sometimes the king is the one burning. Sometimes it is me.
The faces of the crowd change, but the smell of sandalwood never does.
He told me, once, "Time is not a river, boy. It is a serpent. And a serpent eats its own tail."
I did not understand then.
I do now.
The sun wept green that morning.
My daughter was seven.
Then she was seventeen.
Then she was gone.
The fields will not grow in straight rows anymore.
The wheat bends away from the horizon, as if afraid of the future.
I hear laughter from the well at night. It is her voice, but younger.
They say we must find the Serpent Maiden.
They say her love will end this.
But what if ending it means ending us?
The curse now breathes through every voice.
Every story is a strand of the same knot.
And somewhere, in a place where time no longer flows but coils, the Serpent Maiden waits—
for the one whose love will break her and heal the world in the same heartbeat.