The day unraveled in its usual festival rhythm—laughter swelling, arguments breaking like waves, neighbors leaning over railings to hurl jokes as freely as kites.
Ananya slipped away from the laughter to find Kalki. He was in the courtyard, where the neem shadow stretched long across the witness stone. The fissure cut through its center like an old scar, pale in the half-light.
A gust of wind passed. From somewhere above, a faded Bhogi garland, loosened from a balcony, drifted down. Its petals had browned, its thread was fraying, yet it fell with a strange grace—turning slowly, almost deliberately—until it landed across the crack in the stone.
Kalki stilled.
His reel slipped from his fingers, thread pooling at his feet. He crouched, eyes fixed on the garland as though it had carried a message straight from the sky.
"Ever since that dream…" His voice was low, uncertain. "Nothing feels the same. I see fractures where others laugh. Hear songs in silence. Even the air feels heavier—like it's listening."
Ananya felt a sudden shiver race up her arms. The courtyard was the same as always: the neem rustling, Amma's voice faint from the kitchen, Dev shouting about kites upstairs. And yet—something in the way he said it made the space tilt, as though the world itself had leaned closer.
Then he straightened suddenly, forcing a crooked grin. "Or maybe it's just me. Even Ajja looks younger these days. Imagine that—Bhogi fires burning wrinkles."
Ananya burst into laughter, the tension snapping. "Don't let him hear you!"
"Too late," Ajja muttered from the veranda, though his smile betrayed him.
But when Ananya looked back at the stone, the garland still resting across its fissure, her laughter caught in her throat. For a heartbeat, she thought the crack glowed faintly in the dusk—just enough to make the petals seem lit from within.
She blinked, and it was only shadow again.
Yet the unease remained.
Kalki's right, she thought. Something has changed. And I can feel it too.
Kalki stayed crouched beside the witness stone, his fingers hovering just above the wilted garland as if afraid touching it might break some unspoken spell. The last of the sunlight slipped through the neem leaves, striping his face in fragments of gold and shadow.
Ananya didn't move. She felt, absurdly, that if she stepped closer, the air itself might shatter. The courtyard was too still—except for the faintest hum she could not name, like silence holding its breath.
From the lane came the sound of drums testing their skins, neighbors shouting wagers about tomorrow's kite battles. Somewhere above, Dev bellowed victory over an imaginary rival. Life carried on, noisy and unbothered.
But here, in this small courtyard of fading light, Kalki looked apart from it all.
Her brother—the same boy who cracked jokes at breakfast, who teased her letters with doodles of sparrows—looked older, stranger. Not in his face, but in his stillness. As though the world pressed closer to him than to the rest of them.
"Akka."
She startled. He hadn't looked up, but somehow knew she was there. His voice was calm, quiet, yet it carried.
"Do you ever feel," he asked, "that the world isn't just around us… but watching us?"
The question hung between them. She wanted to laugh it off, to nudge him back into the safe corner of ridiculous questions he always asked. But she couldn't. Because for the first time, she felt it too—the weight of something unseen, waiting.
He finally looked up, his eyes catching hers. They were the same bright eyes she had grown up with—mischievous, tender, stubborn. But tonight, they carried a glint that unsettled her, as though a reflection had entered them that wasn't entirely his own.
She opened her mouth to answer, but the words would not come.
Instead, she stepped forward, gently lifted the garland off the stone, and set it aside. Her hand lingered on the fissure a moment longer, tracing its line. The stone was cool, ordinary. And yet her pulse raced as though it had burned her.
"Kalki," she said softly. "Come in. Amma's waiting."
He smiled faintly, stood, and brushed the dust from his palms. But his gaze lingered on the stone even as he walked back toward the house.
Ananya followed, heart heavy with an unease she could not name.
It's the same house, she thought. The same neem, the same stone. And yet… everything feels different.
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Far from the lanterns of Vaidyanagari, where light had never walked, a chamber stirred awake. Pillars older than memory ringed its edges, their carvings eroded into silence. Water dripped somewhere unseen, each fall echoing like the beat of a slow heart.
A voice broke the stillness, low and grave:"Has it begun? Should we start moving too?"
Another answered, measured and hard as stone:"We must. Though the cycle turns earlier than foretold. Delay will cost more than haste."
A third spoke, softer but edged, like wind slipping through branches:"The change is faint, yet it ripples farther than it should. Others will sense it soon—people, and those beyond people."
Silence pressed again. The water dripped.
At last, a fourth voice: steady, pragmatic."Then I will begin arrangements from the end. Let us see how the Continental Science Authority answers when our… recommendations reach them."
The chamber fell quiet once more. The shadows did not move, yet the weight of their presence lingered, as if even silence itself had been drafted into service.