They spoke in hushed circles beneath the trees, voices knotted with fear and resolve. Free the region. Purge the forest. Drive the devils from every hill and village. The words tasted like a promise — bright, dangerous — but nobody could say where the enemy's roots dug deepest. None of them knew how far the darkness spread. Only I did, because only I had snatched the Forest Goddess and the Prince's younger sister from that maw of stone and shadow.
Night had been our ally when I fled: the world masked me, the moon hid my hurry, and the forest swallowed my footprints. I carried both of them until our lungs burned and my arms trembled, until at last I laid them safe inside the village. But the rescue had changed the clock. What I had done cast a stone into the still pond of their world, and the ripples threatened to drown us all.
Nature, it seemed, had a mercy of its own. The things that had trailed us — creatures of dusk and hunger — drew close enough to scent our panic. Then they faltered. Dawn was near. Their strength thinned with the coming light; the sun's touch razed them to ash. They retreated into the earth like rot under a tree, and through that small mercy I slipped from their jaws.
But safety is a fragile thing. With the princess and the goddess rescued, my next step could not be retreat. I had to go back. I had to end them.
"You must prepare," I told them at first light, voice blunt as flint. "They have hands everywhere. If the princess and the goddess were their quarry once, who knows where else the devils have set their traps. We will search. We will free those taken. We will chase these things from the face of the earth — or we will kill them."
The villagers listened with mouths like dry wells. I made a vow inside my own chest, a vow to burn the shadow from our land. I would find the devils' lairs. In two days the cave that had swallowed their power would be my ruin.
"Princess," I said, turning to the girl who still trembled from her ordeal, "make your women strong with something harder than muscle. Teach them courage that does not rely on a brother's sword. Make them guardians of their villages, not supplicants. Train them to stand and fight — to die if they must but to protect first."
I left Shivam and Rishabha under her shadow, two men whose names I trusted like talismans. "When I call," I told them, "come immediately — no steps wasted. This may be the only warning you get."
Then I walked back toward the hollow from which I'd wrested the goddess. The cave crouched in the hillside like a wound. I climbed onto its roof and began to break it open, not for sport but for survival: sunlight, I knew, would be their weakness. With each blow I freed another beam of dawn to stab the darkness, and the devils who loved shadow hissed as if cut.
It took the whole day. Stone splintered beneath my hands; sweat mingled with blood. At last the cavern's crown fell away into jagged teeth, and light lanced into places that had never known a sun. For a while I thought I had finished them. The earth pocked with small holes was all that remained where the cave had been — pitted and mute.
Night came and with it a watchful stillness. I climbed into an old tree and waited. Midnight was the hour of their returning; midnight was when the earth would cough and open its mouth again. I sat, breath slow, and counted the hours until the moon neared the spine of the sky.
The night bred no beasts at first. Then, right beside where I sat, a shadow settled on a branch as though it had always belonged to the wood. It was wrong in every way — a smear of night into a shape, an absence with edges. When it turned, its eyes were coals: two orbs of red that seared into me as if they could boil my marrow. I blinked and it vanished. The world was empty.
I leapt down and walked to the center of where the cave had been. The air tasted different, metallic and hot, though there was no flame. My foot struck a hollow. Before I could speak, something struck the back of my skull — a blow as if someone hurled a rock. Starfire danced behind my eyes and then nothing.
When the world returned, I was not on the hill anymore. The sky had been replaced by black stone and a ceiling alive with dripping heat. Rivers of lava knifed through the darkness and painted the place with a sick, shifting light. Soldiers of shadow moved like a tide among the rocks — gaunt shapes with mouths that remembered only the taste of fear. The smell of sulfur lay heavy. I understood I had been taken underground, into the bowels of some waking volcano that had been turned into a prison.
And then I saw him.
His name had been whispered like a curse in the villages: the black shadow. Here his real name scratched the air like chalk — Shionima. He stood like a king made of storm and hunger. His hair hung in matted ropes, and his teeth showed white as a wolf's, serrated and cruel. Blood bloomed across his skin in a dozen places, a map of violence. He looked not merely like a monster but like madness given weight.
Around him, captives crouched and shivered. I scanned the faces — families torn from doorways, boys whose eyes had grown old in a night. My brother's face surfaced among them like a memory nailed to wood. He was there, bound in chains of smoke and silence. And Shionima fed on them — not their bodies but their power. He drew what spark remained in human souls into himself, and with each feeding a person collapsed, their wildness leached until only a hollow man remained.
Whatever plan had birthed Shionima was to gather power and crown himself ruler of the surface. He believed he could bend the world and all its breath to his will. He had not counted on the stubborn, glaring truth: people do not yield so easily. The earth resists. People remember.
I had not lost my mind when they caged my body. My will was still a blade. Swift as thought, I sent a thread of sense to Shivam and Rishabha, a map in my head, a warning in the language of need. I told them where I had been taken and what the cave had become. I told Shivam: "Keep the princess away. This place is poison to her. Come with Rishabha. Find what you can, and when you meet an enemy, strike first — kill them without fear. Remember the way of the lava: be relentless."
At the appointed hour, Shivam came to the hill. He found nothing but the earth's quiet. He waited through the long hours until the night hid his shape. Then, from the hollow that had not been there before, a black door breathed open and two soldiers crawled out. The door was a seam between worlds — a mouth through which Shionima's hordes walked. Shivam watched, patient as a shadow, and when the moment came he would fall through that seam into whatever the earth had become.
Below, in the heat and the dark, Shionima smiled like a beast about to be sated. He did not yet know how thin his victory would be. He did not yet know the price of underestimating those who rise from the villages.
My hands ached. My jaw was dry. Around me, the lava hissed like a promise. And high above, the tree where I had waited trembled, as if it too heard the distant footfall of heroes on the path to a war that would not be easily won.