Aarav locked the sketchbook inside his cupboard. Then he locked the cupboard. Then, just in case, he tied a belt around the handles.
It felt ridiculous, but the man's words echoed in his head: Do not draw. Do not dream.
He cooked his last packet of noodles and ate it straight from the pan. He didn't bother washing the dish. He just sat on his bed, staring at the ceiling fan wobbling above him, trying not to think.
But the images came anyway. The grin. The horns. The fire in that man's staff.
And beneath it all, something older. Something heavier. Like a memory he couldn't quite place.
By midnight, he gave up and let sleep take him.
He was standing on a battlefield.
The air burned with ash. The ground shook with every strike of steel on steel. Around him, men and women fought not with guns, not with modern weapons, but with bows that sang like thunder and blades that shimmered like stars.
And towering over them were creatures — rakshasas, he knew instantly, though no one had told him the word. They were immense, some with animal heads, some with too many arms, their roars splitting the night.
Aarav looked down. His hands weren't empty. They held a brush — long as a spear, its bristles glowing with fire.
When he swept it across the air, the stroke became real. A shield of light unfurled, catching the blow of a demon's club. Another stroke, and an arrow of fire leapt from nothing, striking a rakshasa square in the chest.
The warriors around him shouted his name — not Aarav, but something else. Something ancient.
"Arindya!"
The name surged through him like lightning. His chest tightened, his heart pounding with a strange familiarity. This wasn't imagination. This wasn't an invention. This was a memory.
The brush blazed hotter, and with every strike he painted into the world, the battlefield shifted. He was creation and destruction both. His art was war.
A roar cut through the chaos.
A massive rakshasa strode forward, skin like molten stone, eyes red as coals. It carried a mace — the same mace he had sketched a hundred times in his flat. The creature's gaze locked on him, and its grin was the same one he had drawn yesterday.
"Found you," it growled.
The earth split beneath its step. Aarav raised the burning brush, ready to—
He woke up choking, drenched in sweat. His body shook, his bedsheet twisted around him like chains.
For a moment, the room was still. The cupboard stood where it had always been, belt tied neatly. The fan clunked in lazy circles.
Then Aarav saw it.
On his table, his sketchbook lay open. The belt on the cupboard hadn't moved. The cupboard itself was still locked.
And yet the sketchbook was there, pages splayed.
The fresh drawing on it stopped his breath.
Himself — not as Aarav, but as Arindya — standing on a battlefield, brush aflame, face grim with war.
The caption at the bottom, scrawled in handwriting he didn't remember writing, read:
"Remember."