The house no longer felt like home.
After the funerals, the village gathered in hushed tones to decide his fate. His parents had left behind their land, their savings, and the house that now stood heavy with silence. By law and blood, all of it belonged to Arun.
"He is the rightful heir," said the elders. "Everything must pass to him."
And so it did.
But what use was ownership to a boy who had no family left to share it with?
The walls echoed with absence. The fields lay empty, though workers still came to tend them. At night, when the village lamps burned low, Arun sat alone in the house where his mother's voice had once called him for dinner, where his father had once patted his head. Now, only whispers remained—the whispers of things that lingered beyond sight.
The villagers did not see it that way. They muttered that the property was cursed, that Arun himself was cursed. "The boy sees things," they said. "And now death clings to him. Who would live in that house without fear?"
Some advised him to sell the land and leave. Others pitied him but kept their distance. Children avoided his eyes.
Arun understood then: he was alone.
And yet, within that loneliness burned a vow. The grinning shadow that had laughed at him the night his parents died was still out there. If he remained in Borigaon, he would wither, caged by whispers and empty walls. If he left, he might one day return strong enough to silence that laughter forever.
So, on a mist-draped dawn, Arun packed a small bag of clothes, carried with him the brittle manuscript he had found among his grandfather's belongings, and walked away from his inheritance. The house and fields remained behind, as lifeless as tombstones.
He carried only one thing that mattered—his hunger to learn.
---
The journey was neither easy nor kind. Arun wandered from town to town, following fragments of rumors about tantriks and occult masters who held knowledge of the unseen.
Not everyone welcomed him. Some mocked the idea of a boy chasing shadows. Others warned him away. The few who knew of such paths spoke of danger, of madness, of death. "Those who walk into the dark rarely walk back out," one old man told him.
But Arun persisted.
The tantriks he found did not give away their knowledge freely. They tested him in ways cruel and strange. Some sent him to sleep in graveyards where the air grew too heavy to breathe. Others starved him for days before whispering a single mantra. A few turned him away altogether, saying he was not ready.
Yet Arun endured.
He learned to draw yantras in ash and blood, to speak chants that made shadows falter, to burn herbs whose smoke sent spirits fleeing. He memorized the signs of different hauntings—the restless ghost, the vengeful spirit, the malicious churel. He learned the difference between illusions and true presences.
And slowly, he became part of something larger.
---
The dark society was not a single group, but a scattered brotherhood. Hidden practitioners across the Northeast kept the old ways alive, gathering in jungles, at river confluences, or abandoned shrines where no villager dared to tread. Arun, through perseverance and suffering, became one of their disciples.
The boy who once cowered at every whisper was now trained to stare into shadows without flinching. The boy who lost his family to a grinning nightmare was now being armed with chants, rituals, and knowledge older than memory.
But he was not alone.
---
Over those years, Arun found others who walked the same path.
There was Rohit, bold and reckless, who once claimed he had chased off a spirit with nothing but a burning torch. Manas, quiet and thoughtful, who studied mantras with the patience of stone and corrected the others when they stumbled. Dipen, restless and sharp-eyed, who joked even when fear crept close.
And then there were the girls. Mitali, whose parents had been healers before vanishing one stormy night, carried fragments of lore passed down through her blood. And Anika, fierce and unyielding, who once stood her ground against a spirit that had cornered her until it finally fled.
Together, they became something more than students. They became family, bound not by blood but by shared scars and whispered secrets.
They trained side by side, endured side by side. On nights when the air grew too heavy with unseen eyes, when the world pressed too close with whispers, they sat together by small fires, telling stories to keep despair at bay.
Arun rarely spoke of Borigaon, or of the grin that haunted his memory. But the others never asked. They all carried ghosts of their own.
---
Five years passed in this way, burning away his boyhood.
Arun had grown taller, his shoulders stronger, his face sharper. His eyes no longer carried the wide-eyed fear of a child, but the steady focus of one who had seen too much and endured more. His voice was marked by the cadence of chants, his hands by the steadiness of ritual.
He was no longer merely cursed with sight. He was a seeker, a fighter, one of the dark society's own.
But the grinning shadow was never far.
Even after years of training, of rituals and chants, Arun sometimes saw it waiting—at the edges of gatherings, in reflections on water, in the corner of his dreams. Its grin was the same. Mocking. Patient.
It was not gone. It was waiting.
And Arun knew: no matter how far he traveled, no matter how much he learned, this was the battle his life had been forged for.
---
One night, sitting by a dim fire after a long day of practice, Rohit grinned at him. "Five years we've been at this. Think we'll ever be done?"
Arun's eyes stayed on the flames. "Done? No. The dead don't rest. Neither can we."
Mitali looked up, her face lit soft by firelight. "Then we walk together."
Arun allowed himself the faintest smile. For the first time since he had left Borigaon, he felt something close to belonging.
Yes. They would walk together—into darkness, into fire, into whatever waited.
And when the time came, when the grinning shadow rose before him again, Arun would not be the boy who once cowered. He would be ready.