Leaves whispered in a language older than pavement. The light here didn't behave like Jakarta's—no glass glare, no billboard shine—only a steady sift, as if the sun had learned patience. Arindra's lungs remembered how to breathe without dust, and that was the first miracle. The second was that he was not alone.
The warrior stood as if the forest had built him and then decided to keep him: balanced, unhurried, weight on his back foot like he was not only ready to move but had already calculated where he'd land. The armor wasn't uniform-pressed; it was hand-known—leather that had learned the vocabulary of a shoulder, metal that had memorized a rib.
"Where is your pawang?" he asked again—voice level, eyes alert. Pawang (a handler/spiritual mediator who manages forces or creatures). "And why does a door that should not open know your name?"
"I don't have a pawang." Arindra swallowed, tried not to sound like a liar or a fool. "My name is Arindra Wisangkara. I—I came through a Prasasti (an inscribed stone tablet). It… woke."
The man's gaze slid once to the shawl in Arindra's fist. "That cloth hums," he said, as if remarking on weather. "Keep it close. Some things here prefer silence."
"My selendang (handwoven shawl)," Arindra said, and the weave warmed against his palm like it had opinions.
The warrior nodded as if that settled the matter of names, but not the problem of existence. "I am Rakanta," he said. No flourish, no rank. "You stepped through a door not made for casual walking."
"Believe me, I don't do casual walking through doors," Arindra said, and bit down on a nervous laugh. "I design the doors. Different—different line of work."
"Design?" Rakanta tilted his head, curious edging into his caution. "You make—what? Patterns? Buildings?"
"Buildings," Arindra said. "Cities, if I'm lucky. But patterns first."
Rakanta held his stare a heartbeat longer, then blinked and let the forest back into his eyes. "Then perhaps you will see what others miss," he said. "Come. We move. We talk later."
He set off along a path that did not exist for anyone less patient, feet settling where leaf litter hid roots, body angling around shadows as if they were more than absence. Arindra followed, letting Rakanta's pace dictate his own breathing. Branches arched like ribs. Vines braided down in loose geometry. The urge to measure distances with steps, to draft an invisible plan with his walk, pressed at him and—because he was himself—he did it. Ten strides between the great buttress roots of the strangler fig. Twelve more to the break of slope where the ground tilted down to the sound of water. A rhythm found.
"Do you know Jakarta?" Arindra asked, the question ridiculous and necessary.
"I know of many cities," Rakanta said. "Names travel. People do. Not always by choice." A flicker of amusement softened the iron of his face. "No, stranger. I do not know your Jakarta."
Arindra nodded. "And this place? It has a name?"
Rakanta's chin lifted a fraction, as if presenting the forest. "This is Jagat Pewayangan," he said. Jagat Pewayangan (Realm of Myth; a world shaped by story and ritual). "This forest has its own names. We are in the skirts of Mandhala Raras—soft center. Old ground. Don't dig unless you know who sleeps."
Arindra nearly said Mandala (a sacred center diagram used for spiritual and spatial harmony) but held it. The word lived differently here. He felt it underfoot: a pull toward balance, like a table leg finds tile and stops wobbling.
They walked. The air kept not being too much. The city had taught him to brace against noise; here he braced against clarity. In clarity, thoughts had nowhere to hide.
"Why me?" he asked finally, quiet because anything louder would be disrespect. "Why would a… door… choose me?"
Rakanta's mouth twitched. "You assume it chose you," he said without cruelty. "Perhaps you were a tool it needed for someone else's work."
"Terrific," Arindra muttered. "I always wanted to be a wrench."
"Do you know what a wrench is?" Rakanta asked, genuine curiosity dripped in the question like honey.
"I—yes. It's a tool," Arindra said, startled into a smile. "Metal. You turn bolts with it."
"Turn," Rakanta repeated, tasting the word. "That is a clean purpose. Better than being a story no one asked to hear again."
They broke into a small clearing where sunlight pooled like a thoughtful cat. A stream stitched its way through stones, water hushing over moss as if smoothing hair. Rakanta lifted a hand. Stop. The gesture was so matter-of-fact that Arindra stopped before the idea reached his ankles.
Rakanta crouched and touched two fingers to the soil. He didn't sniff. He listened—the kind of listening that shapes a body. Then he angled his head barely toward the left.
"Do you hear that?" Rakanta asked.
Arindra did what he always did when he couldn't see a pattern: he removed himself from the urge to declare ignorance; he made small, precise observations; he waited. Leaves, yes. Water, yes. A high thread of insect. The irregular thock of a fruit dropping somewhere beyond his range. And—there. Close to that sound, a not-sound. A part of the air that acted like it was full when it was not.
"No wind," Arindra said slowly. "But those ferns are moving."
"Good," Rakanta said. His hand hovered near his blade but did not rest on it. "You watch. Do not run. If it chooses you, let me be rude first."
It came the way a migraine ambushes you: one second a harmless glimmer, the next it owns your skull and every line in your sight. Darkness flexed where no space existed, as if the forest itself had misplaced a room. There were no eyes, no mouth, no limbs—just the insult of distortion. The light bent the way students bow to a teacher they despise. Even the ferns hunched, as if pretending to be polite to a guest no one wanted.
Bayangan, shadow-beings born from fear and corruption, Arindra thought, and the word did not feel like bedtime anymore. It wore the shape of his Nenek's warning.
Rakanta did not roar, did not declare intent. He stepped sideways, testing. The Bayangan flexed toward that motion. Testing back. Rakanta's blade slid free—smooth, economic—held low. He didn't look at Arindra, but his voice found him. "If it finds your fear, it grows. Think of concrete setting. Think of rope under load. No room for slack."
"Copy," Arindra said. And because there are moments when your body must be convinced of your loyalty to it, he breathed in to a count of four, held for four, out for four. The breath put his thoughts into a scaffolding. It didn't make the shadow smaller; it made his terror fit within the walls.
He saw the distortion ripple toward Rakanta, then veer two degrees, three—toward the brightest thing in the clearing: the silvered face of a polished river stone. Like a cat, like a knife, like anything that loves a gleam.
"Reflection," Arindra said, not loud, not asking. He stepped at a diagonal to keep the stream between him and the thing. "It likes reflection."
"Or hates it," Rakanta said. "Both truths eat."
Arindra glanced down. Water. Stones. He did not have glass, but he had angles. He crouched and sank his palm into the stream, dragging a flat rock from the bed, flipping it to catch more light. The cold slapped his skin with the clarity of a first mistake. He tilted the rock, watching the Bayangan's edge tremble when the glare crossed its not-face.
"It's misplacing itself," Arindra said. "If light is a path—I can make it forget the wrong route."
"Do it," Rakanta said, eyes never leaving the thing.
Fast, Arindra stacked three stones, then four, building a small pyramid whose faces caught the sun, a careless class project from childhood corrected by the urgency of now. He wetted the stones, then dried faces with his sleeve, then wet again—shifting how the light broke, trying to make a strobe, trying to make the Bayangan have to choose. The triangle faces wrestled with each other, throwing small suns into the clearing.
The Bayangan flexed, bled at the edges like ink deciding it didn't want to be a line. It swayed toward the stutter of reflections, toward the most chaotic edges. Rakanta slid in, blade scraping a low curve near the ground, not through shadow—through the soil at its shadow's base. The cut bound the thing to the earth with physics that didn't want to cooperate, as if saying, Here is where you are, lie to me less.
The Bayangan jerked toward Rakanta, and Rakanta lifted his forearm into the movement, letting the darkness break on him like a wave on a rock. He didn't flinch. He let it see no fear to eat. Arindra's hands shook. He ordered them to be extensions of thought. He moved the top stone half a degree. The flash found the distortion's middle. The thing convulsed inward, making itself smaller as if hoarding its own edges.
"Now," Rakanta said, and stepped in with a clean thrust—not into shadow, but into the ground where its weight pretended to be. The blade met something that pretended to be bone. There was a noise that wasn't a sound but a subtraction. The Bayangan collapsed, pulling itself into a bead of darkness that hung in the air for one impolite second and then winked out.
Silence returned as if it had been waiting just offstage.
Arindra realized his mouth was dry. He lifted his shaking hands, looked at his knuckles, laughed once with his mouth closed because that was the only safe space for laughter right now. Rakanta wiped his blade on a broad leaf, an old habit made prayer.
"That was…" Arindra tried.
"Hungry," Rakanta said. "Small. They grow when fed. You did well to starve it."
"I redirected its diet," Arindra said, and the joke arrived DOA; he buried it with a grimace.
Rakanta glanced at the little pyramid of stones. "You made a trap from light," he said, approval quiet as moss. "Are you sure you are not a pawang?"
"I'm an architect," Arindra said, automatic, then softer: "I plan where weight should go. Where people will walk. Where the wind will choose to rest."
"Here," Rakanta said, and held out a small cloth, the kind used to wrap tools or fruit. "Dry your hands. Wet skin confesses fear too easily."
Arindra took it, grateful, and breathed back into his scaffolding of numbers. Rakanta watched with a professional's eye, a craftsman assessing another craft.
"You said this is the skirts of Mandhala Raras," Arindra said after a while. "The soft center. Why is it soft?"
Rakanta's mouth tilted, appreciating the question. "Because the ground takes care of what falls here," he said. "It does not break it. It receives. Some places crack. Some places teach."
"Teaching ground," Arindra said, and looked at the stones, the stream, the way the path he and Rakanta had made by walking did not linger as path because the forest preferred to forget their footprints. "We're not the only things that learn."
"Good," Rakanta said. "Then you may survive."
They moved again, faster this time, as if surviving something small had bought them time to meet something larger. The forest altered subtly. The trees grew further apart; the stream did not widen, but it spoke with more authority. Arindra began to see signs that were meant to be seen: small stacks of twigs nested into the crotch of a low branch—markers, not unlike the site tags he'd used with his crew in the city. A vine tied in a square knot around a sapling that had grown around it—age embedded in ritual. The geometry of intention.
"Your people leave wayfinding," Arindra said.
"Not mine," Rakanta said. "People. You would call them… villagers. Hunters. A padepokan (hermitage/training ground) not far from here trains children to see without being told. They learn to mark without scarring. We use marks like whispers use breath."
"Can I see it?" The question leaped out of him with more eagerness than good politics.
"Perhaps," Rakanta said, not unkindly. "If you are not a problem that will walk itself into their courtyard."
They crested a low ridge and the forest exhaled into openness: a valley washed with green plain, terraced with care. Rice paddies mirrored the sky in a hundred small rectangles, each a perfect study in controlled water. Beyond, it rose again into a shoulder of hill where roofs peered through foliage—wood, tile, and woven palm, curved like a smile learned from wind.
The sight pulled on a part of Arindra's chest that architecture had taught but childhood had named: home.
"Keraton is east," Rakanta said, tilting his chin. Keraton (royal court/palace). "Beyond those hills. But we will not go there yet. You are not ready to be a question with a crown."
"Noted," Arindra said. "What's between us and not being a question?"
Rakanta pointed. "We cross the terraces without stepping where people step. We greet a farmer without frightening their yield. We trade your questions for their rice wine, if they offer. We do not look long at the scarecrows."
"Why not the scarecrows?" Arindra asked, foolishly glancing.
They were ordinary at first glance: sticks, old shirts, hats whose brims had forgotten their ambition. Then his eyes did what eyes do when they care too much: they noted proportion. The arms were too long by one small honest inch. The heads tilted in a way that would strain a human neck but would be comfortable for something that had learned to look from corners. His skin crawled in a slow, ethical way.
"Good," Rakanta said softly. "You see."
"Are they—?"
"Mostly straw," Rakanta said. "Sometimes otherwise. It keeps crows honest. It keeps other watchers bored."
"I'll be bored," Arindra said quickly.
"Try," Rakanta said, and the corner of his mouth admitted he appreciated the attempt.
They moved like men who had been taught respect. Rakanta set the rhythm; Arindra matched it. He stepped on the hard berms, on the edges where the farmer's feet had not left their labor. He let his weight run forward on the slope so the earth held him gently instead of resisting. A woman in a broad hat glanced up from a paddy, eyes quick, mouth calm. Rakanta lifted two fingers, a greeting that asked nothing. She returned it and looked back at the plants, which is its own kind of hospitality.
A boy ran along a higher berm with a stick that had been a sword this morning and would be a fishing rod by afternoon. He saw Arindra, saw the shawl, and forgot to hide his curiosity. Rakanta's presence kept every other instinct in the boy's body disciplined. He hopped once, twice, disappeared into brightness.
"Will they mind an outsider?" Arindra asked.
"They will mind a problem," Rakanta said. "Do not be one."
"Yes, sir," Arindra said. The sir slipped out. Rakanta did not correct him.
They climbed toward the cluster of roofs that wasn't a village so much as an agreement not to be a city. The architecture quieted him: low houses with long eaves; open-sided pavilions—pendopo (open hall for gatherings)—set like commas in the story of a path; granaries lifted off the ground on carved posts so rats would need to compose poetry to reach them. The wood bore the dark gloss of hands and oil and weather, not varnish. Patterns carved into beams were not art without function—they were reminders, measurements, prayers that were also instructions. Every corner made sense.
A man with forearms like carved wood stood at the edge of a pendopo polishing a spear with a rag that had agreed to be his friend. He looked up, saw Rakanta, and his shoulders performed the relaxation of a man whose day had just been spared an argument. He nodded. His eyes flipped to Arindra and did a neat calculation—danger? tool? guest?—and stored the result where it could be updated without fuss.
"Rakanta," he said. His voice was smoke and gravel, unhurried. "You brought weather."
"Only a small cloud," Rakanta said. "This is Arindra. He came through a door that swore it would stay shut."
The man's eyebrows met briefly in the middle, then parted. He set the spear aside as one sets aside an opinion. "I am Sembada," he said. "If you break something, break it where I can repair it."
"I'll aim for that area," Arindra said.
Sembada's mouth did not smile, but his eyes forgot to be stern for a heartbeat. He gestured. "Eat first. Then talk."
Food arrived not like a miracle but like a promise kept: rice with steam like a kind teacher's sigh, vegetables in a broth that had studied how to be comforting, small fried fish that taught oil how to be good. Arindra ate with the attention of a man who understood the contract between hunger and gratitude. Rakanta ate as if his body had always known how—it had. Sembada did not watch them eat, which is manners.
Only when the rice had convinced his hands to stop shaking did Arindra set his bowl aside and say, "I don't want to be a problem for your… people."
"You are already a problem," Sembada said, not unkind. "But you know it. That makes you smaller." He leaned his forearms on his knees. The scars there were the kind that had been instructed to behave. "What do you know about the Bayangan?"
Arindra's throat shut for a second. He made space for words with water and will. "They were stories. Warnings. My Nenek (grandmother) sang of them. She said Bayangan are born when light forgets its path." He searched Sembada's face for mockery and found a slow, practical interest. "I think they love edges. And fear. And reflection. I think they like to make lines lie. In my world, they don't… appear. Or we don't know how to see them. Here, they do."
Sembada nodded once. "Here, they prefer old places," he said. "Here, they steal the names of things. A post that has remembered its load for thirty years wakes and forgets, and a roof stops being a roof. A bridge becomes a question." He squinted at Arindra's shawl. "Your cloth carries a weave I have seen in old diagrams. Where did you get it?"
"It was my grandmother's," Arindra said. The word grandmother he did not explain; he didn't need to. "She taught me Aksara Jawa (Javanese letters). Lullabies. Proverbs. I don't know how to say this without sounding arrogant, but—when I saw the Prasasti, I knew how to place the letters. Not read them, exactly. Place them."
Sembada's pause honored the complexity. "There were once readers who placed more than they read," he said quietly. "They built Mandala (sacred center diagrams that fix balance) into courtyards, into cities. Some failed. Some held longer than anyone deserved." He glanced at Rakanta. A conversation passed like a coin they'd handled too often to drop.
Rakanta shifted, the chair wood compressing with a polite creak. "We will not take him to the Keraton yet," he said. "Let the court find its own trouble. If the door brought him, it will have more to tell. The padepokan (hermitage/training ground) can keep him breathing while we discover whether he lies."
"I don't," Arindra said, then realized how that sounded and added, "Much."
Sembada's eyes smiled first this time. "We all lie," he said. "We choose what to lie to. If you must lie, lie to your fear." He stood—fluid, uninjured despite the map of scars. "Come. If you are to be our problem, be our useful problem."
They led him through the pendopo and beyond to a shaded court where four children moved through drills with wooden staves, their feet whispering geometry into the dust: step, pivot, brace, yield. An elder clapped once, and the air obeyed. The elder's hair was the gray of driftwood; his spine was a line a carpenter would praise.
"This is Ki Marta," Rakanta said. "He teaches bodies to agree with truth."
Ki Marta's eyes located Arindra in space and measured him. Not height, not weight—balance. "You stand as if one leg belongs to city," Ki Marta said. "Put both in the same world or you will split."
"I'm working on it," Arindra said.
Ki Marta nodded, as if that was an acceptable project plan. He tapped the ground with his staff. "Show me how you breathe," he said, and the simplest instruction became most intimate. Arindra did. Ki Marta adjusted one thing—a hand too eager to rise with inhale—and suddenly the breath had more room. "Better," Ki Marta said. "Remember: tarik, tahan, lepas—pull, hold, release. Do this when the world asks you to break."
"Thank you," Arindra said, and meant it with his back and his ribs.
They gave him a place to sit that was also a place to watch. The children's staves learned to be extensions instead of weapons. Rakanta stood at the edge, hands behind his back, a ruin of thought moving behind his eyes: strategies, failures, maps drawn on the underside of his tongue. Sembada disappeared and returned with a shallow tray of tools: cord, wooden wedges, a small chisel whose handle had been wrapped and rewrapped until it could be recognized by touch alone.
"For later," Sembada said, setting the tray down. "If the Bayangan hunt. If we must build a line where one refuses to exist."
Arindra's fingers itched. He reached—but not to grab. To trace, to know. The cord was thick enough to trust, thin enough to talk. The wedge's taper had been thought through by a patient mind. He forced himself to look away because attention is an offering and he had not yet earned a share.
A bell sounded: not an electric chime, not a temple's bronze, but a tidy leaf of metal hung from a beam, struck with a wooden clapper that had been soaked in oil and stories. The elder dismissed the children with a gesture that was also a blessing. The children bowed. Dust rose. The pattern the drills had drawn in the courtyard could be read if you'd trained your eyes for it: a Mandala in footsteps.
Rakanta turned to Arindra. "You will sleep here tonight," he said. "Sembada will watch the perimeter. Ki Marta will watch your spine. I will watch what tries to enter through questions."
"And me?" Arindra asked. "What do I watch?"
"Yourself," Rakanta said. "The Bayangan love a man who argues with his shadow."
He wanted to say he'd been arguing with his shadow since he was old enough to know what a report card was. He wanted to say he was tired of being measured against structures that existed mostly because fear had good PR. Instead, he nodded. "I'll watch," he said.
Night did not fall here; it unfolded. The forest held its breath just long enough to make you notice it had been breathing all along. Lamps were lit with an ease that suggested they'd been waiting all day to be useful. Dinner returned. Sembada ate like a man who believed in the dignity of beans. Rakanta ate as if eating was also a way to count hours. Ki Marta ate so slowly that time changed its mind about what it was.
Later, when the lamps decided to be fewer, Rakanta walked Arindra to a small room that had not been built for guests but could be convinced. A mat, a low shelf, a window that knew how to keep wind but invite night. Arindra set the selendang on the shelf with a care that felt like prayer. The weave warmed once, then settled, as if it had been checking the room for weather.
"Rakanta," Arindra said, as the warrior stood in the doorway, a silhouette that didn't need drama to be a fact. "Thank you. For not—" he gestured vaguely. "For not making this harder than it needs to be."
Rakanta grunted, which in his language might mean you're welcome or do not embarrass us with gratitude. "Sleep," he said. "Dreams instruct here. But don't be polite to them."
The door slid shut with the contented sound of wood behaving. Arindra lay on the mat and, because habit is a rail you can hold, he counted his breaths. He tried to keep them even. The forest joined him without trying. When he finally slept, he expected either nothing or the kind of bad dream that wakes you because it has no patience. He did not expect his Nenek.
She did not appear cruelly young; dreams here didn't lie unless you asked them to. She looked as she had the week before she taught him the lullaby for the last time: tired and gentle, a woman whose hands had learned both to cradle and to bury. She sat on a low stool that had not existed a breath ago and patted it, and he was there, smaller without humiliation.
"You've grown into your knees," she said, approving. "Good. They were always going to be trouble." She tilted her head. "Did you remember to eat?"
"Yes," he said, and the relief of being asked undid him. "It's real, Nenek. It's all—real."
"Of course," she said. "Stories are kitchens. They make real food if you bring real hunger." She put two fingers on his wrist. Her touch felt like stitches on his skin—accurate, necessary. "Listen to Rakanta. Challenge him like you would a column: respectfully. Listen to your fear, then deny it dessert."
He laughed, chest tight. "You knew," he said. "You knew this place."
Her eyes softened further, which he had not known was possible. "We all know places we pretend to have forgotten," she said. "Pretending is a key sometimes. Sometimes the wrong door finds it." She tapped his selendang, which sat in his lap though he did not remember lifting it. "There is a missing stroke in the pattern," she said. "You will want to make it neat. Don't. Let it be a question."
"Why?"
"Because a neat answer is a closed gate," she said. "And you are walking." She paused. The dream gave them both room to breathe around what mattered. "Do not go to the Keraton yet," she said. "A court is a place where shadows wear clothes."
"How long do I stay?" he asked, hating how young he sounded.
"As long as your leaving would be ruder than your staying," she said, which was so absolutely her that he cried without it being violence. She touched his cheek. "Arin," she said, and he had not heard that shortening since he was ten. "Remember: pulang itu arah, bukan jarak—home is a direction, not a distance."
He woke with tears drying on his face. A bell that was not a bell stroked the air outside: dawn adjusting her earrings. He sat up into a morning that had been built to forgive the night. The selendang lay folded on the shelf, one corner turned as if someone had bookmarked him. He rose, washed, dressed, and stepped into a courtyard that had already memorized half a dozen small kindnesses.
Rakanta stood with Sembada and Ki Marta near the edge of the pendopo, heads inclined, the triangle of their posture drawing a problem's outline. When they saw him, they didn't stop talking; they made space for him to stand and not know, which is rarer than you'd think.
"There was movement by the northern ditch," Sembada said without preface. "Three scarecrows refusing to be straw."
"Someone trying to wake what slept," Rakanta said. "Or testing our fences."
Ki Marta tapped his staff twice—decision marks. "We will walk the borders," he said. "Let the children drill a mandala in dust to remind the ground."
"Me?" Arindra said, as if he'd forgotten his own body.
Rakanta's mouth thought about a smile and then refused to be baited. "Yes, wrench," he said. "You."
"Great," Arindra said. "I've always wanted to be tightened."
They set out along the perimeter paths that were not roads but agreements with soil. Rakanta pointed without pointing—to where a line of stones had been reset two finger-widths off true, to where a vine had been cut at an angle that made the cut impatient, to where water had been asked to hesitate before it wanted to.
"Someone unfriendly has been friendly with our edges," Sembada said. "They are trying to teach the land bad habits."
Arindra knelt and touched a stone. It wobbled under his fingers like a table leg he'd scolded a thousand times. "I can fix this," he said, and at the same time, somewhere beyond the terraces, beyond the scarecrows, beyond the hill that kept the Keraton out of sight because the Keraton enjoyed being out of sight, a sound came.
It was the sound he had heard as he stepped through the doorway: a kentongan (a wooden slit drum used to signal danger or gather people), struck with intention. But this time it did not belong to memory. It belonged to this morning.
Three beats, a breath, two beats. Not alarm. Summons.
Rakanta's hand found the hilt of his blade as if that was where hands concluded. He listened, calculating the distance between beats like a carpenter measuring twice before the cut.
"That call," Sembada said softly, "comes from the old causeway."
"The one no one uses," Ki Marta said. "Because it remembers too much."
Rakanta's eyes met Arindra's. Distant yet curious had been his first stance; now curiosity sharpened. "You wanted to see what your doors open," he said.
"Not without breakfast," Arindra said, because humor can keep your hands from shaking.
"You ate," Rakanta said.
"Right," Arindra said, and the joke fell away, leaving behind what jokes are built to protect: fear that can be carried. He stood, adjusted the shawl on his shoulders because superstition is simply memory trying to help, and nodded. "Let's go remind the light."