The night sky was ablaze—not with stars, but with fire. The stronghold of the Agnihotris, once a sanctuary of light, had become a tomb. Smoke curled like serpents over the stone walls, and the air reeked of burnt offerings and spilled blood.
Arjun—or at least, the man the world called Arjun—stood among the chaos. His hands were trembling, not with fear, but with the memory of what he had been unable to prevent.
The battle had been orchestrated flawlessly. His most trusted comrade, Keshav, had led him here, whispering promises of victory and glory. They had laughed together only days ago, sharing tales of past skirmishes, unaware of the knife that would pierce both trust and flesh.
And then it came.
A scream that tore through the night, high and pure. A voice he knew as intimately as his own heartbeat: Meera. His lover. His soul's tether.
He ran, stumbling through the carnage, past fallen comrades whose eyes were wide in the final moment of disbelief. Smoke and fire blurred everything, but he saw her. She was on her knees, her crimson sari soaked in blood, a dagger pressed to her chest.
And the dagger… belonged to Keshav.
"You were weak, Arjun," the traitor hissed, his words slicing deeper than the steel. "Too blind to see the truth, too foolish to protect her."
Arjun screamed, lunged—but power he had once commanded with the force of storms had abandoned him. The Vedic incantations he had mastered, the Rudraksha chains that once bent cosmic energy to his will… all dormant, all silent.
He fell to his knees beside her. "No… not you," he whispered, gripping her hand. Her life left her as softly as the last note of a veena in an empty hall.
A cold wind swept through the ruins, carrying with it an echo that was not his own voice:
"Even in the blackest night, the heart's betrayal can ignite a fire that no darkness can extinguish."—Sky Dragonmire
And then darkness.
When he awoke, it was not in the sanctuary of the Agnihotris, nor amid the ashes of his world. He was somewhere else—cold, silent, and empty. His memories were fragments, flashes of flames, blood, and betrayal. His powers… gone.
Only the weight of loss remained.
He did not know yet that death had not claimed him, that the divine threads of the cosmos had preserved a spark. A spark of vengeance, a spark of remembrance, a spark that would one day rise to claim all that had been stolen.