Burden and Exile
The final flames of the funeral pyre had long since dwindled, leaving behind only a bed of grey ash that seemed too small to contain the immensity of the lives it had consumed. Agni stood before the cold remains, the predawn wind whipping at his simple tunic. He had watched the fire take his mother, Queen Arya, a queen in life, now reduced to the same elemental state as the king she followed. In death, a terrible peace had settled on her features—a serenity she had been denied in her final, agonizing hours.
Her last words echoed in the hollow chamber of his mind, the only sound in the internal silence that had replaced his thoughts. 'Tejgarh is yours now… to hold. Hold it well… and hold yourself… too.' Two responsibilities. Two impossible tasks.
He looked down at his hands, the hands that had failed at both. To hold Tejgarh? Every stone of the fortress, every face in the street, would forever see not their prince, but the architect of their king's annihilation. He was a walking ghost of regicide, a living monument to a son's greatest failure. His presence was a poison in the kingdom's well. The land would never heal with him upon the throne, a constant reminder of the fire that had scorched its heart.
And to hold himself? He was shattered. There was no 'self' left to hold, only a collection of broken pieces—guilt, grief, and the echoing scream of that moment on the battlefield. Staying here, playing the part of a mourning prince, would be a lie. It would be hiding from the truth in silks and ceremonies. True penance could not be performed from a palace balcony.
A cold, numb certainty settled over him, freezing the chaos of his emotions into a single, clear course. It was not a decision born of passion, but of grim, logical despair. The only way to possibly fulfill his mother's charge was to leave. To remove the stain of himself from Tejgarh so it might, in time, scar over. And to find, somewhere in the vast, unforgiving world, a path to bear the unbearable weight of himself.
His feet, moving as if of their own accord, carried him not to the throne room, but to his personal armory. This was his first destination.
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The Armory: Shedding a Skin
The room smelled of metal oil, leather, and memory. His armor stood on a stand in the corner, a silent, gleaming companion of a lifetime. The Dawn-Plate of Tejgarh, commissioned for his sixteenth birthday. It caught the first feeble light of the approaching dawn, the intricate etchings of flames along the pauldrons and breastplate seeming to writhe in the low light.
With slow, deliberate movements, he began to undress it. Each piece felt heavier than stone.
First, the vambraces that had guarded his forearms. He unbuckled them, the familiar clicks sounding like final ticks of a clock. He placed them gently on a low bench.
Then the greaves, which had carried him through drills and dances and into his first, fateful war. Off they came.
The pauldrons, shaped like roaring lion heads, symbols of royal ferocity. He lifted them from the stand, their weight surprising him. Had he truly borne this every day?
Finally, he stood before the breastplate. Its central insignia was not a lion, but a stylized, elegant flame—the Agni-kul emblem. This was the piece that had defined him. Agnivrat. The fire-vowed. The fire-sworn. He had always felt invincible in it, as if the metal were an extension of his own soul's power. Now, it felt like a prison, a shell housing a monster.
His mother's voice hissed in his memory, not in her final tenderness, but in her earlier, scorching fury: 'The fire that took his life bore your signature, Agni! It was your flame!'
This armor was that signature. A symbol of the power that had betrayed him, that had turned from protector to destroyer. He could not wear it again. With a reverence one might show a fallen comrade, he unlaced the sides. He did not let it clatter to the floor. He cradled it, feeling its cold finality, and laid it down with utmost care upon his now-empty bed. It looked like a slain warrior lying in state.
To shed the identity of a warrior was a death in itself, perhaps more profound than a physical one. He stood there, in just his under-tunic, feeling smaller, younger, and more vulnerable than he ever had.
"I am not Agnivrat anymore," he whispered to the empty room, his voice hoarse from disuse and smoke. "That prince died with them. I am just… Agni. Only the fire. Only the consequence."
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The New Garb: Donning the Burden
From a deep, seldom-used chest, he pulled out a bundle of cloth. It was a simple, coarse khadi tunic and trousers, dyed a deep, unforgiving black—the color of ash, of emptiness, of mourning. It was the garb of a pilgrim, an ascetic, a penitent. It held no insignia, promised no lineage, demanded no respect. It was anonymity woven into fabric.
He changed into it. The rough material scratched against his skin, a stark contrast to the smooth, tailored silks and linens he was accustomed to. He expected to feel lighter, unburdened. He did not.
The physical weight of the royal armor was gone. But in its place, the true burdens settled onto his shoulders with a crushing, metaphysical gravity. The guilt was heavier than steel. The memory of his father's ash was heavier than mountain rock. The sound of Neer's curse was a chain around his heart, each link forged in lost friendship and betrayal. The simple clothes did not free him; they simply made the weight he carried more honest.
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The Final Letter: Words for a Friend
On a small table, he found parchment and ink. He sat, the quill feeling foreign in his calloused hand. His fingers trembled slightly, not from weakness, but from the enormity of what he was committing to paper—his abdication, his farewell. He wrote not as a prince, but as a broken man.
Akshay,
By the time you read this, I will be gone. Do not send search parties. Do not mourn my path. This is not an escape; it is an exile I choose for myself.
Tejgarh is yours now. You were always the steady heart, the wise mind. You are the friendship that lived in the hearts of both Agni and Neer. You cannot mend what is broken between us, but you can hold our home together. Rule with the compassion I failed to show and the strength I lacked. Let the people see a future in your eyes, not the ghosts that haunt mine.
Do not wait for my return. This is my vanvas, my penance. I go to find if a man who has burned down his own world can ever be worthy of rebuilding another.
When—if—I return, it will not be as Prince Agnivrat. That man is gone. And that time, if it comes, will be the right time.
Take care of Tejgarh. And take care of yourself, my brother in all but blood.
— Agni
He did not sign it with his title. He was just Agni. He folded the parchment and placed it carefully on the breastplate resting on his bed, where Akshay would be sure to find it. A final trust, a passing of the torch. He knew Akshay would grieve his going, but he also knew his friend's pragmatic heart would understand the terrible necessity of it. The kingdom needed a healer, not a haunted symbol.
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The Silent Departure
The palace was a tomb of whispers. The deepest hour of the night held the world in a grip of blue-black silence. All of Tejgarh was submerged in a slumber of grief and shock, the perfect cloak for his departure.
Agni moved through the halls like the ghost he felt he was. He took only a small, utilitarian dagger, sheathing it at his waist—not for conquest, but for the basic, grim necessity of survival on unknown roads. He left the famed Agni-bow behind. He could not bear to touch the instrument of his ruin. It could stay as a relic of a dead prince.
His path was a silent pilgrimage through his own past. He passed the wide courtyard where, as children, he, Neer, and Akshay had played endless games of tag and war, their laughter bouncing off the stones that now echoed only with his lonely footsteps. He walked the colonnade where his mother would wait for him after his lessons, a smile on her face. Every pillar, every archway seemed to watch him go. He felt, absurdly, that the palace itself might groan in protest, that the stones might cry out to stop the last heir of Tejgarh from abandoning his post.
But there was only silence. A deep, approving, or perhaps accusing, silence.
He paused at the doorway to the chamber where the palace women were preparing his mother's body for its final rites. The scent of flowers and incense drifted out, cloying and sweet. He did not enter. From the threshold, he bowed his head, a final, silent pranaam to the woman who had given him life and whose life his actions had extinguished. He waited for tears to come. None did. The well was dry. He had cried an ocean onto her still chest; now there was only dust.
He turned and moved towards the servants' quarters, to a small, unguarded postern gate used for market deliveries. With one last look down the majestic central corridor—the path to the throne he would never take—he slipped out into the cold night.
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The Cold Wind of the World
The moment he stepped beyond the high, protective walls of Tejgarh, the world changed. The sheltered, structured atmosphere of the fortress was gone. Here, the wind was sharper, carrying the scent of pine from the distant mountains and the damp earth of the plains. It was free and indifferent. It bit at his face, cutting through the coarse black cloth. It felt clean. It felt true.
For the first time in his life, Prince Agnivrat was nobody. He had no crown, no duty to a kingdom, no friend to laugh with, no father to impress, no mother to comfort. He was stripped bare to his essence: a man with a curse, a memory of fire, and a road stretching into darkness.
He turned and looked back. Tejgarh was a majestic silhouette against the lightening sky, its towers and ramparts black cut-outs against the deep blue. It was his home, his heart, his failure. It was everything he was leaving to save it from himself. He memorized the skyline, the shape of it against the dawn, until it was no longer a fortress of stone, but a fading echo in his soul.
Then, he turned his back on it.
He began to walk, his steps firm on the dusty road. He had no destination. No sacred grove, no hermit's cave in mind. The road itself was the destination. The wandering was the penance. His purpose was singular and bleak: to live. To breathe. To carry the burden of his actions with every step, to feel the weight of his sins in his bones, to survive not for a throne or a people, but so that he could truly, fully, and without distraction, regret.
And so, with the rising sun casting the long, lonely shadow of a simple man in black upon the earth, the exile of Agni began. Not with a fanfare or a decree, but with a silent step away from a sleeping kingdom, into the vast, waiting, and unforgiving embrace of the world.