Devansh had not reached for a falling body in centuries.
Yet when the mortal woman collapsed, he moved.
He caught her before stone met skull, her weight striking his chest with a force that felt… unfamiliar.
Warm.
Alive.
For a moment, he did nothing but stand there, the desert-born stranger limp in his arms, dark hair scattered across his sleeve, breath uneven against his shoulder.
No mortal had crossed this far into Vayukshi in decades.
Those who wandered near the outer corridors were gently turned away — memories blurred, instincts redirected, paths quietly reshaped.
This one had walked straight in.
And then she had touched him.
The instant their skin met, something had shifted.
Not in him.
Around him.
The curse that defined his existence — the great, endless absence — had rippled. Like a deep body of water disturbed by a single falling leaf.
Devansh did not feel pain.
He did not feel shock.
But he recognized disturbance.
And disturbance meant danger.
He looked down at her.
Her face was pale, lashes dark against her cheeks, brow faintly creased as though she were dreaming of something too heavy to bear. One hand still clutched the edge of his robe, fingers trembling.
Slowly, deliberately, he carried her deeper into the city.
The corridors accepted them in silence.
He passed halls that had not echoed with footsteps in lifetimes. Pools of still water reflected a sky that did not belong to any season. Pale light traced the dark metal veins in the stone.
He laid her on a low platform in the Hall of Still Waters — a place once meant for meditation, before immortality had emptied it of need.
He straightened.
And waited.
He did not know why.
Waiting was not his nature. Protection was. Observation. Enforcement.
Not this.
Her breathing stuttered. She shifted faintly.
Devansh studied her the way he studied storms that never reached the city — measuring, predicting, preparing for nothing.
"What are you?" he asked quietly.
She did not answer.
But something in her expression tightened, as if she heard him even unconscious.
For the first time in over six hundred years, Devansh remained in one place with no duty to justify it.