THE VEILED THRONE (3111 BCE)
(The Last Dawn of the Dvapara Yuga)
The storm came hungry that night.
Himanchu—barefoot, sunburnt, twelve winters old—pressed his ear to the mountain pass and listened. The rocks were singing. Not the dull hum of wind through caves, but a liquid melody, like a mother humming to a child no one else could see.
His goats had heard it first. They'd bolted toward the sound, their bells jangling panic. Now, as ice-needle rain lashed his back, Himanchu crawled forward on scraped knees. The elders warned of "the valley that eats curious boys", but the song pulsed in his teeth, his ribs, the salt of his sweat—
And then the mist parted like a dying breath.
Before him sprawled Shambala.
The air smelled of crushed emeralds. Trees with trunks of braided silver groaned under canopies of fire-blossoms. A river, glowing like molten sapphire, curled around a colossal dragon of living crystal—her wings draped across the land like shattered stained glass, her chest cracked open to reveal a blue diamond, throbbing in time with the song.
Himanchu's lungs burned. He knew, in the way children know things too true to speak: This is the heart of the world.
Then the earth screamed.
A fissure split the sky, vomiting black lightning. The crystal dragon's head snapped up. Her roar wasn't sound—it was time breaking. Himanchu's vision doubled: he saw the dragon's diamond ripped away by shadowy claws and still glowing safe in her chest, both true at once—
A talon the size of a temple pillar slammed down beside him.
"Mortal," hissed the second dragon—a monster of smoking voids and teeth like broken obelisks—"you let something in."