The house had finally surrendered to silence.
Indu had gone to bed hours ago, her exhaustion finally overcoming her worry. Agastya lay in his room, the red glow behind his eyelids fading into something softer, something closer to sleep. The walls held their breath. The shadows kept their distance.
But Lucian could not rest.
He sat at his desk—a heavy, ancient thing of dark wood that had belonged to his father, and his father's father before him. The surface was cluttered with papers, medical journals, half-empty cups of cold coffee. A laptop sat closed, its blank screen reflecting the dim lamplight. Everything in its place. Everything ordinary.
Except for the drawer.
The bottom drawer.
The one he never opened.
Lucian stared at it for a long moment. His hand hovered above the brass handle, trembling almost imperceptibly. Ten years. Ten years since he had last touched what lay inside. Ten years since he had last spoken the name that still echoed in the hollow chambers of his memory.
He pulled the drawer open.
The wood groaned in protest, stiff from disuse. Inside lay nothing but dust and emptiness—or so it appeared. But Lucian knew better. His fingers found the edge of the drawer's false bottom, that familiar metallic strip that ran along the interior, cold against his skin. He pressed down. The mechanism clicked—softly, secretly—and the false bottom lifted.
Beneath it, a card.
Simple. White. Unremarkable to anyone who might stumble upon it. Just a phone number printed in plain black text, no name, no label, no indication of who waited on the other end. The edges were yellowed with age, the surface coated in a fine layer of dust that had settled over ten years of silence.
Lucian took the card and wiped it gently with his thumb. The dust came away in gray streaks, revealing the crisp black numbers beneath. He stared at them, and for a moment, he was not in this room, not in this house, not in this life. He was somewhere else. Somewhere darker. Somewhere the air smelled of ozone and secrets and things that should never have been spoken aloud.
"Really," he whispered to himself, his voice barely audible above the hum of the ceiling fan. "Ten years have passed. Really, time flies very fast…"
The words felt inadequate. Ten years was a number, a measurement, a cold statistic. It did not capture the weight of a decade lived in deliberate forgetting. The nights he had lain awake, wondering. The mornings he had woken grateful that the phone had not rung. The slow, creeping realization that perhaps—just perhaps—the past could be outrun.
He had been wrong.
The past was not a thing you outran. It was a thing that waited. Patient. Unhurried. Certain that you would eventually come back to it.
Lucian picked up his phone.
His fingers moved across the screen, dialing the number from memory even though he had not dialed it in ten years. The numbers came automatically, as if his hands remembered what his mind had tried to forget. He pressed the call button before he could change his mind.
The dial tone buzzed in his ear.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Four.
On the fifth ring, someone picked up.
There was no greeting. No introduction. Just the soft static of a connection being made, the subtle shift of air as someone breathed on the other end of the line. And then—a voice. Calm. Measured. Entirely without surprise.
"Hello. Long time no see… Light."
The code name landed like a stone dropped into still water. Light. No one had called him that in ten years. He had almost forgotten it existed—almost convinced himself that it belonged to someone else, someone younger, someone who had not yet chosen to forget.
Lucian's throat tightened.
"Ten years," he said quietly. "Ten years have passed since we last met."
The voice on the other end did not respond to the sentiment. There was no nostalgia in it, no warmth, no recognition of the weight those years carried. Just business. Just purpose.
"So. To the point." The voice was steady, unwavering. "What information do you want?"
Lucian closed his eyes. For a moment, he considered hanging up. Returning to the life he had built, the ignorance he had cultivated, the comfortable lie that the past could stay buried.
Then he thought of Agastya. Of the red eye. Of the dreams. Of his son whispering about cliffs and blades and death.
He opened his eyes.
"Agastya," he said. "He has started behaving strangely. Over the past couple of days."
"Continue."
Lucian took a breath. The words came easier now—not easier to speak, but easier to organize. He was a doctor. He knew how to present symptoms, how to lay out evidence, how to build a case.
"He sees weird nightmares. Every time. In every dream, he is stabbed. He feels the blade enter. He feels himself die."
A pause on the other end. Then: "The red eye?"
"It burns. He says it always burns. And it glows, Agent. I have seen it myself. A pulsing, crimson light that comes from nowhere and illuminates everything."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"In the forest," Lucian continued, pressing forward, "he got lost. We searched for hours. And then—" He hesitated. "He came back. On his own. No explanation. No memory of how."
The voice on the other end remained calm, almost bored. "All the incidents you have described are not particularly suspicious. Children have nightmares. Children get lost. A birthmark that catches the light is not evidence of anything beyond biology."
Lucian felt a flash of frustration. He had expected skepticism, but this dismissal felt almost deliberate. As if the voice was testing him, waiting to see how much he would reveal.
"Yes," Lucian said, keeping his voice level. "At first, I thought the same. I am a man of science, Agent. You know this. I do not jump to conclusions. I do not see ghosts in every shadow."
"Then why are you calling me?"
"Because the next incident will shock you."
Silence. Waiting.
"The search operation," Lucian said slowly. "It lasted two hours. We had volunteers, trackers, even dogs. No one could find him. And then—he was simply there. Standing at the edge of the forest. Unharmed. Unafraid."
"Again, this is not—"
Lucian cut him off. "When they found him, I saw something. A wolf. Standing at the tree line, watching. Not approaching. Not threatening. Just… watching. As if it was guarding him."
The voice on the other end went quiet. Not the silence of dismissal. The silence of attention.
Lucian pressed on. "But that is not the strangest part. After the incident, I spoke with Agastya. Tried to understand what had happened. And he told me something that made my blood run cold."
"What?"
"He said that when he entered the forest, he did not feel lost. He felt… familiar. As if he had been there before. As if the trees knew him and he knew them. He said he walked deeper without meaning to, without wanting to—as if something was pulling him forward."
The voice remained silent.
"When he woke after fainting, he found himself faced with a tiger. Not from a distance. Close. The tiger was eating, and it turned to look at him. He said he saw its eyes. He said it was hungry."
"And then?"
"And then something changed. The tiger stopped. Not because it was afraid. Not because it lost interest. It stopped because something made it stop. And when Agastya woke again—he was on the back of a wolf. The same wolf. Carrying him out of the forest."
The silence on the other end stretched so long that Lucian checked his phone to ensure the call had not dropped.
Then—
A sound.
Soft. Almost imperceptible.
The voice on the other end was smiling.
"Lord Agastya has awakened."
The words landed like thunder in a clear sky. Lucian's grip on the phone tightened. His heart, which had been racing, seemed to stutter and stop.
"How," Lucian whispered, "did you conclude that?"
The voice did not answer immediately. When it spoke again, it was softer—not gentle, but weighted. Heavy with knowledge that Lucian could not see.
"I will send you a parcel," the voice said. "It will reach you by tomorrow evening. Inside, you will find what you need to understand. And when you have seen it—"
"Yes?"
"You will conclude the same."
Lucian opened his mouth to ask another question—a hundred questions, a thousand questions—but the voice continued, cutting him off with the practiced ease of someone accustomed to ending conversations before they could spiral.
"Until then, take care of him. Take care of yourself."
"Wait—"
The line went dead.
Lucian sat in the darkness of his study, the phone pressed to his ear, listening to the hollow buzz of a disconnected call. Outside, the night pressed against the windows. Inside, the shadows held their breath.
Lord Agastya has awakened.
The words echoed through his mind, refusing to settle, refusing to make sense. Lord. Agastya. His son. His ten-year-old son who still believed in monsters under the bed, who still needed help tying his shoes, who still cried out in the night for his mother.
And yet—
The wolf. The tiger. The dreams of ancient battlefields and blades through the back.
Lucian set the phone down slowly. His hand was trembling. He looked at the card still lying on the desk, the dust now wiped clean, the numbers still visible.
Ten years.
Ten years of forgetting.
And now, in the span of a single phone call, everything he had buried was clawing its way back to the surface.
Tomorrow evening.
He would wait.
And then—he would finally learn the truth about his son.
About himself.
About everything.
TO BE CONTINUED....