THOSE SECRET STAINED WITH BLOOD
Fate is treated like law—recorded, preserved, unquestioned.
But history is not the truth. It is what survives.
For years, I’ve carried memories that are not mine—visions of executions, betrayals, and events erased from all records.
Speaking of them invites isolation. Silence became survival.
A university research program brought me back to India after years abroad. The project wasn’t about preserving history—it was about uncovering what civilizations hide, what narratives are rewritten, Who benefits from forgetting. How advanced they were and what connection it has with other countries.
With a small group—some friends, some mere acquaintances—we were meant to research, But curiosity pulled us to ancient temples, more for knowledge or amusement than research.
And there, the temples remembered me.
Each site sent violent sensory intrusions crashing through my mind—recognition without context, pain without injury. My teammates looked at me with suspicion, confusion, even fear.
Until I made a temple bell fall on my own head.
Consciousness returned in fragments.
A sharp metallic impact. Pain blooming across my skull. Voices overlapping in a language I understood only in broken pieces. Every word I tried to speak landed wrong. My body was wrong, my gender was changed. My presence… forbidden.
Then hands seized me. Too many hands. I was dragged upright, feet scraping stone, vision swimming with furious faces. Someone shouted a word I didn’t know—but the intent was crystal clear: Death.
Stones flew first. Threats came next. A blade rushed forward before armored soldiers forced the crowd back. Their presence didn’t calm anyone. It sharpened them.
Half-carried, bound, I was led through streets older than memory, into a palace already arranged for judgment. Inside, voices rose—officials, nobles, demanding immediate execution. Betrayal, deception, false death. And all for a body I did not recognize as mine.
Then, silence.
A man entered. Young, composed, dangerous in the way that restrained things are. No crown, yet all authority in the room bent to him.
Even the bloodthirsty lowered their eyes.
He looked at me—and the air shifted.
Recognition. Sharp. Personal. A mistake made twice.
I knew him instantly, despite impossibility. History would later label him a tyrant, a name associated with cruelty, mass punishment, and deliberate erasure.
The arguments resumed, louder now, demanding the king’s permission to end me. They insisted this man must die before he destroyed everything.
But The prince defended me. Even risking his crown, his life. Not for me—but for the body I occupied, the truth it carried.
Execution was delayed.
Not forgiven. Not denied. Simply postponed.
Under watch, I breathed where I should not have. My goal wasn’t to prove innocence—I didn’t even know whose life I had stepped into. It was to find a way home that may not exist.
And yet, the truth began to surface—not through confessions, but through absence.
This body had uncovered something hidden deep within the palace. Something that turned admiration into hatred, loyalty into murder, in a single heartbeat.
The man whose name I wore had once been loved. Then silenced for exposing a truth no one dared to see.
Why am I here? Why in his body, bearing a past I did not live but must reckon with?
They will try to kill me again.
History will repeat itself.
The innocent will be labeled sinful.
The broken will be the key.
The truth… will demand blood.
But I am not him.
