They had walked without speaking for what felt like hours, their steps echoing down the broken steps of a forgotten sanctum beneath Mumbai's skin.
The world above remained unaware—a city choked in traffic and neon, praying to gods in Instagram captions and dying in pixelated headlines. But beneath it, beneath the roads and shopping arcades, below the train lines and the burnt-out husks of flyovers, the old gods still breathed.
Here, the air was thick with copper and silence. Moss crept over shattered stone. Banyan roots split marble columns like time cracking bone.
Veyne Alaric walked at the front, his coat damp with subterranean sweat, his skin remembering another lifetime. Nalini followed, a torchlight in her left hand and shlokas rolling off her lips—not for ceremony, but for protection.
"Agnimeele purohitam yajnasya devam ritvijam
Hotaaram ratnadhatamam…"
(I invoke Agni, the priest, the divine minister of sacrifice,
the invoker, the bestower of wealth.)
The sacred words danced through the shadows, and something in the dark hissed in answer. Not in threat. But in memory.
They arrived at the mouth of the lake like mourners to a pyre.
There it lay—still and endless—The Red Lake, buried beneath the old temple to Desire.
It was not red from blood, though the first look would convince the eye otherwise. It was silt, perhaps. Or something older, suspended like dream-dust in its stillness. The surface did not ripple. Not even when Nalini cast a pebble into it. It floated for a moment, then vanished as if swallowed by silence itself.
"There are no birds here," Nalini said softly.
"No birds. No echoes. No wind," Veyne agreed. "This is a place the city forgot… because it chose to forget."
He moved closer, kneeling by the edge. The stone beneath his palm was warm. Unnaturally so. This place was underground and untouched by sun. Yet it remembered heat.
"It's said," Nalini whispered, "that when Atlantis fell, parts of it did not die… They sank. Buried themselves under new names, new cities. Desire did not vanish. It merely became smoke in the bodies of dancers, seduction in a perfume, resistance in a lover's last breath."
"And law?" Veyne asked.
She smiled, weary. "Law forgot how to dance."
He reached out, dipping two fingers into the lake. The touch was like skin—soft, almost silken. But the moment his hand touched the surface, his eyes widened.
Then the world fell away.
He saw her.
Not in the garb of betrayal. Not in the mask of the veiled serpent who stood on the dais and said nothing as the blades descended.
But in a red dress, simple and worn, her hair undone and her palms streaked with charcoal. A queen without her court. A woman without her mask.
Seraya.
She stood at a threshold—not a throne, not a battlefield—but the threshold of a garden they used to meet in. In Atlantis. In secret.
"You always said I was fire," she said, her voice like broken glass softened in the sea.
"But fire can burn to protect too, Veyne. I burned you so they would not cage you."
He tried to speak but found only silence in his throat. His body was not present here. Only his remembrance was.
She moved closer.
"There were factions you never saw. Shadows I dared not name. I took the crown from your head so they wouldn't put it in a cage. I—"
Her voice broke.
"They told me you died that night. I wanted to follow. But I remained. I remained to watch the rot, to live among the ashes, so that one day… if you returned… I could still recognise your shadow before your face."
A child's voice, faint, called in the distance.
"Ama…"
She turned toward it. Then back at him.
"This world never gave us mercy, Veyne. Don't ask it to now."
He reached out—not with fingers, but with something deeper. Will. Memory. Flame.
She stepped back.
"Not yet," she whispered.
"I'm not ready to be forgiven."
Then the world cracked like glass around him, and he gasped back into his body.
He was kneeling again. Nalini knelt beside him, holding his shoulders. His shirt was soaked through—not with water, but sweat. Or something else entirely.
"You saw her, didn't you?" Nalini asked.
He nodded, slow.
"I saw the woman… not the mask."
She didn't press. There was a respect between them now, thick and unspoken.
Instead, Nalini looked toward the lake again. "This place… it doesn't show the past. It shows the unlived possibilities. The futures lost in silence. The loves unchosen. The truths we refuse to speak."
Veyne stood, his legs shaking faintly. His voice, though hoarse, was firm.
"She survived. That much I know now."
"And what will you do with that knowing?" Nalini asked.
He looked down at the red waters.
"I will not seek vengeance anymore. Not for her."
Nalini's brows rose. "Forgiveness?"
He shook his head. "Not yet. But I have let go of the noose around her name."
They began walking back—leaving the Red Lake behind. The air began to shift. Wind returned in subtle currents. A faint birdcall echoed from above.
The place had tasted their memory, and now it began to sleep again.
On the way up the steps, Nalini paused and said:
_"You know, there's a shloka from the Rigveda that stays with me…
'Let noble thoughts come to us from all directions.'_
Maybe that's what we're learning to do again—receive the truth, even when it comes from the ones we once cursed."
Veyne didn't reply. He simply nodded, and as they emerged from the subterranean sanctum into the smog-stained twilight of Mumbai, he whispered a mantra of his own—not aloud, but within:
"O fire that once kissed the lips of my enemies,
teach me now to hold the hands of my past
without drawing blood."
The sun hung low over Mumbai, painting the skyline in ochre and rust. The sea wheezed against the shore, coughing up brine and plastic, like it had forgotten how to breathe properly in this age of concrete.
In a narrow chawl behind Dadar station, on the topmost floor of a crumbling building that smelled of sweat and incense, a woman stared at her reflection in a cracked mirror.
Seraya.
Not the golden priestess of Atlantis. Not the veiled figure from the coronation night. This was someone far simpler. A schoolteacher with ink-stained fingers. A woman who lit camphor every evening and prayed with closed eyes but an open heart.
She held a diya in her hands now, its flame trembling as if caught between surrender and defiance.
The mirror before her reflected more than her face. It reflected weight. Not the weight of time, but of choice.
"I saw him," she whispered.
"He saw me."
She didn't flinch as the wind from the broken window scattered vermillion across the floor. Instead, she knelt, setting the diya before the tiny altar in the corner—an old brass Ganesha, a copy of the Gita with cracked edges, and a small, folded square of blood-red cloth.
She had kept it all these years.
A piece of his coronation robe.
The only thing she'd taken from that night when everything else was lost—her name, her station, her soul.
"Na hi kalyāṇakṛt kaścid durgatiṁ tāta gacchati," she murmured.
(One who does good, dear one, never truly comes to ruin.)
But the words felt dry on her tongue. Like they had once belonged to her… but now asked for proof.
Across the city, other echoes stirred.
On a rooftop in Bandra, a young man painted a mural—flames licking the edges of a shattered crown. He didn't know why the image came to him in dreams, only that he had to draw it. Passers-by paused below, pointing up, some crossing themselves with religion or rebellion.
In a courtroom, an old judge dropped his gavel mid-sentence. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth as he clutched his chest. On the bench, the symbol of blind justice flickered strangely—one eye open, then closed, then open again.
The city was remembering.
Through symbols. Through madness. Through dreams.
Seraya walked out into the street, her dupatta drawn low, her eyes covered in large dark glasses. The world saw a tired woman going to the market.
They did not see the once-high priestess of Desire, the weaver of mind-lace and memory silk.
She passed the chaiwallah. The children playing with cricket bats. The beggar singing devotional songs off-key. But the rhythm of her heart was tuned elsewhere—to another city beneath this one, where once love and betrayal had danced hand-in-hand around a burning throne.
She turned into a side alley, slipped through an old rusted gate, and descended into the basement of a long-shut printing press.
There, the walls were covered in maps—not of countries, but of influence. Red threads criss-crossed photographs. Notes in five languages scribbled on torn pages. At the centre of it all, a faded photograph of a man in a cloak.
Veyne Alaric.
She stood before it like a pilgrim before a shrine.
"You survived," she said.
"But so did I. And so did everything they buried."
Her fingers brushed the photo.
She had not wept in seventeen years. But something moved now. Not quite a tear. Not quite a shiver. Something like breath turning to flame in the throat.
Outside, the wind shifted.
Graffiti began appearing overnight across Churchgate and Byculla. A woman in red, standing atop a crumbling courthouse, holding the scales in one hand, a sword in the other. Her face obscured by smoke. Her eyes—drawn wide open.
Pigeons fell mid-flight, flapping furiously before crashing to the ground. The authorities blamed climate. Or pesticides. Or stress. But the street children said:
"The city's angry."
In Andheri, a preacher screamed through a megaphone about "the One of Fire." He wore no shoes, only ash smeared across his chest. His voice cracked like thunder.
"He has returned! The Law has woken! Hide your lies, O men of Order, for the Scales are burning!"
No one believed him. But no one laughed either.
Because deep down, the city had started to twitch. The sleeping part. The ancient part. The part that once whispered to lovers and executioners in the same breath.
Back in her underground den, Seraya lit another diya.
This one, she placed before a small statue—its features half-melted, its identity forgotten.
"You were once Desire," she whispered.
"But they carved you into Order."
She sat, cross-legged, breathing slowly.
"Veyne has revived Law. That means… the old balance is shifting."
She remembered the Ashen Crown.
How it once pulsed with seven flames. How each flame flickered in harmony with the rest. When one died, the rest withered. But when one burned bright, it called the others to rise.
She whispered now, like a mantra:
"Desire. War. Faith. Knowledge. Shadow. Trade. Law."
She paused.
"And the eighth that never belonged… Order."
The room seemed to inhale.
She opened her eyes.
"They will come for me again. But I am no longer hers."
She stood, her spine straight, her voice steel.
"I am no longer the woman who stood silent on the dais."
"I am the one who lit the first fire. And I will light the last."
Above, the monsoon clouds began to gather.
The air smelled not just of rain—but of something older.
Like pages burning in a temple library.
Like old verdicts rewritten in blood.
Like betrayal waiting to be forgiven.
The High Court of Bombay stood tall and weary, like an old warrior too proud to fall. Rain swept across its gothic arches and lion-head gargoyles, and the stained glass windows caught the grey of the monsoon like they were remembering older storms. Inside, time moved slow. Paper smelled of dust and defiance. The corridors echoed with footfalls, whispers, the dull rhythm of justice unfolding… or trying to.
But something was off today.
The typewriters hiccupped mid-word. Files vanished, only to be found two floors up. The server room reported no errors, yet the digital case logs flickered—dates scrambled, judgments rewritten in strange syntax before correcting themselves.
No one spoke of it aloud.
But the clerks muttered in their chai breaks, and even the peons avoided the third courtroom on the east wing.
Because last night, a statue had moved.
Or so they said.
Not a full step, not a grand gesture—just a tilt of the head. Lady Justice, carved in white marble above Courtroom No. 7, her blindfold cracked slightly at the corner, now gazed downward.
At the witness box.
Inside Courtroom No. 7, the senior judge, Shivraj Bendre, sat in silence before the next hearing. He was a man of precision—files alphabetised, pen refilled daily, white shirt starched to punishment. For three decades, his word had sliced through land disputes, corporate corruption, and the petty chaos of everyday human ego.
But today, his hands trembled.
He had dreamt something that did not feel like a dream.
It began in the courtroom—his own, except the wood was charred, the walls weeping ash. The accused stood at the centre: faceless, nameless, cloaked in flame. And around him, seven figures watched—not with eyes, but presence.
And then—without warning—the bench crumbled.
Not from above, but from within. Like a verdict had corroded its own maker.
He had woken gasping.
Now, here, in waking hours, he could still smell smoke behind the air freshener. His eyes flicked to the Lady Justice above. For a second, just a second, it looked as if her blindfold had burned away.
"This city... is remembering something it once judged," he murmured.
And suddenly, he felt it again—the old hymn his grandmother used to hum when a storm came in the Konkan coast:
"Yada yada hi dharmasya glanir bhavati bharata…"
"Whenever dharma declines, O Bharata…"
He never believed in prophecy.
But today, prophecy had walked into his courtroom wearing the scent of ash.
Elsewhere, inside the archives deep beneath the court—sealed from public access, hidden behind iron doors and forgotten keypads—an intern named Kavita Raut wandered.
She was only 23, doing her post-grad research in legal anthropology, with a soft spot for things people called "useless knowledge." That morning, a misfiled case number had brought her down here.
But what she found… was not just a case.
It was a relic.
Wrapped in linen, stored inside a file marked "Sealed by Order: 1979," was a scroll. Handwritten in Sanskrit. Its script shimmered faintly, like ink that had once been fire.
At first, she thought it was a mistake. But as she unrolled it, the courtroom lights flickered—and every hair on her arms stood up.
It was a trial transcript.
But not in this court.
Not in this time.
The first line read:
"Court of the Law Eternal, Day 6,421 of the Ashen Cycle."
There were no lawyers, only Speakers.
No witnesses, only Echoes.
And the accused?
A boy king.
Named Veyne Alaric.
Kavita gasped.
That name… it was from her dreams. The same dreams that had plagued her since childhood—of flame-lit corridors, of betrayal whispered in golden halls.
She pressed her palm to the parchment.
A heat flared beneath her skin.
"Law was never broken," the scroll read.
"It was buried."
That same evening, in a tea shop across from the court, a retired advocate named Nagesh Rao burned his last copy of the Indian Penal Code.
Not out of anger.
But out of ritual.
"Words have stopped holding weight," he told the confused chaiwala.
"Now it is time for fire to speak."
No one dared argue.
They watched in silence as he fed the pages, one by one, into a copper urn. No petrol. No match. Just a spark from the edge of his thumb—so subtle, it was mistaken for reflection off his ring.
The fire hissed and danced. Not orange, but white-blue. The colour of verdicts written in truth.
When it was over, Nagesh walked away barefoot, humming a tune no one had heard in a hundred years.
Above, the statue of Lady Justice tilted further.
And that night, across multiple courthouses in the city, the security cameras glitched.
In every frame, for precisely 3 seconds, the blindfold slipped.
And the statues watched.
In his chambers, Judge Shivraj stared at the candle he now kept on his desk. He had stopped trusting electricity since the dream. Stopped trusting light that came from wires instead of wicks.
He opened the Gita beside him.
"Tasmāt tvam uttiṣṭha yaśo labhasva…"
"Arise, therefore, and win your glory."
And for the first time, in his long and rational life, he whispered not a verdict, but a prayer:
"May Justice walk without chains again."
Somewhere in the storm drains below, where forgotten things gather, a gavel made of obsidian stirred.
Not by hand.
But by memory.
Rain fell like quiet absolution.
It had been three days since the statue's blindfold cracked. Three days since the courtrooms began to whisper truths buried beneath legalese and dust. Three days since Mumbai began to dream again—not in illusions, but in memory.
In the heart of the city, nestled between a banyan tree and a crumbling wall that once bore the sigil of the old dominion, sat an old woman. No name on record. No number in any registry. But she had been seen.
Once, on the day the Saffron Hand bowed.
Once, when the Ashen Trial began.
And now, again—when the Law stirred beneath stone.
Her name was never spoken.
But in the tongues of the old watchers, she was called Smṛti-Mātrā—the One Who Remembers.
She sat on a cot woven of cane and silence, her shawl soaked, her palms resting upon her knees like still rivers. Her eyes were cataracted with age, yet they saw more than most could bear.
The alley around her was silent.
Even the rats refused to squeak.
Even the dogs held breath.
Across her, Veyne stood.
No guards. No words. No flicker of flame in his pupils. Just a man. A shadow of a crown above his brow, felt rather than seen. Nalini stood a few feet behind, unsure whether to kneel or run.
The woman smiled, toothless and eternal.
"So. You have come at last, my king."
Her voice was not a whisper—it was an echo. Not loud, but remembered by every brick, every pipe, every cracked mirror in the alley.
Veyne bowed—not out of formality, but out of need.
"I remember your voice," he said softly. "It was there, before the fall."
The old woman chuckled, brushing rain from her shoulder as if brushing off centuries.
"I was there before the beginning. I have served Law in all its masks. And you… you were its promise."
She rose, slow but unwavering, her fingers crackling with the stiffness of age and memory. Then, she gestured to the faded wall behind her. Graffiti covered it—some crude, some vibrant—but beneath it all was a symbol etched in the stone itself.
A set of balanced scales, shaped like a flame.
"This city forgets," she said. "But stone remembers."
"You buried Law to protect it," she added. "But now you must unearth it—not as ruler, but as penitent."
Veyne clenched his fists.
"I am not innocent."
"And Law does not demand innocence," she replied. "It demands reckoning."
Behind her, the banyan tree rustled—not from wind, but from weight.
Seven black crows had gathered. Watching.
Waiting.
Each bore a ring of white feathers around the throat—a mark of the old Witnesses.
Nalini stepped forward, uneasy.
"What are they waiting for?"
The old woman did not answer directly.
Instead, she drew a small pot from beneath her cot. Inside was a thick black paste, fragrant with ash and turmeric.
She dipped two fingers in and approached Veyne.
"This is the mark of Pratikār. Not revenge. Not rage. It is the return of the scales to those who dared melt them."
And with that, she drew a single line down his forehead, from crown to brow. It burned, but not with heat—with memory.
Suddenly, Veyne staggered.
His knees buckled, and Nalini rushed to catch him, but the old woman raised a hand.
"Let it happen."
He collapsed.
And the rain stopped.
But only for him.
In his vision, he stood in the courtroom again—the one from dreams. Seven judges, faceless but heavy with presence, presided. On the stand, Elias knelt.
Not as betrayer.
But as accused.
"You remember what you lost," said one judge.
"But do you remember what you destroyed?" asked another.
Veyne opened his mouth—but ash fell from it.
He had no words.
Only weight.
And then came Seraya.
Her veil gone. Her eyes unweeping.
She carried in her arms the broken Sword of Alaric.
She dropped it at his feet.
"Judgement is not a sword," she said.
"It is a mirror."
The reflection in the blade was not a king.
It was a boy.
Shivering. Afraid. Loving too much, and punished for it.
When Veyne awoke, he was weeping.
The old woman offered no comfort—only stillness.
"The city does not need a tyrant," she said.
"It needs a witness. One who remembers, even when it burns."
He stood slowly, nodding.
"Then let Mumbai remember. Let it see."
She smiled again, as if something centuries in waiting had finally cracked open.
"Then go to the Courthouse of Crows," she said. "Where no verdict has ever been passed. Where memory waits in silence."
"There," she whispered, "Law will rise."
That night, seven statues across the city—once symbols of civic pride—cracked at the same time.
Their blindfolds fell.
And for a moment, every courtroom camera blinked red.
Not recording.
Judging.