The Remnant's council was, predictably, divided.
Kritya presented Indra's offer with clinical precision — the terms, the implications, the advantages and disadvantages. She didn't advocate. She laid out the facts and let the council argue.
They argued for six hours.
Shukra rejected the offer immediately. "He's buying our silence with scraps. Land rights? We already have land — our land, the land they stole. Integration? We don't want to be integrated into the system that destroyed us. We want the system to acknowledge what it did."
Mira, the healer, was cautiously supportive. "Recognition matters. If the Deva state formally acknowledges the Asura civilisation, it changes the legal and cultural framework. Our descendants stop being 'remnants' and start being citizens. That's not nothing."
Bala, the crop-rotation elder, had the most practical objection. "He halted the Destruction Corps. That's real. But it's conditional. If we refuse, the Corps resumes. And they won't just destroy the library — they'll come for Patala."
The argument went back and forth. History versus pragmatism. Justice versus survival. The eternal tension of every displaced people: do you accept the conqueror's terms because something is better than nothing, or do you reject them because accepting means validating the conquest?
I listened. I watched faces. I watched Kritya, who sat through the entire debate with her hands folded and her face neutral, waiting for the council to exhaust itself before speaking.
When the room finally quieted — not from consensus but from fatigue — she stood.
"There's a third option," she said. "We don't accept or reject. We counter-offer."
The room stirred.
"Indra's offer protects his throne. Our acceptance would protect our survival. But neither protects the truth. The truth — the full truth, not a 'contextualised' version, not a managed narrative — is what we've spent three hundred years preserving. If we compromise on the truth, we betray every ancestor who preserved a book, memorised a story, or taught a child the old language in secret."
"So what's the counter?" Shukra asked.
"A public event. A Summit of Truth. Held in neutral territory — not Amaravati, not Patala, but a place both sides can access. Both civilisations present their histories — the full, unedited accounts. Deva scholars, Asura scholars, working together. Not to agree — to reveal. Let the people of the Three Realms hear both versions and decide for themselves."
"Indra will never agree to that," I said.
"He will if the alternative is worse. Right now, the texts are spreading uncontrolled. His suppression is failing. A managed, public event gives him a degree of control — he chooses the venue, the format, the participants. It's less threatening than the alternative, which is the truth spreading through every market and village without any official framework at all."
"And if he says no?"
