Prayag was transformed.
The confluence — the sangam where the Ganga, the Yamuna, and the invisible Saraswati met — had been a pilgrimage site for both civilisations since before recorded history. The Devas built temples on the western bank. The Asuras, before the war, had built observatories on the eastern. The observatories were ruins now, but they were still there — angular stone towers, half-collapsed, their foundations still visible in the earth like the fingerprints of a civilisation that had once measured the stars.
The Summit was held on the sandbank between the rivers — neutral ground in the most literal sense. A vast amphitheatre had been constructed in two weeks, open-air, with seating for ten thousand and mantric relay crystals that would broadcast the proceedings to every major settlement in the Three Realms.
Ten thousand seats. They filled in three hours. People had walked for days — from the mountain villages of the north, from the coastal towns of the south, from the Deva heartland and, emerging from the forests for the first time in three centuries, from the Remnant. Asura descendants, walking openly through Deva territory, some of them seeing cities and roads and the sheer scale of the civilisation that had displaced them, for the first time.
The tension was extraordinary. Not violent — not yet. But electric. The air crackled with it. Ten thousand people, drawn by the most powerful force in any civilisation: the promise that something they'd been told their whole lives was about to be questioned.
Kritya sat on the eastern platform — the Asura side. She'd dressed formally for the first time since I'd known her — a dark ceremonial robe, embroidered with the angular patterns of Asura design, her hair unbraided and falling loose, which I later learned was the traditional Asura style for formal occasions. She looked different — not like the woman who argued about crop rotation, but like the daughter of Vritra, the heir to a destroyed kingdom, carrying three hundred years of silence in her posture.
Indra sat on the western platform — the Deva side. He was in white, as before, but with the addition of a single ornament: the Vajra pendant, the symbol of the thunder king, the weapon that had, according to myth, killed Vritra. He wore it, I was certain, deliberately. A reminder of power. A statement that he was participating from a position of strength.
Brihaspati moderated. He stood between the platforms, small, old, and utterly in command of the proceedings.
"We are here," he said, his mantric-amplified voice carrying across the amphitheatre and, through the relay crystals, across the Three Realms, "to do something that has not been done in three hundred years. We are here to listen."
The Deva presentation came first. Not the official version — the True Record. The private archive, unsealed for the first time, read aloud by the Chief Historian of the Hall of Remembrance, a woman named Vasundhara who looked like she might vomit from the stress of reading classified material to a live audience of ten thousand.
