I couldn't stop. Over the following weeks, I returned to the buried library five more times, each trip a risk that could end my career or my life. I brought back more books — histories, technical manuals, philosophical texts. With the Codex as my key, I translated them at a pace that would have impressed the scholars at Amaravati's academy, had any of them cared to look at what a blacksmith's son was doing in his barracks after hours.
The picture that emerged was not simple. The Asuras were not saints. Their history contained its own wars, its own atrocities, its own failures of justice and compassion. Mayasura himself acknowledged this — he was honest about the factions within Asura society that had advocated for conquest, for domination, for the very things the Devas accused them of.
But the balance was different from what I'd been taught. The Asuras were not darkness opposing light. They were a civilisation opposing another civilisation. A civilisation that had been losing, slowly, for centuries — not because they were weaker, but because the Devas had one advantage that transcended military power.
Narrative control.
The Devas didn't just win wars. They won the story. Every battle became a chapter in a divine saga. Every Deva victory was ordained by cosmic law. Every Asura defeat was proof of moral inferiority. The Devas had bards, scholars, and priests who could transform a territorial dispute into a cosmic struggle between good and evil — and they did, again and again, until the transformation was complete and the original truth was buried under so many layers of myth that digging it up felt like digging up a grave.
Which is exactly what I was doing.
On my sixth trip to the library, I found the room that broke me.
Not a library room — a smaller space, behind a concealed door at the back of the archive. Inside: not books but artefacts. Personal belongings. Preserved with the same impossible Asura technology that had kept the books intact.
Children's toys. Carved wooden animals, painted in bright colours, the paint still vivid after three centuries. A doll with articulated limbs and a face that had been painted by someone who knew what a child wanted — big eyes, a crooked smile, the expression of a friend.
Cooking utensils. Clay pots, ladles, a grinding stone with traces of spice still embedded in its surface. Someone's kitchen. Someone's daily routine of feeding a family, preserved in stone and clay.
And letters. Hundreds of them, written on the same indestructible material as the books, bundled and tied with cord. Personal correspondence — parents writing to children, lovers writing to each other, friends exchanging news. I translated one. It read:
"Dearest Prithvi, the garden is blooming again. The jasmine you planted by the east wall has finally flowered — it took three years, as you predicted. I save a sprig for your return. Your mother sends her love and asks when you are coming home. The war feels far away from here, but the news makes it closer every day. Be safe. Be careful. Come back to the jasmine."
A letter from someone waiting for someone else to come home from a war. The most ordinary, universal, heartbreakingly human document in the history of any civilisation.
These were not monsters. These were people who grew jasmine and wrote letters and carved dolls for their children and cooked with spices and waited for the people they loved to come home.
And we had burned them. Every one. Every city, every library, every garden, every kitchen, every child's toy. We had burned them and then written songs about how righteous the burning was.
I sat in the preservation room, surrounded by the personal belongings of a dead civilization, and I wept. Not for the Asuras — though they deserved weeping. For myself. For the twenty-two years I'd spent believing in a lie so complete that it had become my identity.
I was a Deva soldier. That identity was built on a foundation of moral certainty — the certainty that we were right, that our wars were just, that our civilisation was the light of the world. Without that certainty, what was I?
A man in a uniform. Standing in the ruins of the people his uniform had destroyed.
Nothing more. Nothing less. And nothing would ever be the same.
