The journey through the Naraka Wastes took six days.
Six days of grey dust, of dead earth, of walking through the cremation ground of a civilisation and trying not to think about the fact that every step covered ground where someone had once lived, worked, dreamed. The Wastes were vast — a hundred leagues of nothing, or what appeared to be nothing. Beneath the surface, I knew now, were the bones of cities. Libraries. Gardens that had bloomed in every season.
On the fourth day, the landscape changed. The grey ash thinned, and beneath it, I saw colour — green, faint at first, then stronger. Grass. Real, living grass, pushing up through centuries of death like a fist through plaster. By the fifth day, there were trees — not the manicured gardens of Amaravati, but wild growth, thick and tangled, the kind of forest that happens when nature has been left alone long enough to forget that humans exist.
On the sixth day, they found me.
I say "found" and not "captured" because the distinction matters. I was walking through a forest so dense that the canopy blocked the sun, navigating by Dhara's map and the compass she'd given me, when I became aware that I was not alone. Not through sound — the forest was full of sound, birds and insects and the particular rustle of leaves that happens when wind moves through a canopy. Through sensation. The feeling of being observed. Studied. Assessed.
They materialised from the trees. Not literally — no magic, no supernatural fading-in. They simply stepped out of positions where they'd been standing, motionless and invisible, blending with the forest through a combination of dark clothing, body paint, and the particular discipline of people who'd been hiding from the most powerful military force in the Three Realms for three hundred years.
Five of them. Three men, two women. Armed — short bows, curved blades, and something I didn't recognise: a device worn on the wrist, metallic, glowing faintly with the same blue light I'd seen in the library. Asura technology, still functioning.
They were different from Devas. I'd expected this — the illustrations in the library had shown me what Asura people looked like — but seeing it in the flesh was different from seeing it on a page. Their skin was darker, not the warm brown of Deva complexions but a deeper tone, like polished teak. Their features were sharper — high cheekbones, strong jaws, eyes that were darker and set deeper, beneath brow ridges that gave their faces a quality of permanent intensity. The women had the same features — angular, striking, without the softness that Deva aesthetics considered essential to femininity.
They were, I realized, the faces from the propaganda murals. The faces I'd been taught to fear since childhood. And standing in front of them, in their forest, as a trespasser from the civilisation that had destroyed theirs, I felt not fear but shame.
