Kritya found me after the council meeting, sitting by the river, watching the water in the moonlight and trying to process the fact that I'd just volunteered for what was, by any reasonable assessment, a suicide mission.
"You're scared," she said, sitting beside me.
"I'm terrified."
"Good. Scared people make careful plans. Brave people make graves."
"That's morbid."
"I'm the daughter of a man who was killed by the god of thunder. Morbidity runs in the family."
I looked at her. In the moonlight, with the river noise around us and the forest breathing in the background, she looked less like a commander and more like what she was — a thirty-year-old woman carrying the weight of a dead civilisation, trying to build something alive from the ruins.
"What was he like?" I asked. "Vritra. Your father."
She was quiet for a long time. "He was gentle. That's what nobody knows. The Deva songs describe him as a monster — Vritra the Serpent, Vritra the Darkness, the dragon who blocked the rivers and threatened the world. In reality, he was a water engineer. The rivers he 'blocked' were dams — irrigation infrastructure for Asura farmland. Indra destroyed them not because they threatened the cosmic order, but because they diverted water from Deva-controlled territory."
"A water war."
"Dressed up as a divine crusade. My father fought because the alternative was watching his people's farms die. He was killed not in a duel of cosmic significance, but in a military engagement over water rights. And then the bards made it into a song, and the song made it into scripture, and the scripture made him into a demon." She picked up a stone and threw it into the river. "That's what the Deva machine does. It takes your father and turns him into a metaphor for evil. And then your children grow up not knowing who you actually were."
"You know."
"Because we kept the truth. Three hundred years, in exile, in hiding, in the dark — we kept the truth. And now it's time to share it."
She stood. "Get some sleep, Vrik. Tomorrow we start the work."
She walked back toward the settlement. I watched her go — this woman who carried the weight of history and the hope of a people and the specific, personal grief of a daughter whose father had been mythologised beyond recognition.
And I understood, with the clarity that comes at the intersection of moonlight and conviction, that I would follow her. Not because she ordered it. Not because the cause was just — though it was. But because she was the first leader I'd ever met who cared more about the truth than about being right.
In the Deva world, leadership was about certainty. About projecting an image of divine rightness that could never be questioned.
Kritya led by admitting she might be wrong and proceeding anyway. It was the bravest thing I'd ever seen.
