She was right. She was almost always right, which was something I was beginning to find both admirable and slightly annoying.
I translated for fourteen hours a day. My back screamed. My eyes blurred. My hand cramped around the stylus until I had to pry my own fingers open with my other hand. But the work — the pure, grinding, exhilarating work of converting one civilization's words into another's — was the most meaningful thing I'd ever done.
Because with every page I translated, a piece of the truth became accessible. A piece of Asura history stepped out of the darkness and into a language that millions of people could read. I was building a bridge, word by word, between two worlds that had been at war for so long that they'd forgotten they were once neighbours.
On day seven, the scouts reported.
The Deva expedition had left Amaravati early. They weren't two weeks out — they were five days. Moving faster than expected, with a larger force: five hundred soldiers, not three hundred, plus mantric specialists and — this was the part that made my blood freeze — a Destruction Corps.
The Destruction Corps was Indra's personal division, specialising in the obliteration of structures, artifacts, and — if necessary — populations that threatened the stability of the realm. They didn't investigate. They didn't preserve. They erased. When the Destruction Corps was deployed, it meant the High Council wasn't interested in what the Wastes contained. They were interested in making sure nobody else ever found it.
Five days. We needed ten. The mathematics of the situation was simple and devastating: we would not finish.
Kritya called an emergency council. The debate was shorter this time — urgency compresses democracy. The decision: accelerate. Twenty-hour shifts. All available personnel. Prioritise the most critical texts and abandon the rest.
"What about the library?" I asked.
"We can't save it," Kritya said. The words cost her — I could see it in her face, the particular pain of someone who is pragmatic enough to sacrifice something sacred. "We save what we can carry. The rest..."
"They'll burn it."
"They'll burn it. They'll burn every book, every crystal, every carved stone. The way they burned the cities. The way they burned Tripura." Her voice was steady but her hands — I noticed this, because I was watching her hands the way I'd been watching them for days — were gripping the edge of the table so hard her knuckles had gone pale.
