Amaravati looked different from the inside when you'd seen it from the ruins of what it had destroyed.
The white quartz walls still glowed. The concentric rings still climbed the plateau. The Vajra Throne still dominated the skyline like a fist made of light. But now I saw it the way a patient sees a hospital after learning their diagnosis — the same building, but every surface carrying a different meaning.
The escort was ceremonial — six soldiers in full dress armour, the white-and-gold of Indra's personal guard. They'd met me at the eastern gate, which meant my arrival was public. People stared. Not many recognized me — a blacksmith's son from the lower quarters doesn't carry much name recognition — but the escort told them this was someone important, or at least someone the king considered worth fetching.
The Vajra Throne was even more overwhelming from inside than from outside. The throne room was carved from a single piece of quartz — floor, walls, ceiling, all one continuous surface, polished to a mirror finish that reflected the light from a thousand mantric lamps. The effect was vertigo-inducing: the room seemed to extend infinitely in all directions, a palace of light with no edges.
In the centre, on a throne that looked less like furniture and more like a geological event — a jagged, crystalline eruption from the floor, sharp-edged and magnificent — sat Indra.
He was not what the murals depicted. The murals showed a young man, golden-skinned, with flowing hair and a body like a Greek sculpture. The real Indra was older — fifty, perhaps, with grey at the temples and lines around his eyes that came from decades of ruling rather than decades of living. He was tall, still powerfully built, but the power was contained rather than displayed. He wore simple white — no armour, no crown, no visual markers of divinity. Just a man on a throne, watching me approach.
"Vrik," he said. His voice was resonant — the kind of voice that fills a room without trying, that makes you listen even when you don't want to. "The soldier who found the library."
"Lord Indra."
"Sit."
There was a chair opposite the throne — smaller, lower, positioned so that anyone sitting in it would have to look up. A psychological arrangement. I sat anyway. Looking up at tyrants was still easier than kneeling to them.
"You've been busy," Indra said. He didn't sound angry. He sounded... interested. The way a chess player sounds when an opponent makes an unexpected move. "One hundred and sixty-seven Asura texts, translated and distributed across the Three Realms. My intelligence division is very frustrated with you."
"I'm sorry to inconvenience them."
