"Are you?" He almost smiled. Almost. "You've done in three months what the Asura Remnant hasn't managed in three centuries. You've made people question. That's a dangerous gift."
"The truth isn't a gift, Lord Indra. It's a debt. You owe it to the people you've been lying to."
The almost-smile disappeared. "Lying is a strong word."
"So is 'monster.' That's the word your historians used for an entire civilisation."
Silence. The crystal room reflected us infinitely — a thousand Vriks facing a thousand Indras, diminishing into the mirrored distance.
"Let me tell you something, Vrik," Indra said. He leaned forward — not aggressively, but with the posture of a man about to share something he'd been carrying alone. "I know the truth. I've always known it."
The room shifted. Not physically — the crystals didn't move, the light didn't change. But the emotional landscape of the conversation tilted, and I was suddenly on different ground.
"The Churning, the wars, the destruction of Tripura — I know what happened. Not the version in the Hall of Remembrance. The real version. Every Deva king learns the real version on the night they take the throne. It's part of the coronation — the Reading of the True Record. A private archive, sealed, known only to the sitting monarch."
"You've known for thirty years."
"I've known for thirty years that my civilisation was built on a conquest we rebranded as a divine mandate. That the Asuras were a people, not a plague. That the war was about resources, not righteousness."
"And you maintained the lie."
"I maintained the peace." His voice hardened. "Three hundred years of peace, Vrik. Three hundred years without a civilisational war. Do you know how rare that is? Do you know what happens when you tell a population of eight hundred million people that everything they believe is wrong? Not unrest. Not protests. Collapse. The Deva identity — the cultural, spiritual, political identity that holds the Three Realms together — is built on the foundational myth. Remove the foundation, and the building falls. On everyone inside it."
"Including the people living in the basement," I said. "The Remnant. The survivors. The five thousand people hiding in a forest because your foundational myth declared them subhuman."
"You think I don't know about the Remnant? I've known about Patala for fifteen years. I could have sent the army at any time. I didn't."
"Benevolence? From the man on the throne built from the ruins of their civilisation?"
"Pragmatism. The Remnant is small, isolated, and contained. They don't threaten the stability of the Realms. As long as they stay in their forest, the equation holds — the peace is maintained, the myth is preserved, and five thousand people survive in the margins."
"That's not survival. That's a cage with trees."
Indra stood. He was taller than me — significantly — and the movement was sudden enough to trigger the reflex of a soldier facing a superior. But he didn't approach. He walked to the wall and placed his hand on the quartz.
