Elder Bahu gave her a torch, an old one, oil-fed, because he said the deep place ate electric light.
Elder Deva gave her his silence, which she understood was the closest he would come to wishing her well.
Her grandmother gave her a small wooden pendant on a cord, carved with the Vanara sun symbol, and held her face in both hands for a moment.
"You are exactly like your grandfather," Nalini said. "He also never listened to anyone."
"Did it work out for him?" Arya asked.
"No," Nalini said. "He died heroically. Try to do better."
The entrance to the beneath was behind the oldest altar in the eastern quarter — a flat stone panel that only moved when a Blood Memory carrier placed both hands on it and pushed. Arya had to push hard. The stone scraped back, revealing a staircase cut straight down into the earth, steep and narrow, smelling of mineral water and something older that had no name.
Meera had asked to come. Arya had said no.
Kavi, the young forest-department clerk, had also asked to come. Arya had said no.
Bahu had simply nodded, which she was fairly sure was his way of saying he would have come if his knees still worked.
She went alone.
The stairs went down for a long time.
The torchlight reached about four feet ahead and no further. Beyond that: dark. Not the dark of a room with the lights off. The dark of a place that had never had lights. A fundamental dark, the kind that made you understand why ancient people were afraid of the underground.
Arya kept moving.
At the bottom of the stairs: a cavern.
She lifted the torch.
The cavern was large — very large, bigger than felt possible, the ceiling somewhere far above the reach of the light. The walls were carved, floor to ceiling, with the same dense script she'd seen upstairs. But down here the carvings moved. Not fast. Very slowly. Like text being slowly rewritten.
In the center of the cavern floor: a circular platform, raised slightly. On the platform: a crack. Running from one side to the other, about four feet long, glowing faint orange-red from below, like a lit coal.
From the crack came a sound. Low. Rhythmic. Like breathing. But wrong.
Arya walked toward it.
The pressure in the air increased with every step. Her head began to ache. Her vision swam. Images crowded at the edges — the battlefield, the smoke, the grief — all the accumulated weight of unfinished war pushing up through the crack, looking for a way out.
She reached the platform.
She looked down at the crack.
Down there, very far below, something looked back.
Not with eyes. It didn't have those. But she felt looked at. She felt considered.
She felt it deciding.
