It begins not with death——but with a contract.
Before there was The Undertaker, before there were whispers locked in books and curses sealed beneath gym floors, there was a man sitting beneath the boughs of a Bodhi tree, offering tea to a god he refused to worship.
His name was Anata Dharma.
And he had never once believed in the concept of good or evil.
Only information.
Jakarta, 1901.
A storm rolled above the city, the sky pulsing with heat lightning. Below it, the streets were thick with colonial dust and muttered prayers—prayers for rain, for freedom, for peace.
In the center of a forgotten temple courtyard, a single candle burned.
The man in the black robe sat cross-legged, ledger open, fountain pen steady.
He was writing.
Not spells.
Debts.
Every line on the page was a name. Every name had a story. And every story had a price.
That was the day he met the first Vessel of Avici Narak.
The old man arrived at twilight.
He wore the tattered remnants of Dutch military garb over ritual armor forged in the highlands. His right eye was missing, his left hand was scorched to the bone. And in his shadow: a flickering distortion that made the temple tremble.
"You've been watching me," the old man said.
Anata didn't look up.
"You burned a kingdom into the side of a mountain. Hard not to notice."
"I didn't burn it. He did."
"Ah. So we're doing the pronoun blame game now."
The distortion behind the old man sharpened—red and gold flame. Silent. Waiting.
"You know his name," the Vessel said.
"I know many," Anata replied, finally lifting his eyes. "But yours... that one begged to be remembered. Avici Narak."
The shadows stirred.
"Don't say it like that."
The voice—Avici's—rumbled from the lips of the old man, but it came from deeper. Below his ribs. Below time.
"Like I'm a curiosity. A line in your book."
"You're not in my book," Anata said. "You're not for sale."
A pause.
Then, surprisingly: a chuckle.
"Smart man."
"I know. That's why I live and everyone else dies."
"Is that what you think this is?" the Vessel said. "A numbers game? You hoard secrets, hide in graveyards, and pretend you're not playing the same game as us?"
Anata folded his ledger shut.
"I'm not pretending. I really don't care."
"Yet here you are."
"Curiosity."
"Curiosity gets people killed."
"No. Loyalty gets people killed. Curiosity just makes the corpse more interesting."
The silence between them stretched.
Then Avici stepped forward, fully forming through the body of his Vessel. The man's back straightened. His burnt hand pulsed with power. The temple walls cracked just from his presence.
He looked at Anata with eyes that had seen empires rise, fall, and burn from within.
"You know what's coming."
"Of course."
"And you won't stop it?"
"Why would I?" Anata asked. "If I interrupt the story, I don't get to read the ending."
"You're a snake."
"No. I'm the shelf the snake coils on. Don't confuse neutrality with cowardice."
The Vessel flinched.
Anata smiled.
"Besides," he added, "you're the one bound to a bloodline like a cursed heirloom. That's not exactly a free man's fate."
"I chose this."
"Did you? Or did you forget the part where he carved you into the world with a language older than grief?"
Avici said nothing.
Anata leaned forward.
"Tell me, Guardian. When your current bloodline forgets you—again—will you crawl back to me, begging to be remembered?"
"I will never beg."
"Then you will vanish."
The two stared at each other—Broker and Bound Flame. Keeper of Secrets versus Keeper of Oaths.
The rain started to fall.
Hard. Unforgiving.
And in that moment, Avici extended his burnt hand.
Anata took it.
Their pact was never spoken aloud. It didn't have to be.
Present Day.
Naraya Dharma International School.
A modern shrine built atop older sins.
Vicki Arana jolted upright in his dorm bed, gasping.
His heart was pounding.
And the voice inside his head?
Smirking.
"So… your great-great-grandfather had better banter than you."
"You're joking," Vicki whispered.
"He didn't whine every time I used his lungs. That's all I'm saying."
Vicki rubbed his face. The memory had been too clear. Too visceral.
"That really happened?"
"Every word. That was the first time I met Anata. He hasn't aged a day. Hasn't changed his jacket either."
"How is that possible?"
"He's not immortal. He's worse. He's interesting."
There was a knock on the window.
Vicki turned—and there, standing outside on the third-floor ledge, perfectly balanced in a stormcoat, holding a black umbrella...
Was Anata Dharma.
Smiling like he'd just placed a winning bet.
"Come along, Mr. Arana," he said through the glass.
"The second seal won't unbury itself."
Rain slicked down the windows of Naraya Dharma International School. It wasn't a dramatic storm—no thunder, no lightning. Just relentless sheets of rain that felt less like weather and more like a warning.
On the third floor, in a room too quiet for its own good, Vicki Arana stood frozen by the window.
Outside, calmly balancing on the narrow stone ledge, stood Anata Dharma—umbrella tilted, coat spotless, smile unchanged.
He gestured once. An invitation.
Then he turned and stepped off the ledge.
Vicki didn't scream. He didn't panic.
He moved.
Minutes later, Raka and Nayla found him sprinting down the back stairwell. No questions, no explanations.
Only urgency.
"He's here, isn't he?" Nayla asked, already adjusting her bag.
Vicki nodded.
"And he's taking us to the second seal."
They didn't take the main halls. They moved through unused corridors and side exits, past cleaning bots and flickering monitors.
Anata Dharma was always ten steps ahead.
He waited for them beneath the southern courtyard arch, holding a black leather folder and a cup of something that definitely wasn't coffee.
"You're late," he said as they approached.
"We weren't invited," Nayla shot back.
"You read the Archive," he replied. "That's invitation enough."
He turned and walked.
They followed.
The path led them underground—past maintenance hatches, beneath the amphitheater, through an old elevator shaft sealed off in 2008 "for renovations."
The door opened without a key.
Inside was a mirror.
Floor to ceiling. No dust. No reflection.
"This," Anata said, "is the entrance."
"To what?" Vicki asked.
"To the Reflected Sanctum," Anata replied. "Where the second seal sleeps."
"How do we get through?" Raka asked.
"With knowledge. Always with knowledge."
Anata stepped aside and turned his gaze toward the ceiling.
"You may speak now, Bound Flame. I know you've been listening."
There was a beat of silence.
Then—
"You always were too perceptive for your own good."
The voice filled the room—not loud, but thick. Resonant. Avici spoke from somewhere inside Vicki's skull, but the mirror pulsed as if reacting to his presence.
Anata smiled.
"And you, Avici Narak. Still clinging to your favorite host like a parasite in a suit of pride."
"Coming from the man who stitched himself into eternity by blackmailing a library, that's rich."
"I prefer 'brokered immortality through legal ambiguity.'"
"You always were allergic to honesty."
"And you were always obsessed with loyalty. How's that working out for you? Oh right—you're a whisper inside a high schooler's head."
"I could end you."
"You tried. Twice. Remember Kyoto?"
A pause. Then, almost amused:
"You cheated."
"I bargained. That's different."
Vicki rubbed his temples.
"Are you two done measuring each other's ancient trauma?"
Anata chuckled.
"Just reminiscing. Nothing like a few centuries of unresolved ego."
The mirror began to hum.
It rippled—like water reacting to sound. Then a shape emerged.
A door.
Carved into the mirror's surface, etched in shifting glyphs that glowed as they aligned into readable form.
"Only one of you may enter," Anata said. "For now."
"Why?" Nayla asked.
"Because the reflection doesn't allow multiple versions of the same truth. If more than one enters, the mirror fractures. And when the mirror breaks…"
"Reality bleeds," Avici finished.
Anata nodded.
"Send the Vessel."
Vicki exhaled.
"So I just walk in?"
"No," Anata said. "You accept."
The glyphs reformed into a single word.
"REMEMBER."
Vicki reached out and pressed his palm to the mirror.
The surface swallowed him whole.
Inside was light.
Too bright. Too clinical.
It was a hallway—mirror on all sides, no doors, no end.
Every surface reflected a different version of Vicki.
Young. Older. Broken. Laughing. Bleeding. Burning.
Each reflection whispered something different. Each one told a lie that felt like truth.
He walked.
Until he saw it.
At the center of the hallway—hovering just above a cracked tile—floated the second seal.
It was smaller than the one beneath the gym. Sleeker. Built like a compass with rings of red crystal orbiting a frozen flame.
And behind it—his own reflection. Except…
It smiled.
Wrong.
"I am what you forget when you lie to yourself," the reflection said.
"I am the echo of every repressed scream. I am you—unbound."
It lunged.
Back outside, the mirror shattered slightly at the edges.
Anata stepped back.
"Oh. That's new."
Nayla grabbed the hilt of a weapon hidden in her sleeve.
"What's happening to him?"
Anata adjusted his cufflinks.
"He's meeting the part of himself that refused to forget."
Raka clenched his fists.
"And if he loses?"
Anata smiled again.
"Then I suppose he'll need a new Vessel to whisper in."
Inside the sanctum. Vicki stood still.
The mirror-version of himself snarled back at him—same face, same height, but with one crucial difference.
The eyes.
Not his.
They burned black and red, flickering like dying stars.
This wasn't a reflection.
This was an inversion.
The copy raised its hand. Runes crawled up its wrist—ancient, dissonant, written in a script that throbbed with hunger.
"I am the you that remembers too much," the shadow hissed.
"And I'm the one who survived," Vicki spat back.
He reached deep—deeper than his lungs, deeper than muscle.He found it. The thread of flame coiled inside his soul.
And he spoke the name that cracked the silence.
"AVICI NARAK."
The seal beneath his feet responded.Red surged through the floor, forming a mandala of flame, and the world held its breath.
Then—
Vicki's body lifted an inch from the ground.
Eyes ignited.
Back arched.
Avici entered.
"Finally."
The Bound Flame stepped forward now, in full control.
His voice echoed against mirrored walls, his footsteps left scorch marks on glass.
He looked at the twisted doppelgänger, and exhaled slowly.
"Let's see what lies your shadow tells."
But the reflection only grinned wider.
Then it lifted its arms and whispered:
"Arvanu Shura."
The lights dimmed.
The mirrors cracked.
And something else arrived.
It didn't descend.It surfaced—as if reality had been hiding it just beneath the veneer of reflection.
A second flame ignited.
But this was not red.
It was void-colored—black tinged with metallic violet, burning inwards instead of out.
Where Avici radiated discipline, honor, and rage, Arvanu Shura bled freedom, mockery, and betrayal.
He stepped through the mirror wearing Vicki's face—but smiling wrong.
"Oh. You again," Arvanu Shura drawled. "Still reciting your little war-poems, Avici?"
"And you're still hiding in mirrors, pretending you were ever worthy of the covenant."
"I didn't break it, old friend. I rewrote it."
The seal chamber ruptured.
Time dilated.
Glass shattered in patterns of sacred geometry.
Then—both leapt.
Avici opened with a blade of flame, forged mid-air by sigils drawn with two fingers.
"Ka'ren Tal'sha — Flame of Oath!"
Arvanu Shura answered with a whip of black chain, barbed and alive.
"Vorith Nih-Hal!"
The chain wrapped around the blade—imploding it into embers.
Avici moved faster—disappeared into a shimmer-step, appearing above his enemy with both hands raised.
A circle of red fire bloomed around him as he chanted in a tongue Vicki didn't recognize.
"Nathir kal sha'thun vo'rei—SAHVAR."
Twelve flaming runes descended from the ceiling like divine executioners.
But Arvanu just laughed.
"You're still playing by the rules."
He clapped once.
The ground beneath them flipped.
Gravity reversed.
Now they were fighting on the ceiling of the mirrored world, and reflections of their past fights flickered like ghosts behind every panel.
Avici recovered mid-air, spun into a vortex kick, and flung three sigils like knives.
"Re'vas-tor!"
Arvanu dodged them, but one grazed his shoulder.
He hissed.
"Careful, Guardian. You're chipping my vessel."
"He'll recover."
"Will he?"
Arvanu raised both hands now—and mirrors all around them began to bleed.
Vicki saw it. Scenes pouring out of glass like reverse waterfalls.
Each scene was a memory—
The first time Vicki got detention.
The moment he saw Naila disappear.
The first time he heard Avici's name.
"You feel that?" Arvanu whispered. "That's your soul, unraveling."
He plunged his arm into a mirror and pulled out a weapon made of memory—a jagged staff forged from Vicki's regret.
Avici narrowed his eyes.
"You'll break the vessel."
"Maybe. But we'll finally be free."
They clashed again.
This time the battle echoed like thunder trapped in a glass tomb.
Magic fractured light itself.
Spells twisted the concept of color.
Fire met void, oath met betrayal.
And the mirrors cracked further.
One by one.
Until—
CRACK.
The ceiling above them—one of the largest mirrors—shattered.
And on the other side of that break... was something watching.
Not human.
Not even sentient.
Just hungry.
A presence. Coiled and ancient.
Narakasura.
Still sealed. Still dreaming.
But now—aware.
Arvanu Shura turned.
He grinned.
"He sees you now."
Avici froze for a second.
"No... Not yet. The seals aren't fully broken."
"No," Arvanu said. "But the cracks are enough."
Then he stabbed the memory-weapon into the mirror beneath them.
And everything began to collapse.
Outside the Sanctum, Anata Dharma felt it.
The ripple. The fracture. The hunger.
He closed his eyes.
"The second seal is destabilizing."
Nayla stepped forward.
"Can we stop it?"
Anata smiled faintly.
"No."
Raka looked panicked.
"Then what do we do?"
Anata turned his head slightly, eyes glowing faintly violet.
"We hope the Vessel makes it out before the mirror forgets what a 'door' is."
Inside, Vicki—half-lost in the swirling memory-storm—heard Avici's voice inside his head again.
"We must sever the tether. If the seal breaks now, Narakasura will wake through the wrong body."
"Then what do I do?"
"You do what I can't."
"You let go."
Vicki reached toward the falling mirror.
Everything blurred.
Flame, shadow, glass, time.
He screamed—
"ARANA—! AVICI NARAK—!"
And then—
Silence.