*As Rudra reads aloud a single phrase—Ashta-Kala awakens in silence—he experiences a brief vision: a blindfolded corpse whispering backward mantras from a riverbank. His nose begins to bleed. The candlelight flickers unnaturally. He stuffs the manuscript in his satchel, disoriented.
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The cold came first. Not the chill of the room, but something inner—a sudden absence in the back of his throat, like the aftertaste of burnt offerings. Rudra wiped the blood from his upper lip with his sleeve, eyes darting around the room.
Nothing moved.
The figure—if it had ever truly been there—had left no trace. No footprint. No scent. Not even the faint dissonance a presence usually leaves in space.
But Rudra felt it. As though a hand had pressed against his back and left behind a residue that wasn't physical.
He drew a breath. Counted.
One. Two. Three. The blood stopped.
He checked the palm-leaf manuscript again. The phrase glowed faintly in the lantern light, now pulsing as if alive.
He slammed shut his notebook and carefully wrapped the manuscript in a cloth scrap from his satchel. He hesitated for a moment, then reached into the drawer beneath his desk and retrieved a small square of tin—an old Shiv Yantra plate his mother had given him when he was twelve.
He didn't believe in its protection. But tonight, he didn't not believe in it either.
Tucking both objects into his satchel, Rudra extinguished the lantern and closed the box of manuscripts. He paused at the base of the stairs.
Something creaked above.
Footsteps.
He froze.
Not rats. Not wood settling.
Shoes. Slow. Heavy.
There was no one else in the building. He had personally locked the front door at sundown.
He ascended the narrow stairwell, careful not to let the steps creak beneath him. The smell of ash still clung to him, stronger now. Not like cigarette smoke—older. Temple pyres.
As he reached the main hall, he glimpsed candlelight flickering along the hallway wall to his right. The reading room.
He turned the corner.
A thin trail of soot led into the room like a string unspooled.
He stepped forward.
The door was ajar.
The air was still. The smell—iron and burnt flowers.
He pushed the door open.
The head archivist, Mr. Ganguly, lay sprawled across the floor like a fallen statue.
His eyes were gone.
Two dark pits where they'd been.
His mouth had been sewn shut with red thread—neatly, almost ritually, in a pattern Rudra recognized from ancient depictions of self-mummified monks.
Rudra's first instinct was to flee. But something kept him still.
At the edge of Mr. Ganguly's body, in a perfect ring of soot, was a symbol scratched into the parquet floor.
Eight spokes. A wheel.
Each spoke ended in an eye.
The Ashta-Kala Chakra.
Rudra's breath caught.
His fingers moved before thought could stop them. He knelt and reached toward the symbol.
The moment his fingertip brushed the soot, something entered him.
Not like possession. More like an echo.
He heard his own voice speaking—not aloud, but inside his skull, loud as a temple bell.
"Om karoti netram. Sa bindu dasha. Karuna prabhruta—"
It wasn't any mantra he'd studied. But he understood it. Wordlessly. It pressed meaning into his brain like a seal into wax.
He pulled back. The chant stopped.
He wiped away the soot with his sleeve. The eyes vanished.
Police whistles echoed faintly from the street outside.
Instinct took over. Rudra fled back down the hall, heart pounding, mind racing.
He didn't remember stuffing the manuscript deeper into his satchel. But when he reached his room that night—sweating, ears ringing, hands shaking—he found it safely there.
And now, the charred page bore a new mark:
A single bloody fingerprint, seared into its center.
It wasn't his.