It began with a breath.
Shallow. Unsettled. Wrong.
Devavrata sat cross-legged beneath a canopy of winter stars, surrounded by the unyielding quiet of Mahendra Parvata's sacred hollows. No beasts roamed here. No wind stirred the trees. It was a place where even silence feared to speak too loudly.
He inhaled slowly, trying to recall the first technique he'd ever learned as a boy
But it was gone.
Not forgotten, no. His mind knew the method. His body remembered the postures.
But his soul no longer answered.
The qi did not gather.
The breath did not spiral.
His dantian felt... foreign. Twisted. As though a thousand swords had been buried in its soil, leaving no space for anything to grow.
He tried again.
And again.
Until blood seeped from his nose, and his spine trembled beneath the weight of stillness.
His inner world, once a golden garden of flowing qi and soft currents, had become a crater—burnt, scarred, and echoing with weapon-names.
Agneyastra.
Varunastra.
Vāyavyastra.
Bhargavastra.
Each a brand upon the flesh of his spirit. Each screaming for release. Each whispering not peace—but purpose. Not ascension—but annihilation.
You do not cultivate, the Agneyastra hissed. You burn.
You do not refine, the Varunastra murmured. You drown.
You do not grasp, the Vāyavyastra whispered. You vanish.
You do not rise, the Bhargavastra thundered. You judge.
Devavrata clutched his chest. His breath became ragged. His vision swam.
There was no balance.
Only fury carved into form.
Only power without root.
He fell inward—into a vision not of his choosing.
He saw himself seated in lotus posture before a calm lake of silver qi. The surface was glass. Still. Waiting.
And from the shadows behind him, the astral forms of the astras emerged.
Not weapons—but gods.
The Agneyastra wore fire for skin and had no eyes.
The Varunastra was a figure of flowing robes and liquid sorrow.
The Bhargavastra had no form—only a throne made of bones and chains that bled fire.
They did not attack him.
They waited.
Because this was not their domain. It was his.
Or had been.
Then the Bhargavastra spoke—its voice like embers cracking inside a sealed tomb:
"You sealed me, prince.
But who sealed you?"
Devavrata approached the lake, trembling. He reached out to touch the surface, hoping to awaken the qi beneath. Hoping the golden lotus would return. That perhaps it had merely gone dormant.
But the moment his finger touched the water—the entire lake turned to ash.
No ripple. No resistance.
Just oblivion.
The gods laughed.
Not mockery. Not cruelty.
Recognition.
He had become them.
He was the lake of ash.
He was the sword where the soul should be.
Devavrata fell to his knees in the vision—and in the waking world too.
His breath came in broken shudders. The cold mountain air bit into his skin, but it could not numb the fire within.
He pressed his forehead to the ground, not in reverence—but in desperation.
"Please..." he whispered into the soil.
Not to Parashurama.
Not to any sage.
To Dharma itself.
Let me remember who I was before the war within.
Let me be more than a weapon. More than wrath given form.
Let me be worthy—not only of power, but of peace.
The mountain said nothing.
The stars turned their gaze.
But in the quiet that followed—something shifted.
A breeze.
Gentle. Barely felt.
Yet it carried a scent—jasmine and sandalwood, the memory of temples and childhood prayers.
His heart slowed.
His breath deepened.
And within the wreckage of his dantian, a single speck of gold light flickered.
Not an astra.
Not a curse.
Not power.
But hope.
A seed.
Unburnt.
Unbroken.
Waiting.
The nights grew longer.
Not with cold, nor shadow, but with a silence that felt too still, as if the stars themselves were holding their breath.
After the sealing of the Bhargavastra, something within Devavrata had unraveled—not all at once, but in slow, imperceptible threads. A quiet splintering beneath the surface.
It was not the body—his strength endured, honed by war and tempered by the countless astras now etched into his marrow.
Nor was it the mind—his clarity was sharp, his will like tempered steel.
But the soul…
The soul frayed at the edges like old silk worn through by the weight of celestial iron.
Each breath felt hollow.
Each attempt to circulate qi was like trying to draw water from a dry well.
He sat in meditation for hours, but his thoughts no longer flowed like rivers—they struck jagged walls, collapsing into static.
His spirit veins, once clear as a river of stars, now pulsed with interference—echoes of the Agneyastra's fire, the Vāyavyastra's shrieking winds, and above all… the Bhargavastra.
It was not merely a weapon. It was a karmic wound. A sealed wrath that slept within him like a chained beast, and even in its slumber, it hungered.
He could feel it—coiled in the pit of his being, like molten iron wrapped in grief.
As if the weapon resented being silenced.
As if part of him agreed.
A night came—cloudless, windless—when Devavrata collapsed in the hollow of the cave. Not from pain. Not from exhaustion.
But from a weight that did not belong to the physical world.
His hands trembled.
His breath grew shallow.
He curled inward—not from weakness, but from a vastness inside him he could not bear to face.
It felt as though the heavens had withdrawn from him.
As though the cosmos had passed him by—
And left behind a husk made not of flesh, but of judgment too heavy to carry.
And in that hollow, in that sacred silence where no mantra came and no flame answered his call, he remembered her.
Ganga.
The river not of water, but of memory.
She came to him—not in form, but in fragrance, in warmth, in the rhythm of the rain striking the rocks outside the cave.
He saw her face.
Not as the celestial torrent worshipped by realms.
But as the mother.
The one who combed his hair with fingers like moonlight.
The one who wrapped him in blue silks after his first fever.
The one who knelt beside him on stormy nights with a string of prayer-beads carved from starlit stones.
He remembered her voice.
Soft. Calm. Unshakeable.
"Before you master the heavens,"
"You must learn to walk barefoot on truth."
He remembered the days before cultivation.
When she would press his palms together and make him recite verses from the Atharva-chhandas, not for power, but for peace.
"The astras can break the world," she said, once brushing his cheek,
"But the world is not conquered by might, my son.
It yields only to those who listen."
She had taught him to listen.
To the wind between words.
To the stillness between thoughts.
To the breath that came not from lungs—but from soul.
But somewhere along the path—amid war, duty, and the fire of astras—he had forgotten.
Forgotten how to listen.
Forgotten how to be.
Now, that silence returned.
Not as punishment.
But as offering.
In the still cave beneath a sleeping mountain, with no answers and no escape, Devavrata reached inward—
Not to control.
Not to ascend.
But to remember.
And the first thing he heard…
Was his mother's breath
—echoing in his own.
Like a river beginning again.
Devavrata stopped trying to cultivate through force.
He ceased summoning qi like a general marshaling armies.
He no longer chased breakthroughs with clenched fists and burning eyes.
For the first time since the Bhargavastra had sealed itself inside him, he surrendered.
And in that surrender—he began to rebuild.
Each morning, before the first rays touched the high cliffs, he stood facing east with hands clasped—not in power, but in reverence—and recited the Sūkta of the Still Flame, a hymn older than dynasties, whispered once by a mendicant who claimed to hear the breath of creation itself in the silence between thunderclaps.
"Let the flame be still.
Let the stillness be flame.
In the pause between heartbeat and sky—
There dwells the name of the Unborn."
His voice did not thunder.
It did not echo.
It simply was.
A presence in the cave, neither reaching nor retreating.
He abandoned martial forms, abandoned the thousand stances etched into his muscle and memory. Instead, he walked.
Barefoot.
Through the spiraling labyrinths carved into the stone floor by monks who had long vanished into legend—paths of reflection, not conquest. Some led nowhere. Some circled back. All demanded stillness.
Each step became a breath.
Each breath a letting go.
Not of power, but of need.
By firelight, he unrolled forgotten scrolls gifted to him by Parashurama—texts he had once disregarded in favor of blade and astras.
They bore no diagrams of spirit veins, no esoteric symbols for elemental mastery.
Only words.
Truths.
Writings by sages who had never drawn swords, who never tamed beasts or hurled flames across battlefields. Philosophers who spoke not of power, but of its illusion.
_"To burn is easy," one scroll read,
"To refrain is divine."
Another:
"The blade does not kill;
The ego behind it does."
And yet another:
"To wield justice without judgment is to lift a mountain with no hands."
He read them by oil lamp, his eyes quiet, his heart heavy—but lighter each night.
He began to remember himself.
Not merely as heir to Hastinapura.
Not merely as the one blessed by Ganga or chosen by Parashurama.
But as something older.
As a witness to the movement of time.
And slowly—almost imperceptibly—the block lifted.
It did not break like chains.
It dissolved, like morning mist retreating before the sun.
His qi began to stir again.
But it did not rush like a river.
It listened.
It pulsed with a quiet rhythm, like the stillness of a well so deep, one could hear eternity echo in its bottomless dark.
He no longer commanded it.
He simply welcomed it.
There were no surges. No explosions of power.
Just…
Presence.
The kind that held mountains aloft.
The kind that made stars orbit in silence.
The kind Ganga once whispered of, when she said:
"Even the gods are born from stillness, my son.
So must you be."