That morning, the air on the mountain did not move.
Devavrata sat beneath the Judgment Rock, where the sigils of ages past had long faded into the stone. Void Ascension had left no marks on the earth—only within him. He had tasted formlessness and returned not as someone greater, but someone emptied. A stillness now dwelled behind his eyes, deeper than words, deeper than breath.
He had become a quiet place in a loud world.
Parashurama approached without sound, though the wind finally stirred with his steps. The old master sat cross-legged across from him and offered a rare sight: a crooked, amused smile.
"You're not glowing, boy," Parashurama grunted. "For all the drama the Void stirs in legends, I expected sparks."
Devavrata chuckled softly, the motion almost alien to his post-ascension stillness. "Perhaps enlightenment has better manners than we thought."
Parashurama barked a laugh and leaned back, watching a hawk wheel overhead.
"Good. You can still joke. Means you're not completely consumed."
Silence lingered for a moment. Then his gaze darkened—not in anger, but in gravity.
"I know what you've felt, boy. The Void... it does not give. It strips away until what remains cannot be denied. You're not who you were before. And you never will be again."
Devavrata's breath slowed, as though something inside him remembered how to ache.
"I thought… after Void Ascension… I would understand more, … Remember" he said. "But parts of me remain hidden. I feel them. Like sealed doors in my mind. One of them… screams like a sealed door I can't open."
Parashurama, still seated with arms folded beneath the old pine tree, opened one eye.
"Remember what?"
A vision shimmered behind Devavrata's eyes: a silent battlefield drowned in twilight, his hand clutching a blade blackened by karma, surrounded by echoes of names he could no longer bear to speak.
Not a dream. Not a memory.
A warning.
"There are fragments inside me," Devavrata said. "Not dreams. Not memories. Visions. I can feel them… behind the Bhargavastra's seal. But when I reach for them, they vanish like mist. And something inside me recoils."
Parashurama leaned forward, his tone no longer casual.
"You were never meant to remember them. Not yet."
Devavrata looked up. "Why?"
The sage's eyes were distant now, as if watching something through time.
Parashurama opened his mouth—and paused.
His eyes, ancient and unwavering, shimmered with something almost tender. Not pity. Not regret. But the ache of someone who once tried to forget the same truth.
"Because they are not memories of your past, Devavrata. They are echoes of your future."
A hush fell between them, as even the wind stilled to listen.
"When you accepted the Bhargavastra," Parashurama said, "you weren't merely inheriting a weapon. You were offered a glimpse. The astra carries more than power—it carries vision. And what it showed you... was what you would become if judgment ruled you. What would happen when law turned against dharma. Who you would be… and what you would lose."
Devavrata's brows knit. "Then why seal it?"
"Because fate," Parashurama answered, "must never be known before its time."
He stood slowly, brushing pine needles from his cloak.
"Even Void Ascension cannot pierce those memories. That's the nature of the Bhargavastra's seal—it doesn't just lock away power. It hides knowledge that the world is not ready for. Not even you."
Devavrata closed his eyes, the weight of unrealized destiny pressing on his breath.
"So I walk forward… without knowing the cost."
Parashurama smiled faintly, though it did not reach his eyes.
"Every warrior does."
He turned, but paused.
"But the day may come when those memories unlock themselves. Not through cultivation. Not through strength. But because the moment written in them has arrived."
Devavrata opened his eyes again, steady.
"And when that day comes?"
Parashurama looked over his shoulder.
"Then you'll understand what it means to wield judgment not as a weapon… but as a wound."
The sage stood slowly and tapped Devavrata's forehead lightly with two fingers.
"Void Ascension gave you the stillness to hold power. But the Bhargavastra demands reckoning. And that's a storm no teacher can walk you through."
Devavrata opened his eyes. "Then what remains for me to learn?"
Parashurama grinned. "Everything else that could kill you."
Parashurama summoned him and led him deep into the ranges beyond the Ashvattha forests, where mortal feet had never stepped and divine beasts dared not linger. They descended through chasms older than language, passed waterfalls that fell not with water but with time—each drop echoing an age.
And then, at the base of the world, they arrived.
The Womb of Earth.
A valley encased in obsidian cliffs, veiled in perpetual twilight, where the stars above were not reflections of the sky, but memories carved into stone. Here, even echoes were shy, refusing to intrude.
Here, nothing was loud.
Not even the truth.
They came to a circle of ancient runes—Bhargava script so old that it pulsed rather than shone—and at its heart sat a brazier carved from a single slab of primordial granite. Within it burned no ordinary fire.
This flame did not consume.
It remembered.
Its tongues flickered in silence, white and violet and ghost-blue, as though fed by spirit, not wood—memories of long-dead sages, warriors, monsters.
Parashurama sat. Not as a master. As a witness.
He gestured for Devavrata to join him.
"You've already grasped the outer forms of Astras that I taught you," Parashurama said, his voice detached from time itself. But there are others.
Deeper. Older.
Bound not in scroll or chant, but sealed in silence by those who saw what they could undo.
Weapons that do not merely slay—but unravel.
Summon one upon the surface, and mountains fracture. Summon two, and oceans forget their tides. Summon them all… and reality itself may fracture beyond repair."
He looked into the brazier's haunted flame.
"This place was carved from beneath fate, beyond the reach of gods, so that these astras may be remembered without being released.
Only here can their names be spoken without consequence. Only here can I show them—if you are ready to bear their memory, but never their pride."
He turned to Devavrata, and for a moment, the weight of all the ages he carried creased his face.
"The world will not thank you for knowing them.
But one day, it may survive because you did."
"You've wielded the first four," Parashurama said, his voice unbound from time. Agneyastra, Varunastra, Vāyavyastra, Bhargavastra."
Devavrata nodded, but said nothing.
"They bent to your will," Parashurama continued. "But that is not the same as understanding them."
He leaned forward, eyes glowing faintly in the reflection of the memory-flame.
"Not truly.
Not the way a soul must understand fire before it dares to call it friend."
Devavrata felt something stir behind his sternum—an ache, old and unspoken. A weight he'd felt since his Void Ascension: the sense that something had awakened within him, but not fully.
Parashurama reached into the brazier.
His hand did not burn.
Instead, the flame parted like mist, and from it rose visions—moments from lifetimes past, echoes of battles yet to come, and whispers of truths that could not be unlearned.
"These are not weapons," Parashurama said.
"They are principles. And when the time comes… they will be the choices that make or unmake you."
"There was once a blade," Parashurama said, "forged by monks in a land that no longer has a name. It could sever cause from effect. One man wielded it to save his people—and became a god. Another wielded it to judge his brother—and became forgotten."
"Not all power liberates. Some isolates. Some scars the sky."
And in the deep recess of Devavrata's heart, a line whispered by his mother long ago returned to him—soft as moonlight on still water:
"The gods do not rise to judge us.
They kneel beside us… when we choose."
Parashurama extended his palm over the brazier. The memory-flame trembled.
A whisper rose—not of voice, but of soul. A vision bloomed within the smoke.