Six Years Gone.
Hastinapura—crown of the Kuru bloodline, citadel of dharma, heart of Aryavarta—stood tall, but not proud.
The city of kings still gleamed with its timeless veneer. Towers of ivory and marble rose like spears against the blue sky, their tips crowned in gold leaf and garlands woven by temple virgins and blessed by the priests of the Vasishta lineage. Flags of crimson and sapphire snapped in the wind, bearing the sigils of ancient victories. The seven concentric walls still stood unbreached since the days of Emperor Bharata, their sandstone hearts humming faintly with the echoes of Vedic mantras embedded into the very mortar.
The silver drums still rang out at dawn—four strikes to mark the rising of Surya, one each for the four directions—echoing from the temple domes to the palace towers, from the lotus pools of the outer courts to the darkened chambers where treaties and betrayals were sealed in silence.
On the surface, nothing had changed.
But underneath?
The soul of the kingdom had begun to fray.
Not in rebellion.
But in slow betrayal.
Though six years had passed since he vanished with Parasurama into the womb of the earth, Devavrata looked almost untouched by time.
His stride had the same balance it once held in the training yards of Hastinapura—measured, graceful, and grounded like the still center of a storm. His posture remained regal but unboastful, the natural poise of someone born to command but taught to bow.
But for all his absence from the mortal world, time had not engraved its usual toll.
His face was lean, chiseled by discipline, but bore no lines of weariness. His skin retained the bronze of a Kshatriya, forged beneath both sun and starlight—yet without sunburn or the blemish of fatigue. His hair, mostly still midnight-dark and tied in a warrior's knot at the crown, now bore the faintest streaks of white—not from age, but from arcane strain. With each astra mastered, each divine mantra etched into his marrow, a strand of his hair lost its darkness. The celestial energies reshaped his spirit—and his form. These silver threads were not signs of decay, but the marks of a mortal touching truths too vast for flesh.
Only his eyes betrayed change.
Where once there had been fire—bright, ambitious, commanding—now there was depth.
Not the kind that seeks to dazzle, but the kind that pulls.
Looking into them felt like staring into a river that ran both forward and backward in time—past, present, and the flickering breath of what might be. Beneath that gaze, some courtiers found themselves shifting uncomfortably. Not out of guilt. But recognition. Recognition of a scale of existence they had forgotten they lived beneath.
He looked the same.
Yet nothing about him was the same.
Devavrata's physical form had not changed because he had transcended the need to age.
At the level of Void Ascension, the body no longer bent to the passage of time in the same way. The soul nourished the flesh, and the spirit refined it like a flame scouring away weakness. Decay, though still real, was no longer dominant.
He returned like a still reflection in an unchanged lake—but if one reached into the water, they would find it ran far deeper now.
This was not the return of a prince.
It was the return of a storm that had never truly left.
Hastinapura was still radiant—but beneath the ivory shine of its spires, something had begun to curdle.
Devavrata's absence had stretched from weeks into months, then from years into something worse: uncertainty. And uncertainty was a poison that did not kill openly—it seeped.
Behind the ornamental grace of its council chambers and sanctified temples, the palace had grown hollow in spirit. Like a man with a perfect posture and a bleeding gut, Hastinapura stood—but with pain beneath every gesture.
Secret councils had begun to form, cloaked in the fragrance of incense and the excuse of administration. In the lower corridors, once meant only for storage and servants, the footsteps of nobles now echoed after dusk. Scrolls passed in silence. Fingers traced the crests of old alliances.
The older ministers remembered Devavrata's eyes—how silence fell before them like dry leaves before fire. But the younger lords, sons of dukes and cousins of barons, had grown bold in his absence. Too young to recall the weight of his presence, and too ambitious to believe in his return.
In one such gathering, lit only by the cold glow of moonlight through lattice screens, a voice whispered:
"He has been gone too long. And even should he return—who's to say he deserves the throne now?"
Another, older, but wearied by years of watching the court shift with every wind, murmured:
"The king has aged. He waits only for his son. But a kingdom cannot wait forever."
A third, draped in robes marked with the sigil of the Western Marches, spoke what many had begun to feel:
"If Devavrata truly wished the throne, he would not have left it untended. The law is loyalty—but dharma demands action. If he will not return, then someone must rule."
There was no talk of rebellion. Not openly. Only policy. Pragmatism. Possibilities.
But in every word, there was betrayal.
And above, in the highest chambers of the citadel, Shantanu sat in silence. His once-commanding figure now thinner, his crown often left unworn on a stand beside his bed. He stared often at the river's direction, lips moving in prayer—whether for his son's return or for forgiveness, none could say.
He had not held court in weeks.
And the throne room, once the storm-eye of Aryavarta's greatest judgments, had grown quieter.
But fate, like fire, does not wait forever.
And neither did Devavrata.
The storm was coming home.