G5

In the older texts — the ones written before the empire, before the current understanding of cultivation, before even the great wars of the Second Age — there was a phenomenon referred to as Sapta-Nakshatra Sangam: the Convergence of the Seven Stars. The astronomers of the Parakrama Rajya had tracked its approach for eleven years. They had published careful papers. They had presented their findings to the imperial court. They had explained, in measured scholarly language, that this alignment of seven specific stars — not a constellation in the common understanding, but seven stars scattered across different positions in the sky that would, for precisely one night, form a perfect geometric pattern visible from any point on the subcontinent — occurred once every thousand and twelve years. They had not, in their carefully measured scholarly language, mentioned what the old texts said would happen when it did. The astronomers were, on the whole, sensible people. They had families. They had appointments to maintain. On the night of the alignment, the sky above all of India blazed. It began an hour after midnight — a subtle brightening, the kind that makes sleeping people turn over and waking people look up with mild confusion. Then the seven stars, one by one, seemed to swell, as though whatever burned inside them had suddenly remembered how to burn properly. The light they cast was not moonlight-silver or sunlight-gold but something between the two — amber-white, warm, the colour of firelight seen through closed eyes. In Mritika village, Arjun was awake. He had not been sleeping well since the mark appeared, and he had taken to sitting outside in the small hours, watching the sky and trying to make the mark on his palm stop pulsing by sheer force of will. He was not succeeding. When the seven stars brightened, he felt it in his chest before he saw it with his eyes. Like something striking a bell inside his ribcage. A single, pure tone, felt rather than heard. Then the sky above him cracked open. Not literally — there was no sound, no physical rupture. But in Arjun's perception, the sky changed, as though a second sky existed beneath the first and the gap between them had momentarily become transparent. He could see, or feel, or somehow perceive — there was no word in any language he knew that covered the exact sensation — a vast network of lines of energy passing through the earth beneath him, through the air around him, through the stars above. And running through the centre of this network, like a river of fire, a path. Agni Marga. The Path of Fire. He understood this the way you understand things in dreams — completely, without knowing how the knowledge arrived. The mark on his palm flared so bright that it cast shadows. Then the pain hit him, and he went down. — In Suryapura, Vikram was in his room at the inn, sitting at the small table with the archivist's notes spread before him, reading about the Agni Marga for the third consecutive night. He was cross-referencing Bhaskar's translations with what he had been able to find in the Guild library — not much, because the Guild library contained primarily what the empire found convenient to remember, and the Agni Marga was evidently not one of those things. What he had pieced together: Agni Marga was not a sword style. It was not a cultivation technique in the conventional sense. It was something older — a path, an alignment, a way of moving through the world that had been practiced in the age before cultivation was systematised and bureaucratised and sold in tiered manuals. And it required four practitioners. Always four. Each representing one of the four Mahabhutas — earth, wind, water, and space. He was studying this when the stars blazed. The light came through his window — amber-white, impossible — and the mark on his wrist became fire. Not metaphorical fire. Real heat, expanding from the inside, as though something in his wrist was trying to wake up. Vikram was, constitutionally, not someone who panicked. He gripped the edge of the table and breathed with the measured rhythm his sensei had taught him, and held himself together through thirty seconds of sensation that felt like his arm was being unmade and remade by something vast and utterly indifferent to his preferences. Then it passed. He was kneeling on the floor without remembering how he'd gotten there. On the table, the papers had scattered. One of them had landed face-up — a page of Bhaskar's notes, the section about what happened when all four practitioners received the mark at the same moment. The text said: they will find each other. Nothing on earth will prevent it. Vikram read this twice. Then he began, systematically, to pack. — In the dry foothills north of the Vindhyas, Kiran was making camp beside a cold fire when the sky lit up. He had seen unusual celestial phenomena before — the hermitage was at high altitude, and the skies were clear, and Guru Paramananda had spent many evenings pointing out the movements of stars and planets and explaining their significance in the old cosmological texts. He knew about the Sapta-Nakshatra Sangam. He had not expected to see it. When the mark on his arm activated, he was already sitting cross-legged in the meditative position his master had taught him, which was fortunate, because the sensation that followed would have knocked him over otherwise. It was not pain, for Kiran. It was more like being filled. Like a vessel that had been empty suddenly receiving something that was meant for it — enormous, rushing, overwhelming, but not wrong. Not intrusive. The energy that flowed through him in those thirty seconds felt like his own life-energy but larger, older, shaped differently, like a river compared to a trickle. When it was done, he sat in the dark for a long time, breathing. The wave-symbol on his arm was bright enough now to read by. By its light, he opened the Roga-Shastra and found a page he had read before but not fully understood. A footnote, in the old script his master had taught him to read: When the four are marked, the path between them becomes a living thing. Trust it. Walk toward the warmth. He looked at his arm. Then he looked south and east. The mark was warmer in that direction. Significantly warmer. He slept for three hours and started walking before dawn. — In Nandagram, on the road east, Rahu saw the sky change and felt the mark in his palm turn from a mild warm pulse to a roaring heat that dropped him to one knee in the middle of the road. He stayed down for thirty seconds, which was thirty seconds longer than he was comfortable being stationary in an open space. When he rose, he checked his hand. The shadow-mark was bright — not amber like fire, but a deep, luminous black-within-black that somehow cast its own particular quality of shadow around it. He looked east. He thought: whatever that was, it just told every person who might be interested in finding me exactly where I am. He thought: I need to reach wherever this is leading before the people looking for me get there first. He ran east. Not because something was telling him to. He told himself this very firmly. He ran east because it was efficient. That was all.