Description

Present Day

6 November 2025 | Thursday | 5:45 PM

The highway of Bihar—usually drowning in trucks, horns, engines, and chaos—was silent.

Not calm. Dead silent.

The kind of silence that felt infected, as if the air itself was holding its breath, afraid to

move. The land beneath their feet no longer felt like a road—it felt like a grave stretched

endlessly forward. The noise that once lived here had vanished, as though the world had

stopped breathing altogether.

Thousands of people stood there. Thousands… yet it felt abandoned.

In the middle of that lifeless stretch of road, a man knelt—barefoot, white shirt, blue pants.

His knees burned against the asphalt, his hands shaking violently as they clutched a torn

white chunni.

The skin of his palms was scorched—red, raw, blistered—ruined by a desperate attempt that

had failed. He held the fabric like it was the last proof that she had ever existed.

His hands were folded, almost like a prayer, but his head was bowed—not to God, not to

fate, but to defeat.

His hair was disheveled. His body trembled uncontrollably. His face carried nothing—no

tears, no rage, no grief. Just a terrifying emptiness, as if death had already claimed him and

forgotten to finish the job.

He was breathing. Not because he wanted to live, but because his heart refused to stop

without permission.

He was surrounded by thousands, and yet—utterly alone.

Ahead of him, a car burned. Flames ripped through metal. Smoke clawed its way into the

evening sky. The stench of fire and melted rubber suffocated the air. Ash floated down,

settling on skin, clothes, shoes—but no one moved. No one dared.

Then his eyes lifted, and something inside him collapsed completely.

A scream tore out of him.

It didn’t echo—it split the silence.

4Raw. Broken. Inhuman.

A sound ripped straight from his lungs, violent enough to scar the air itself. It carried a name

—one so heavy, so forbidden, that the world itself seemed to reject it.

The sound died mid-breath, as if even fate refused to let it be spoken again.

The effect was immediate.

People flinched. Blood ran cold. Bodies stiffened where they stood. The name—though

unheard—pressed against their ears like thunder, making hearts pound and spines shiver.

Something ancient had stirred.

His lips moved again. And again. And again.

No sound escaped this time—only the shape of a name, repeated silently, obsessively, like a

curse carved into his soul.

More than an hour passed. Still, he didn’t move. Still kneeling. Still staring into the flames.

Still clutching the chunni to his chest, as if holding it tighter could reverse time itself.

And somewhere inside his fractured mind, a sound surfaced—soft, delicate, cruel.

The chime of anklets.

Her anklet.