Ankush Rana
Gurugram, Haryana – April 2024.
It began, as many strange tales do, with a disappearance.
On a humid April evening, as the sky turned the color of burnt saffron and a light haze hung over the Gurgaon skyline, Professor Agni Bose vanished. A scholar of ancient Indian tantra and mystical practices, he had been lecturing at a private university on Golf Course Road and working as a consultant on an upcoming docuseries for an international streaming platform titled “Spirits of the Subcontinent.” His last known appearance was a brief sighting at the DLF Phase II market, captured on a CCTV camera. After that: nothing.
No phone calls. No messages. No social media activity.
Gone.
Three days later, Aranya Sen received a letter.
It wasn’t an email or a WhatsApp text. It was an actual envelope—off-white, slightly damp, with his name scrawled in an impatient, angular hand. The letter bore no stamp, no return address. Just the seal of red wax and the faint scent of burnt camphor.
Inside was a single sheet of parchment.
On it, drawn in vermillion ink, was a diagram: a triangle within a circle, surrounded by what looked like Devanagari script—but distorted, almost mutated. At the bottom were three words in Bengali:
“ডাকিনী বিধান খোঁজো।”
“Seek the Dakini Vidhan.”
Aranya blinked.
He was not new to the strange. A doctoral candidate in mystic literature from JNU, he had spent the last four years exploring the blurry line between occult fiction and historical fact. He was currently in Gurugram on a sabbatical, helping his old professor—Agni Bose—with the docuseries production. They had spent nights discussing tantric rituals, folk practices from Bengal and Odisha, and obscure mentions of “Dakini Vidya” in the Kalika Purana.
But Professor Bose had always been cautious, even skeptical. The real thing, he said, was mostly buried or erased. If anything still existed, it was fragmented, incomplete. “And,” he had once told Aranya over black tea at a café in Sector 29, “some truths are better left fragmented.”
Now Bose was missing. And this letter—this diagram—felt like a breadcrumb in a very dangerous trail.
Aranya lived in a rented apartment near MG Road. His roommate was Tara Mitra—filmmaker, skeptic, caffeine addict. She had grown up in Gurugram, seen the city morph from dusty fields to chrome towers, and treated the city’s extremes—luxury malls and hidden ruins—with equal parts humor and disdain.
When Aranya showed her the letter, she didn’t laugh.
“This symbol,” she said, pointing to the triangle-in-circle design, “I’ve seen this.”
“Where?”
“In an abandoned structure near Ghata village,” she said. “We went there while shooting a doc for Haryana Tourism. There were tribal-style murals on the inside walls. That exact triangle… but painted in black.”
Aranya’s heart thumped.
They drove out the next morning.
Gurugram, for all its modern polish, was still layered with the old. Pockets of wilderness clung to the edges of the city like memories that refused to fade. Ghata was one such place. Beyond the high-rises and cafes, the land folded into scrub forests and thorny paths, dotted with ruins that history had forgotten.
The structure was there—half-buried under lantana shrubs, its sandstone walls scorched and cracked by time. Tara led him through the broken archway. Inside, the air turned strangely cold.
And there it was—etched into the wall above a collapsed altar: the same diagram from the letter. Triangle. Circle. And around it, words Aranya could now recognize.
“Yogini Mandala. Dakini Chakra. Pishaach Lakshya.”
“Why would Professor Bose come here?” Tara asked softly.
Aranya didn’t answer. He was staring at something else now—scratches on the ground, like someone had recently swept the floor clean. And at the center of the space, half-covered in dust, was a book. Bound in leather. Old. Smelling of damp and decay.
He picked it up.
Inside were hand-drawn diagrams, incantations in Sanskrit and Prakrit, and notes in Professor Bose’s handwriting. The margins were filled with questions. “Is this the key?” “Why three veils?” “Blood moon = gateway?”
The last entry was dated three days ago.
“The Dakini Vidhan exists. It is here, hidden in fragments. The Mandala aligns during Chaitra Purnima. I must attempt the invocation.”
Aranya looked up.
Chaitra Purnima was tonight.
They returned to the city in silence.
That evening, Tara began recording. She had pulled out her old DSLR and began documenting everything—the letter, the site, the manuscript. “If this is real,” she said, “we’ll need evidence. And if it’s not, we’ve still got a killer mystery story.”
Aranya, meanwhile, began decoding the ritual. The manuscript spoke of three “veils” to be pierced before invoking the Dakini force—symbolic gateways of perception, protection, and power. Each veil required an offering: sound, scent, and blood.
“Not literal blood,” he muttered to himself, flipping pages. “Could be metaphor. Or symbolic sacrifice…”
But as the moon began to rise over the Gurgaon skyline, blood didn’t feel so symbolic anymore.
A power outage swept their block at 11:07 p.m. Exactly the time mentioned in the manuscript for the “First Opening.” Aranya lit a candle. The manuscript trembled in his hand—not from the wind, but from something subtler. The air seemed… charged.
Then they heard it.
A knock. Soft. Measured. From the front door.
Tara froze. “Did you order anything?”
Aranya shook his head and stepped toward the peephole.
No one.
He opened the door.
On the floor lay a second envelope.
This one was damp, the ink bleeding into the paper. Inside: a photograph. Black and white. Blurry. But unmistakable.
Professor Agni Bose, sitting cross-legged inside the shrine they had just visited, eyes closed. And above him, emerging from the shadows—something with long hair. Too tall. Too thin. Watching him.
Tara took a step back. “What the hell is that?”
Aranya didn’t answer.
In the silence, the wind outside carried a sound—not the usual Gurgaon traffic hum, but something older.
A chant.
A woman’s voice.
Faint, almost under the breath, but rhythmic. Hypnotic.
“Dakini Dakini Raktapaayi…”
—
They didn’t sleep that night.
Tara uploaded encrypted copies of the manuscript scans to her cloud drive. Aranya mapped out the three veils mentioned in the text, matching them to real locations in and around Gurugram. The first appeared to be tied to the ruin at Ghata village. The second—judging by the line “where the mirror swallows light”—seemed to point to a forgotten well in Sector 56, known locally as “Andh Kuva” or the Blind Well.
And the third?
The manuscript was unclear. It simply called it *“Nirbak Sthal”—*the Silent Place.
Aranya had a hunch. He marked it with a red dot on the city map.
They would go veil by veil. Piece by piece.
And find Agni Bose.
Or what remained of him.
Gurugram, April 2024. Chaitra Purnima Night.
The city never truly slept, even in the dead of night. But as Aranya and Tara drove through Sector 56 under the bloated full moon, something about the air felt… unnaturally still. It was a little after 2 a.m. The world outside their windshield had turned shadowy, surreal. Street dogs didn’t bark. Auto-rickshaws were missing from their usual night haunts. Even the drunk partygoers had disappeared.
The manuscript had guided them here.
“Where the mirror swallows light.”
That phrase echoed in Aranya’s mind as they parked near an old, locked community center behind a deserted plot of land. This place—colloquially known as Andh Kuva—had once been the center of a forgotten village, long before Gurugram became Gurgaon and then morphed into a sprawling corporate dystopia. Before malls and metro lines and cyber hubs, there was this land—red, cracked, haunted.
As they entered through a broken grill gate, Tara whispered, “You know, there are stories. People say no one hears you scream near this place. Something about the acoustics—or maybe the land is just cursed.”
Aranya held the manuscript tightly. “If the first veil was perception—symbolic vision—then this must be protection. A veil around the self. The manuscript said it guards against what lies inside.”
“Inside what?”
“The self,” Aranya said, and added quietly, “or the well.”
They found it at the center of the old yard: a moss-covered stone ring jutting out from the earth. It was barely two feet high, its interior covered with metal mesh now bent and rusted. A “safety measure” no doubt added after someone had fallen—or been pushed.
Tara lifted her camera. As the lens focused, the screen flickered. The autofocus jittered, refusing to lock onto the well. “It’s like the center’s… blank. Light’s there but nothing reflects back. Like a black hole.”
“No,” Aranya murmured. “Like a mirror that doesn’t return your image.”
He dropped to his knees and removed the mesh. The smell that rose was ancient. Not rot, exactly—but age. Time. Secrets.
Aranya pulled out the offerings listed for the second veil: incense of vetiver, a mirror shard, and a chant. He lit the incense. Smoke spiraled into the night. Then, slowly, he repeated the invocation from the manuscript:
“O Dakini, keeper of the second gate, bearer of silence, show thy veil.”
The wind stopped.
A moment later, Tara let out a short gasp.
In the reflection of her camera lens—not in real space, but in the faint shimmer of glass—something moved. A figure, tall and hunched, stood behind Aranya at the edge of the well. It was shadow-like, but its eyes… they glowed faintly red.
Tara turned, but nothing was there.
She showed him the frame. The figure was already gone.
Aranya whispered, “It’s begun.”
The second veil had opened.
**
The manuscript said nothing about what to do after the veil revealed itself. It only mentioned a “trial of self,” an experience unique to the seeker.
By the time they returned to Aranya’s apartment, he was drenched in sweat. He barely spoke. Tara made coffee, but he didn’t touch it. He sat at his desk, flipping the manuscript’s pages again and again, as if trying to unlock something he had missed.
“You okay?” she asked.
“I saw something when I looked into the well,” he murmured. “Not with my eyes. Inside.”
“What?”
“Myself,” he said. “But… different. Angry. Empty. It wanted me to jump.”
There was silence between them.
Tara finally said, “Maybe this manuscript doesn’t lead to Agni Bose. Maybe it leads away from him.”
Aranya looked up. “You’re still free to walk.”
“And miss this? Not a chance,” she smirked, masking her own fear.
**
The next day brought a new clue.
A small parcel arrived at their door, left anonymously. Inside was a pen drive. No label. No markings. Aranya scanned it on an offline system. The files were encrypted. Tara, a self-trained ethical hacker, cracked the simple passcode in minutes:
“Dakini.”
Inside were eight video files. All timestamped. All marked with GPS coordinates—locations across Gurugram.
The first few were mundane. Professor Agni Bose speaking to the camera, explaining rituals. Notes on tantric symbols, diagrams from the manuscript. Then came the sixth video.
It was shot in night vision.
Professor Bose stood in the center of what appeared to be the Ghata shrine.
“I believe,” he said, voice shaking slightly, “that the manuscript is not merely instructional. It is a map. Not physical—but metaphysical. Each veil is a layer of reality. Piercing through them doesn’t just reveal truths. It invites them.”
A sudden crackling sound came through the audio. A voice. Whispering.
Professor Bose turned toward the source, flashlight flicking in panic. The camera shook.
Then the screen went black.
The seventh video resumed mid-motion—Bose running, breathing hard. He turned the camera toward himself.
“Something followed me. I didn’t summon it. I invited it. There’s a difference. The third veil is the most dangerous. The Silent Place—”
He stopped. Stared off-camera. Then, slowly, he whispered, “Oh no… she’s here.”
Static.
The final video was only ten seconds long.
It showed a woman. Tall. Barefoot. Hair covering her face. Standing at the center of a Gurgaon street that Tara recognized immediately—an alley in DLF Phase III. The timestamp: three days ago. 3:13 a.m.
The same night Bose vanished.
**
They didn’t sleep again.
By morning, they had mapped out the Silent Place. The manuscript’s final clue—”Where speech is devoured, and echoes weep”—led them to the edges of the Aravalli forest belt, where an unfinished metro tunnel project had been abandoned years ago due to “structural instability.”
Locals had their own stories. They said voices echo wrong in that place. That if you whisper, the forest answers.
That night, Aranya packed the manuscript and offerings for the third veil.
But when he came to the door, Tara was already waiting.
With a new envelope.
This one was smaller. More elegant.
Inside, a torn page from the manuscript.
In blood, someone had scrawled:
“She knows you. She’s waiting.”
Aravalli Ridge, Near Chakkarpur, Gurugram – April 2024
The Aravalli forest doesn’t welcome visitors after dark.
Stretching like a withered serpent along the edge of Gurugram, this forested belt, often mistaken for mere overgrown scrubland, carries centuries of silence in its dry soil. Locals called certain patches of it “shabdheen,” the wordless zone. It was here, amidst the unfinished metro tunnels near Chakkarpur, that the manuscript claimed the third veil resided.
Aranya and Tara arrived just before midnight.
They came prepared—flashlights, incense, rope, salt, water, and a pair of antique copper bells as instructed by the manuscript. Tara also had her camera, now loaded with infrared filters. The night felt unnaturally heavy. Not just in atmosphere, but in meaning—as if they were walking into the belly of something old and unfinished.
“What if this is a trap?” Tara asked, scanning the dark with her torch. “What if whatever’s behind this wants us to come here?”
“I think it already did,” Aranya replied.
They pushed through undergrowth until they reached the fence: a rusted chain-link barrier marked “Restricted – HUDA/DMRC.” Someone had already broken through the mesh. Aranya squeezed through first.
The tunnel entrance yawned before them—concrete, crumbling, half-swallowed by roots and vines. The manuscript had warned:
“The veil of silence does not open by ritual. It opens by memory. By unvoiced truths. By offerings of what was never spoken.”
They lit the incense and rang the bells—three times, as prescribed.
Then entered the dark.
**
The tunnel wasn’t deep, but it bent slightly to the left, obscuring the back. Water dripped from cracks in the ceiling. The air felt like static—thick with pressure, humming with a sound you couldn’t quite hear but could definitely feel.
Ten steps in, their phones lost signal. The flashlight beams flickered, not from battery but something else—something reactive. Tara’s camera, in night vision mode, began glitching. The green-black image on her screen pulsed with a faint… interference.
Then, after about twenty steps, everything changed.
The sound stopped.
No drip. No wind. No breath.
It was the kind of silence you could hear.
Tara mouthed something, but her voice didn’t carry. Her lips moved. Nothing came out.
She tried again. Still nothing.
Aranya’s throat tightened. He spoke.
No sound.
His voice was inside his head—but nowhere else. The tunnel had swallowed it. This was the Silent Place.
He opened the manuscript. The third veil, it said, would be pierced not with speech, but with unspoken memory. A confession you never gave. A truth you never dared admit.
The offering had to be personal.
He reached into his satchel and took out a folded letter.
It had been written two years ago but never sent—to his younger sister, Mitali. She had died in an accident. He had blamed her. She had taken the car without telling anyone. He had buried the letter deep in a drawer.
Tonight, he placed it in the center of the tunnel floor.
Tara watched silently, tears brimming.
Then she reached into her pocket and produced an old key.
“To my nani’s locker,” she mouthed. “I… took money. Lied about it. She died without knowing. I never said sorry.”
She placed the key next to the letter.
The tunnel trembled.
A low, guttural vibration passed through their bones, like thunder being born in the earth. Aranya staggered. Tara clutched the wall.
And then, from the far end of the tunnel, came light—a pale bluish glow, pulsing like a heartbeat.
The third veil had opened.
**
They approached the light slowly.
It wasn’t fire, or a bulb. It was alive. Suspended in midair was a diagram—a glowing mandala spinning slowly, its lines shifting like fluid. Around it, reality flickered: the walls dissolved, then re-formed; the concrete turned briefly to black stone; symbols pulsed on the ground like veins of light.
In the manuscript, this form had a name: Dakini Chakra.
To touch it would mean entering the inner circle—the core truth of the Vidya.
Aranya hesitated.
Then stepped forward.
As his fingers brushed the spinning diagram, he felt something snap—not in his body, but inside his perception. Time folded. The tunnel vanished. He fell—not down, but inward.
And woke somewhere else.
**
He stood in a room.
Familiar. Too familiar.
It was his childhood bedroom in Salt Lake, Kolkata. But something was wrong. The light was dim. The shadows were thick. The furniture was slightly out of place, warped.
Sitting on the bed, back toward him, was a woman.
His mother.
Dead ten years.
“Aranya,” she said, in a voice warm and cold all at once, “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“I—”
“You brought the Dakini. You read the words. You crossed the veils.”
She turned.
But it wasn’t her face.
It was a mirror—her features, but blank. A reflection of Aranya’s own face, stitched over hers. He stumbled back.
“I don’t understand—”
“You don’t need to,” said another voice.
Tara stood behind him now. But not Tara. Her eyes were completely white. Her skin cracked like porcelain. She was chanting—but her mouth didn’t move.
“Rakta kshaata, manah shunya, yatra dakini nivisate…”
A third voice joined.
Then a fourth.
Then hundreds.
Aranya clutched his head.
The room was gone.
He stood now in a vast circular hall—somewhere outside time. All around him were faceless figures in robes, circling a black stone altar. Floating above it was the manuscript, its pages turning in an invisible wind.
And at the center of the altar—bound in crimson threads—was Professor Agni Bose.
Eyes closed. Mouth open. Breathing.
Still alive.
Aranya rushed forward. But every step he took was echoed by a dozen shadows. The closer he got, the colder the air became. A woman stepped from the altar’s side.
Tall. Hair like a shroud. Her eyes black as tar.
The Dakini.
She reached toward him.
Not to harm—but to offer.
Her palm opened.
Inside it: his own heart.
Still beating.
“Take it,” she whispered, though her lips didn’t move.
Behind her, Professor Bose opened his eyes.
And screamed.
**
Aranya blinked.
He was back in the tunnel.
Tara was shaking him. Her voice had returned.
“You stopped breathing! You just collapsed—what did you see?”
He gasped. Sat up. The mandala had vanished.
“I saw Bose. He’s alive. She has him.”
Tara’s voice was shaking. “Who is she?”
“The Dakini. Not just a spirit. She’s… an archetype. A force. She’s not evil. She’s waiting. And we opened the path.”
“To what?”
“To a place where thoughts become real. Where silence speaks. And she wants a trade.”
Tara stared.
“A trade?”
He nodded. “To release Bose, someone must take his place.”
**
They left the tunnel before dawn.
The world had returned to normal—traffic noise, the chirp of early birds, the distant honk of trucks. But nothing felt normal anymore.
Back in the apartment, Aranya laid out everything: the manuscript, the videos, the letter, the veil sites, and the final entry from Bose’s field notes.
“The Dakini speaks in silence. She does not demand worship. She demands balance. The Vidya is real. And once begun, it must be completed. The final choice is not about power. It is about offering.”
Tara looked at him.
“We’re not stopping, are we?”
“No,” he said. “We’re going to finish what Bose started.”
She asked the question he had been avoiding all night:
“What if the trade… is one of us?”
He didn’t answer.
The manuscript flipped open on its own.
To the final page.
There, written in fresh ink, were the words:
“One walks out. One stays behind.”
Gurugram — April 2024, Two Nights Before the Lunar Eclipse
The city felt different.
Not in any visible way—roads were still clogged, Gurugram’s towers still blinked with neon arrogance, and chai stalls still buzzed with gossip—but Aranya could feel it. A subtle pressure in the air. Like a lung inhaling, preparing to hold its breath.
The manuscript had grown warm. As if it had a pulse.
At precisely 3:33 a.m., the final page revealed a new diagram—one that hadn’t been there before.
A mandala of exchange. The symbol was split in two. On one side: a hand holding fire. On the other: a skull brimming with black flowers.
At the bottom, six words had appeared:
“The eclipse marks the final offering.”
Aranya didn’t sleep that night.
**
Tara had begun recording everything—writing her own log entries, mapping the locations, photographing the manuscript’s spontaneous changes. She wasn’t just documenting anymore; she was participating. The Silent Place had changed her.
“I’ve seen things I don’t know how to describe,” she said one morning. “When I close my eyes, I see symbols. When I touch metal, I hear whispers. My body’s here, but something inside me isn’t. It’s ahead of me.”
“Time distortion,” Aranya said. “Bose mentioned it. Dakini Vidya warps linear perception. That’s how it sees the trade before we make it.”
Tara leaned in.
“And what if we refuse to make it?”
Aranya paused.
“The manuscript doesn’t say what happens if we walk away. But every veil required something. Memory. Guilt. Blood. The fourth… will want more.”
She looked down at her hands. “Then we give it what it wants.”
**
The fourth veil was the Veil of Flesh.
“No man-made structure may host the rite,” the manuscript read. “Only living skin and ancient soil may bind it. Where the red river once flowed and the moon weeps blood, the offering shall be taken.”
That pointed them to one place: the Najafgarh Drain, west Gurugram—an old canal once part of the Sahibi river. Red clay, high iron content, and old tribal settlements long buried beneath modern slums.
Tara located a derelict dhobi ghat nearby, abandoned since the early 2000s. Aranya gathered the offerings: cowrie shells, turmeric paste, vetiver, one drop of human blood. And something else—something not listed, but which Bose had hinted at in his sixth video:
“To pierce the fourth veil is to offer a piece of yourself you can never retrieve.”
**
They arrived before sunset.
The air reeked of stagnant water and rust. Crumbling walls, graffiti, the husk of old basins where clothes had once been beaten clean. Now, crows watched from broken rafters.
They found a hollow in the mud, shaped almost like a natural altar—rounded stone, cracked and darkened by old ash.
Tara set up the perimeter. Salt in a circle. Incense. The bell.
Then Aranya pulled out a small glass vial.
Tara blinked. “Is that…?”
“My blood,” he nodded. “From the hospital. I donated for this.”
He poured it on the stone.
Nothing happened.
Then he lifted his shirt, exposing a sigil—one he had carved into his skin the night before. A spiral, an eye, and a line descending into a flame.
Tara’s mouth opened in shock.
“You self-branded?”
“It was the price.”
He pressed his palm to the stone.
And everything exploded in red.
**
The world dissolved.
They weren’t in Gurugram anymore.
They stood in a burning field.
Not metaphorical. Not dream-like.
Burning.
Flames curled from the soil like inverted rain. The sky was a wound—blood-red, split by veins of black lightning. And in the distance, between the fire and the smoke, were figures.
Women.
Dozens of them.
They moved in a circle, heads covered in veils, arms raised. At their center stood the Dakini. She wore no robe. Her skin shimmered with shifting symbols. Her eyes were pure white.
She looked at Aranya.
And spoke.
But not with words.
With memory.
Suddenly, Aranya was nine years old, standing on the roof of his old house. His sister Mitali was laughing. She dared him to jump across to the next roof. He did. She followed.
She fell.
He remembered her screams.
He remembered running—not to help her, but away.
He had never told anyone.
And now the Dakini knew.
“You owe,” she said—this time audibly, in a voice that belonged to his mother.
Tara stepped forward.
“I offer myself.”
The Dakini turned.
Tara’s body began to glow.
Symbols raced across her skin. Spirals, moons, eyes, skulls. She didn’t scream. But her eyes filled with tears.
Aranya stepped between them.
“No.”
The Dakini tilted her head.
“You opened the book. You walked the path. You called us.”
Aranya nodded. “Then take me.”
The circle of women around the Dakini froze.
And for the first time, the Dakini smiled.
It was not a kind smile.
It was ecstatic.
She raised one finger.
Pointed to the sky.
The moon above—already red—turned black.
And the world fell silent.
**
They woke up at exactly 3:00 a.m. in the same ghat, surrounded by footprints.
Dozens of them.
As if a ritual had been performed around them.
Tara was shivering.
Aranya held her.
“My body feels… hollow,” she said. “Like something left.”
He looked at her arm.
The same spiral sigil had appeared on her skin, glowing faintly beneath the surface.
“She touched you,” Aranya whispered.
“She marked me,” Tara said. “I didn’t offer myself. But she took anyway.”
The manuscript now had a new page.
This one handwritten.
Not by Agni Bose. Not by Aranya.
By Tara.
Though she didn’t remember writing it.
It read:
“Veil Four pierced. Final rite must be done where the dead remember, and the forgotten speak. The cost has doubled. Two must be weighed. One must remain.”
Beneath the note was a name.
A location.
“Sector 29 Cemetery — 5th Night — Eclipse Totality.”
**
That day, Aranya received a message.
A voice note.
It was Bose.
“Aranya,” he whispered. “I can’t hold it. She feeds on silence but grows on memory. The manuscript is not a guide—it’s a trap. She is not a guardian of knowledge. She is a consequence. Tell Tara—”
Static.
Then one final word:
“Run.”
**
But they didn’t run.
Because some stories, once opened, demand to be finished.
That night, Aranya dreamt of the manuscript.
He was standing at its center. Its pages were alive, flapping like wings. All around him, thousands of whispering mouths spoke one line over and over:
“One walks out. One stays behind.”
When he awoke, the manuscript was gone from his desk.
Tara had taken it.
She left a note.
“I know what needs to be done. I saw it in the Silent Place. If she wants a life, I’ll give her mine. Meet me at Sector 29. — T.”
Aranya crushed the note.
He ran out the door.
He wasn’t going to let her go alone.
Not into that graveyard.
Not into the final veil.
Sector 29 Cemetery, Gurugram – Total Lunar Eclipse Night
It wasn’t even marked on most maps.
Sector 29 Cemetery was a remnant—a tiny burial ground boxed in by high-rises and late-night microbreweries. Somewhere between past and present, it had become invisible to the living. Forgotten by builders. Ignored by planners.
Tonight, the gates stood open.
The eclipse had begun.
A sliver of shadow had touched the blood-orange moon. The air was dry as ash.
Aranya reached the cemetery at 11:08 PM.
He hadn’t slept. Hadn’t eaten. Hadn’t thought about anything else since Tara disappeared with the manuscript.
The place was too quiet. No insects. No breeze.
He stepped past the rusted gate, flashlight sweeping over crooked crosses, broken marble slabs, and crumbling headstones. Wild grass grew in uneven clumps, and thorny branches clawed at his legs.
Halfway through the field, he saw light.
Candles. Dozens of them.
Forming a circle.
And in the center, standing barefoot on red-soaked soil, was Tara.
She wore a plain white kurta, sleeves rolled up. The spiral sigil on her forearm pulsed gently beneath her skin. Her eyes met his—and softened.
“You shouldn’t have come.”
“You shouldn’t have come alone,” he replied.
She smiled sadly.
“I’m not alone.”
The candles flickered. The soil stirred.
Figures began to emerge from the shadows.
Not people. Not quite ghosts.
Memories made flesh.
Aranya saw his sister Mitali—age nine—hair tied in two loops, holding a skipping rope.
He blinked. Tara saw someone too.
An old woman with bangles that rattled like bells.
“Nani,” she whispered.
They were surrounded.
Not by enemies—but by truths.
“Final veil,” Tara said, “is not about death. It’s about memory. It’s about what we leave behind when we pretend we’ve healed.”
Aranya shook his head. “There has to be another way.”
“The Dakini doesn’t take without offering. She showed me the rules. One stays. One walks out. That’s the exchange. That’s the price.”
“And you just… accept that?”
“No,” Tara said. “I choose it.”
From her satchel, she took the manuscript.
It was no longer parchment.
It was skin.
Stitched. Bound. Alive.
She placed it on the ground.
And began the chant.
“Rakta kshaata, manah shunya, yatra dakini nivisate…”
The wind picked up.
The candles flared.
From the sky above, the final shadow passed over the moon. The eclipse reached totality. And the veil lifted.
**
The air turned thick. Time slowed.
And then, she appeared.
The Dakini.
Emerging not from the earth, but from between seconds—stepping through a crack in time itself. Her body shimmered with hundreds of symbols, constantly shifting. Her face wore all faces. Her hair moved like smoke underwater.
She did not walk.
She hovered.
Behind her trailed a chain of lights—like tethered souls.
Among them, barely visible, was a man in glasses. Disheveled. Eyes wide.
Professor Agni Bose.
He reached out.
“Tara,” he croaked. “Don’t—”
But his voice was eaten by the wind.
The Dakini turned to Tara.
She raised a single hand.
Tara stood straighter. She looked calm. Her voice was strong.
“I offer myself. For him.”
The Dakini tilted her head.
The symbols on her skin glowed brighter. She gestured toward the manuscript.
A new page unfurled—written in blood.
It read:
“The trade must be whole. Half-offerings spoil the pact. Choose with full heart, or suffer the spiral.”
Tara hesitated.
Aranya stepped forward.
“Wait,” he said. “You don’t get to choose this alone.”
She turned to him. “You didn’t see what I saw.”
“I don’t need to,” he said. “I know who I am.”
He walked into the circle.
Faceless figures parted.
He reached Tara.
Took her hand.
“I’m not letting you go. Not unless I go too.”
“You’d die.”
“No,” he said. “We both choose. Let her decide.”
He turned to the Dakini.
“We offer ourselves. Both of us. You choose. One stays. One walks.”
The Dakini moved.
Suddenly, the world shifted.
They were no longer in the cemetery.
They were in the spiral.
**
Everything turned grey.
No sky. No ground.
Only a vast spiral staircase descending into blackness.
They stood on one step. The Dakini hovered ahead, arms outstretched.
Below them: all their memories. All their lies. All their pain.
Aranya saw himself crying alone in a bathroom at 14.
Tara saw her parents screaming through a bedroom wall.
They kept descending.
Each step heavier than the last.
The Dakini finally stopped.
At the bottom: a stone table.
On it: a mirror.
She pointed.
One must look.
Only one.
Tara stepped forward.
She looked.
And gasped.
Her reflection was not hers.
It was Aranya’s.
Smiling.
But his eyes were gone.
She turned to him.
“You were never supposed to be the offering.”
He stepped forward. Looked.
His reflection was her.
But burning.
The Dakini spoke at last.
Two words.
Not in their ears—in their bones.
“Equal pain.”
And the veil tore open.
**
Back in the cemetery, the wind stopped.
The candles snuffed.
The manuscript burst into blue flame and turned to ash.
Only one figure stood at the center now.
Tara.
She was alone.
Aranya was gone.
No blood. No scream. Just… gone.
She dropped to her knees.
Weeping.
The spiral on her arm faded.
The eclipse passed.
The moon returned to silver.
The sky healed.
The cemetery was empty again.
Behind her, the gates closed on their own.
**
Three weeks later.
Gurugram, April 2024
Tara sat on a bench outside a metro station, holding a tattered journal.
Aranya’s journal.
The last entry:
“If pain is the price, let it be mine. She deserves a life. I’ve already lived in memory too long.”
She watched people walk by. Living, breathing, not knowing how close they had come to something ancient, hungry, patient.
The manuscript was gone. The Dakini? Maybe satisfied. Maybe waiting.
Professor Bose had been found, disoriented, near Sultanpur Lake. He had no memory past February.
The university issued a statement: “field trauma, dehydration, temporary amnesia.”
The truth never made the papers.
Tara never spoke of it again.
But sometimes, when the moon turned red—
—she could still hear the spiral whisper.
“One walks out. One stays behind.”
THE END
