Kiran and his comrades find themselves in tropical Borneo, where they must face the sins of the past.
Shadow On My Back
Authors: Anorrack
(6093 words)
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The Frontier of What Will Be Srivijaya, Before The Birth of Christ
The Sun looms large in the sky, cracking the dirt, burning leaves and searing flesh under its unblinking gaze.
The object of its ire gleams below, a bright spot in the dark belly of the jungle. It is an unhallowed City, hated by Earth, Sun, and Man. The walls of the City ward against the encroaching forest, where death stalks on feet and wing and fin. Each day the jungle rallies against its foul presence, each day vine and tooth and claw attempt to tear down its walls, to trample its crops, to smother the City in foliage and beast-flesh. But each day they are repelled, and each day the City grows ever larger.
The stone ramparts are crowned with gold and ivory, the crenelations are streaked with jet and studded with gemstones. They are cut jewels as big as a fist, arranged in eye-searing sigils and abominable words and phrases. It is a king's ransom flaunted bare without protection, unwavering in its plain sacrilege. The walls rise to grace the canopy, dwarfing any man or animal that comes close to their magnificence. Their size dares thieves to risk their hands stealing its ornaments, their scale dares armies to risk their lives taking its walls.
Many have tried.
Brunei Bay, British North Borneo, May 1943
The borrowed fishing boat trundled up the river, its outboard motors sputtering blue smoke into the air and rainbow oil into the water as they fought the current. The last thousand-odd miles of island-hopping hadn't been kind to the craft, which had been worse for wear even before they had appropriated it from a Japanese-held port. Even the series of retrofits and repairs that Matthews and Santo had done on the motors in transit hadn't done much to extend their lifespans, whining under the strain and torque.
We huddled together in the small craft, around a map laid flat upon a rusted tacklebox. The insects were a vicious black cloud over every inch of the river, our presence whipping them into a frenzy.
"Its original name is lost to history, but the city was called Saptaduhkhanam Nagaram by those that knew of it." I strained to hear Ingmar Alstrand's wispy voice over the twin engines, insects, and rush of the river.
"Translation?" DC Al Fine inquired. She was wearing a Russian's face, today, her vowels flat as she spoke.
"The City of Seven Woes," Santo supplied, brushing stray sweat flies off the map. "So-called because of the seven hells the Funan found while looking for trade a thousand years ago. Disease, hunger, thirst, animals, madness, cannibalism, and… other things. It was said that the ground itself cracked open to feed on the explorers, sealing itself shut again so they could be digested in its earthen gullet."
Matthews grunted, focused on his task of keeping the boat on course. "Guess it's too much to hope that the Japanese go out the same way."
Santo hummed in agreement. "I've been praying for it, but it has been hard to hear God's reply over these damned insects."
Ingmar continued as if they had not been interrupted. "The city is far, far older than the ancient merchants that found it. They had come looking for a trading port, but found only death behind its crumbled walls."
I nodded. "How long have the Japanese been digging there for?"
Fine answered for them. "Months. They have been shipping in POWs and natives via water to do the labor for them. From all reports the jungle takes them faster than they can be replaced." Her face darkened. "But it doesn't stop them from making progress."
Santo's eyes narrowed, looking at the rough sketches of the map, stolen from an occupied-government cartographer. "The airfield has benzina in great supply, for both the planes and burning back the forest, and if we move fast we should be able to destroy the artifact and steal a plane before they can muster the force to fight back. The airfield is our ticket out of here."
Matthews spoke again, glancing towards us as he tried to maintain control of the tiller. "We can't engage the enemy until they have the artifact in hand. No matter how long we have to wait, they have to dig it up first. We'll nab two birds with one stone, that way."
I grimaced. "I still think it would be easier if we take them down before they get… whatever they came here for." I looked at Ingmar. "Still nothing?"
They shook their head. "The wyrd remains fickle about the object's nature. All we can be sure of is that it is an artifact of great power." Their frown deepened. "And that no one should have control over it."
Matthews interrupted. "Regardless of what it is, we can't afford to let them come back here and resume the dig. We have to make sure they are ready to leave with prize in hand before we bag and tag 'em." He stared directly at me. "That's our only goal. No trying to free the prisoners. That's not what we're here for, and we can't afford another screw-up."
I bit back a retort and kept my peace. Ever since my one-on-one with Ingmar, I had been on edge talking to Matthews. Even ignoring the argument that night, what Ingmar had said sparked an uneasiness around him that had not gone away a full two months later. Best I just ignored his jabs.
It didn't help that Pramaada had been on edge ever since we entered the mouth of the river. As we passed mangroves and mudflats, she had been distant, murmuring to herself in the deep recesses of my mind.
I stirred with a questioning thought, reaching out to Pramaada. What's wrong now?
Her voice was tinged with an emotion I didn't recognize in her. This is a fool's errand, Kiran. The City is an accursed place.
You could have brought that up in the past couple months, Pramaada.
She spat. I would have thought common sense would have prevailed. The stories of this place, the lives being taken, the remote location, all of which I thought would have dissuaded your. Unfortunately your lot is not as smart as I had hoped.
My lips pursed. Didn't you say that I should never run away from any fight no matter the odds, and you would punish me with karmic justice if I did?
Yes! When fighting mere man and demon, not when… she trailed off. The emotion in her voice wasn't anger. It was fear.
Pramaada. What is in that city?
She was subdued, her voice curt. Death. Of mind and soul. If they activate the artifact, Kiran, there is no telling what they could do.
Within those towering walls, men and elephants labor in the suffocating heat and stifling air. Their backs are bent, their muscles ripple, their bodies contort as they raise great statues and towers in the name of their accursed god-king, their frames skeletal and starved, limbs bleeding and gnarled, breath shallow and weak. They wear no chains, they bend to no whip, but their minds remain broken, shackled to an unseen force that twists the soul into knots. The force that turned this place to one that deals with slaves and pain and meat.
The force that holds their minds in such sway holds court in the great pagoda-palace, its seventy-seven steps inlaid with mahogany and marble, each step hosting a temple-guard whose armor of brass and lacquered bamboo weighs more than they do. Its five staggered roofs curved in accordance with the sacred dharma, hosting the nests of birds that have long since fled. In a small alcove within the palace, the machine turns. The Heart beats. And the slaves move according to its rhythm.
The king sits below the Heart on a great throne. He looks small upon his dais of brass, as a child upon his father's seat. His eyes are as glassy and empty as the pearls adorning his robes. The succulent fruits in a bowl at his feet are long spoiled. His hand twitches at the command of another, issuing orders to knobbly-kneed attendants who already know the words in their heart. They know for they are not his own words. His is not the true power in this City. He is as much a slave to its power as those that worked outside the pagoda, no matter what he had intended.
The king had asked the Heart to make him the wealthiest man in the world. The Heart cogitated. The Heart obliged.
Lobha's Heart beats. And the hateful Sun turns with it.
"Left. No, more. Yes, stop."
I pivoted slightly, reacquiring the target with my binoculars. A small, sour man with a thin mustache sulked under a parasol's shade above the laboring workers. The curled insignia on his sleeve marked him as a major. "Why him?"
Alstrand and I had been paired up on a knoll, two hundred yards away from the dig site. The ruins had been swallowed by the forest until the IJAMEA arrived, cutting and burning it back to make way for the dig and flattening it for the airfield. We had been lurking near the edge of the forest for the past week, smeared with mud to ward off the near-constant swarm of insects that hunted in the humid old-growth.
Alstrand licked their chapped lips. "He'll be important, I'm sure."
I nodded and reached into my pocket, pulling out a Japanese fifty-sen coin. I tapped out a message in Morse to its sympathetic partners rattling around in Fine's and Matthew's hands. A few moments later, two corresponding double-taps made the coin flip. I pocketed the piece. I noticed a splash of color behind the major, and I focused my binoculars back on him.
"Who's the girl next to the major? Know her story?"
Previously hidden behind the major and the hill was a woman in a strange ceremonial outfit. The shapes of her body were hidden underneath a long, flowing robe that trailed on the ground behind her, her hair shrouded by a purple, conical hat. Her emotionless face was caked in alabaster white makeup. Despite the heat and stifling attire, a paper fan remained folded and unused in her grasp.
Ingmar gritted their teeth. "Miko. Sorceress. Communes with demons and the dead. Makes our job more difficult."
I continued to stare at the woman. I felt a strange pull, an attraction towards her, like metal to a lodestone. Not carnally, but something in the pit of my stomach. Magic clung to her like a graveyard stench. She almost glided across the uneven ground as she followed the major, who seemed to try to avoid direct eye-contact with her. The dead air stirred, blowing from our direction towards the hill. The miko froze and cocked her head upwind, scanning the treeline. I felt a tingling sensation between my shoulder-blades and quickly looked away, afraid of seeing piercing eyes set in a hauntingly beautiful face staring through the glass into mine. I changed the conversation.
"Ingmar, are you sure there is nothing else you can tell us about the artifact?"
They blinked. They had dark circles under their eyes from sleepless nights in that rotten tub of a boat. Their skin glowed a violent red beneath the cracked mud smeared over their body. Alstrand's small frame wasn't suited to the tropics. "Something about this place refuses to be scried. A dark cloud hangs over these ruins. I can only see moments. Pictures. At the center of that cloud…" They snarled. "Jormungandr. The Worldsea Worm, and the vultures that feast on the carrion in his wake. The rise of the Worm heralded Ragnarök. That IJAMEA seeks him out is not good."
"'Heralded'? It has happened already?"
They gave a curt shake of their head. "I see it happen, it has happened. Will happen. Has always happened. Doesn't matter. We can only change the path of the Wheel, not its eventual destination."
I turned away from them. It was difficult to understand Ingmar through my middling English skills and their obtuse use of it. I retrained my binoculars on the major, who was animatedly talking with a conclave of scientists carrying buzzing instruments, the miko lurking in the background. The dig site sat on a large hillock, whose base was surrounded by a tent-city patrolled by tamed rakshasa, interspersed among mossy pillars and vine-draped buildings that erupted from the ground like so many cankerous molars. It was a very disadvantageous position for us, and forced us to split into teams to cover all sides for recon.
My gaze followed a few of the loose rakshasa, in their twitchy, unsteady stride. The poor, mutated creatures looked much the same as the ones in Burma, yet also wildly different, each wholly unique in their horror and form. Some were thin, tall and twisted, others short, squat, and scurrying. Some carried a stolen face that were locked in expressions of agony, crying tears of blood. Other faces were trapped in frozen rictus laugh, jaw gaping open, crammed with too many teeth. Yet all wore crowns of silver nails hammered into their skull, commanding obedience and inciting them to violence.
Tentacles and tusks abounded, stingers and talons were everywhere to be seen. They were as if people had been tossed into a primordial soup, and crawled out carrying the animal kingdom upon their backs. Their skin split and bones bulged from the changes wrought upon them by IJAMEA's cruel experiments.
I followed one rakshasa with my binoculars. It was facing away from me, but I could see how it lurched and dragged its feet, its torso swollen, twisted by a mangled spine. When it reached the end of its leash, it turned, exposing its belly to me, and I froze. The woman had been pregnant when IJAMEA had gotten ahold of her. The fetus seemed to have survived the experiments, in some remote semblance of the word, reaching, grasping. My blood turned to ice. My skin erupted in gooseflesh despite the tropical heat, and I looked away from the binoculars. I couldn't stop myself from dry-heaving.
Ingmar followed where my gaze had been fixated. "They will do anything to secure their hold on these lands, Kiran. You know this. They are just as the Nazis attacking my home country. They must be stopped."
I nodded without saying anything. It took a minute for me to compose myself again and resume my recon. I consciously avoiding looking at the patrolling mutants, and focused on the structures. The airfield was half-hidden on the other side of the hill, with planes landing every other day delivering supplies and personnel. Our ride out of here was a Kawasaki Ki-56 that had just arrived the day before, disgorging scientists and very delicate-looking electronics. It was in the process of being refueled, scheduled to leave in three days, according to Ingmar. That was, if we didn't steal it first.
I sucked my teeth and looked back. "Do any of these… 'paths' say that you survive this?"
Their brilliant blue eye met mine. Ingmar's dark warning of their own death had haunted me ever since the mountains of Hainan, and I had thought of it often since. Their mouth worked for a bit before they spoke. "I do not know. This city craves blood, and mine own death must satisfy."
"That isn't fair."
They studied me for a moment, wearing a look I did not understand. Everything about them was vague and blurred. Their gender, speech, even age, all worn away by the sands of time. They laid a hand on mine, soft and cool, and their voice was gentle when they next spoke. "It is war, Kiran. The path I have chosen seems to prolong your time enough, and that must suffice."
I looked at the ground beneath me, at the burnt ash and brown grass that colored our hunting blind a dark, spoiled hue. "And what does that path have for me? Do you see that?"
I did not look at them, but I felt them shift slightly, imperceptibly. The hand is withdrawn. "You are of two halves, Kiran. There is a war inside you. Over your body and your mind, one as fierce as the one fought in the Pacific. Whether it consumes you or you overcome it is…" A beat. "I've said too much."
Ingmar pulled out their bag of runes, and shoved their fist inside. They quickly withdrew some stones, throwing them to the ground. Upturned, the faces of ᚾ, þ, ᚻ glinted. Quietly, Ingmar turned over the face-down tiles to reveal ᛞ and ᚢ. Their face was sour. "nauthiz, thurs, hagalaz showing their faces, with dagaz and uruz obscured." The gold seam in their lapis eye gleamed as if ablaze. "Unholster your rifle and alert Fine. Pray that she truly does know how to pilot that damnable plane."
One of the work-crew stumbles and falls to the ground, his atrophied legs giving way on the slope of a hill and cracking upon the exposed stone. His companions mindlessly walk over his body, carrying pots of clay bound for the eastern walls. He was a farmer from across the sea, conscripted by a lord he never served, taken as a captive in war by mercenaries and sold in exchange for spices, talismans, and those rich things the City made that rotted men's souls.
Bony feet trample him, kick him, and twist his swollen, shattered leg still further. The pain shakes his mind free from its bonds for the briefest of moments. He thinks about his family, the terrace farms, the taste of rice wine. The songs that will never be sung. Stories that will never be told. The Wheel turns. His head hurts. He stares into the Sun's unblinking eye and prays.
Lobha's Heart beats, and his mind is deafened by the Heart's pulse once more. The man rises again to resume the work.
A distant cry snapped me to attention. A worker on the top of the hill waved their arms and shovel, inviting a swarm of activity to rise up the hill like an army of ants on their nest. My coin vibrated with dits and dahs.
I peered through the scope, and past the pile of discarded brick and bone that surrounded the excavation, I saw the artifact rising out of the ground, hauled to surface through the strained effort of a dozen men.
It wasn't solid steel, that much I could tell from the relative ease with which the large machine gracelessly rose from its grave. No seam or weld blighted its surface, no bolt, screw, or stitch pocked its smooth hide. Barring the slightest of tarnish, the machine was perfectly clean, almost seeming to repel the clods of dirt and gravel that attempted to follow the artifact from the pit whence it came. The warp and weft of the machine's surface suggested the rolls of ocean waves and coils of vines more than any straight-pipe, piston, or toothed gear. The spirals seemed to draw the gaze, entrancing the mind with their supple, tarnished mirror polish and impossible curves that followed no earthly geometry. It was a human heart rendered abstract with veins as coiled tendrils and muscles as twisted curves. It was terrible in its beauty, magnificent in its form.
It could never have been made by human hands.
Lobha's Heart.
Ingmar's breath was unsteady. "Gjallarhorn. That which calls the Apocalypse."
The major approached, stroking the curve of the machine, almost as tall as a man, like it was the thigh of a lover. The miko hovered behind him, her head cocked with a detached curiosity, hulking rakshasa decorated with shrunken heads and lurid kanji lurking in her shadow. The major's fingers traced along the curves until they came to rest within an alcove nestled the device, and he pushed his hand inside.
Immediately, his body seized as though an electric current blazed through him, his gritted teeth bared, eyes shining white. The curls of the machine came to life, warping and twisting like seaweed in an ocean current. Small lights began to shine with sickly luminescence, a thousand staring eyes in the recesses and crevices of the machine that blinked in a way that almost made sense. Even over a hundred yards away, I doubled over in pain as a pressure built within my skull, a crushing, blinding, crippling dumb force clamping onto my mind with crude brutality. I sensed Ingmar do the same beside me, and felt Pramaada raise a noiseless cry within before she was drowned out by the noise.
The noise, the unending, unceasing, unyielding noise that drowned the world. Insects stopped in their incessant buzzing. Birds fell from the sky, too stunned to flap their wings, to breathe. The rakshasa screamed and tore at their flesh, their tattered minds balking at the Heart's touch. Ingmar gasped and clutched their stomach, their knuckles white and their face purple.
There wasn't any room in my own head for me, my own self pushed against the walls of my skull as this formless, mindless, soulless thing rooted around my soul like a boar in the forest dirt, searching, learning, tearing out new concepts, simple words, cherished memories, old thoughts, and half-forgotten dreams as a burglar would rummage through a man's chest for his valuables.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity passed by, the infernal pressure released, making a soundless thump.
For the first time in millennia, the Heart beat. And the jungle silenced itself to listen to the roar of the eldritch engine, alive once more.
The man may have stopped in his prayers, but the Sun and Earth and Water hear his cries, are witness to the suffering within the gilded gates of the City, and their hate curdles and spits and sings like a smith's fire fueled by the bellows of the damned.
The City is a monument to avarice, they all agree. Endlessly expanding, endlessly encroaching, fueled by the greed of merchants that covet what the City creates, turning good men to sin and bad men to blasphemy. Shaped jewels the size of chickens' eggs, ivory from animals drawn from myth, meteoric iron plucked from the heavens' eyes, and more, so many more exotic luxuries and depravities. This they sought, and for this they traded food, slaves, and clay to aid in the City's growth, to aid in its plowing of Earth, in its pollution of Water, all in plain, mocking view of the Sun's wrathful eye. The City, already five yojanas long and five yojanas broad expands without limit.
The City has no need for a military other than ostentation, they have no need for weapons or for war. War is not profitable, for it decreases the labor pool and supply of goods, as well as potential partners in trade, necessary to bring the king's wish to fruition. In Lobha's Heart flows gold, in its soul is commerce. The chosen weapon of the Heart of Darkness is that of Capital, and it is a weapon that grows stronger with every passing day.
The Sun gathers the gods to deliberate, to ask what can be done with the festering blight upon the Earth's back. They agree, innumerable in number they are, that something must be done. So they go entreat with Mahadeva, upon his mountain abode Kailasha, at the center of the universe.
The throng of gods call out to Mahadeva, they beg in one voice, 'O great Mahadeva, O horrible Mahadeva, rid of us this sinful City that scourges the Earth, poisons the Water, and holds the souls of our people in its sway. O Mahadeva, do this deed for us, and we will kneel at the base of Kailasha, the center of the universe, and kiss your feet, and we shall praise your name.'
And Mahadeva, O great and horrible Mahadeva, moved by their pleas, does look down from the top of Kailasha with scorn, towards the place across the sea that disturbed his people so. Mahadeva does look upon the City of Woe, and opens his third eye.
The next heartbeat was much easier to tolerate, merely relegated to a piercing migraine squatting in the hind-brain. The birds breathed once more, the insects resumed their hum, and Ingmar stirred. I fumbled with the binoculars, observing the major nodding to the miko, and stiffly marching down the other side of the hill, towards the airfield. Getting over the initial shock of their brains being violated by an ancient, eldritch force, the laborers scrambled to assemble a wooden crate for the Heart to sit in.
I clenched my fist. "They're taking it away."
Pramaada stirred within me, uncoiling like a serpent. Be careful, Kiran. I will not help you here.
Well why the blazes won't you?
The coin flipped to life. Morse from al Fine. INTERCEPT.
The powers you are meddling with… they are beyond even the gods' domain and time. The Heart is not to be touched. Father Shiva forbids it!
We're trying to stop them from meddling with it! We would be fulfilling the gods' commands!
KIRAN. INTERCEPT.
The snake spat. It is Divine Mandate! We are breaking a covenant! We will be judged!
We are trying to win a war!
Ingmar grabbed my shoulder roughly. "Kiran, please."
KIRAN!
Too many voices, too many conflicting demands . I needed to stop IJAMEA from stealing this artifact, I needed to save Ingmar from their predestined fate, I needed Pramaada's power. I concentrated very hard, a vein throbbing in my temple. Pramaada had been in my mind for far too long for it not to have an effect on me, a mortal. I had been touched by the divine, which meant I could touch them right back. If you won't help me, I will make you help me.
I grabbed the snake worming within my mind and twisted it with two hands. It reared and bit my hindbrain, hissing and spitting venom. The Pramaada-snake, patterned in dappled oranges and blacks — staring with three eyes and flaring a hood emblazoned with two more — wriggled within my grasp, its lashing tail cutting searing holes in my brain, leaking liquid memory. I squeezed the snake all the tighter, and crammed it into the iron trunk Father always kept under his bed, capped its ivory-kukri fangs with the smell of corkwood and gagged it with the memory of cotton. Before I closed the lid of Father's trunk, I bit the tail of the serpent and drank of its blood. Of Pramaada's blood.
And I scream.
گستاخ
Searing power blazes through my limbs and sets my veins aflame. My sixth and ninth ribs rotate and thicken and puncture the skin, growing and splitting into scapula and humerus, radius and ulna, carpals and metacarpals and phlanges, donning gnarled red flesh and runny yellow fat and split purple skin.
I scream.
My vertebrae stretch and crack and split as I grow taller, crooked, colossal. My scoliotic body has no straight lines, just jagged edges and ragged curves and twisting, piercing points of teeth and bone and claw.
I scream.
My frame buckles and expands, my legs twist and lengthen, my vocal cords tear and reknit and I scream, my voice thick with rage and pain and murder. The transition, so easily done with Pramaada at the helm, is horrible and terrible without and it burns and it tears and it scrapes as I tumble-charge towards the hill, towards the Heart, body-plan shifting and blurring between bipedal, quadrapedal, hexapedal, the earth shaking with my every step.
A spattering of gunfire, the cries of the ambushed, they are no matter at all as I plunge heedlessly into the slaughter, laughing, screaming, singing. No weapons for me, no dance to perform, just me and tooth and flesh and claw. My hands find a gun and break the barrel in half, before doing the same to the wielder's spine. I grab another body and roll, planting his face against ruined cobblestone and crushing it like a melon beneath my bulk. My teeth find the neck of a soldier and bite down. Blood spurts into my waiting maw and down my throat, his heartbeat a battle drum rattling within my skull. He is delicious.
The shackled demons are unchained, prodded in my direction and set loose. We lock eyes and my path deviates and the ground quakes as our masses collide, clawing and biting and screaming. Unmovable forces locked in a standstill, caressing each other gently, tearing each other apart. There are many, some are one in many and others are many in one, mangled bodies, stitched bodies, screaming bodies. The rakshasa's barbed tendrils and tusks dig into my flesh, levering underneath my rib-cage and pulling, opening my chest like a ripe fruit and exposing my innards to the sun. I shiver at its touch as it shoves its claws inside me, clumsily pawing at my intestines in ways that cause my face to flush. Fuck.
I pivot and tackle and tear, bringing a demon to the ground with me, pinning it to the dirt. Its vacant and withered faces are spattered with blood and stare into my own. Faces stretched and faces hanging by a thread, faces split in two and faces eaten by tumors. These are stolen faces, lives they didn't earn, shattered masks that cannot hide the fact that I know what they are. I feel its hot breath against my lips, and I quiver at the sensation, my body electric, my mind a raging inferno. my thoughts race burning and hot and sparking and crackling in their vibrancy. Everything is heightened, every emotion is hyper-real and every sense is hyper-vivid, as if all my life I was blindfolded and deaf and wrapped in cotton, only now to be exposed to the real world.
Only now to be me.
A laugh bubbles from my throat and shakes the trees before I lean in and brush my lips against their own before I tear the rakshasa's jaw off with my teeth. Fast strong beautiful powerful wonderful oh how I wish I could stay like this forever.
More come, more rakshasa pile upon me, more soldiers fire into the pile at me. It's no matter, no matter at all. I am boiling in bloodlust, basting in battle-joy. I scythe through them in their number and surge out of the growing pile of corpses and hit the ground running, biting and fighting and killing and laughing. They can't kill me, they can't overcome my divinity, the glorious, beautiful form of the Wild-Woman of Nepal, the Wood-Guardian of Burma, sniper and soldier and sorceress and sage all in one.
They can never beat me, for I always win.
I am many. I am the tangled hands that grasp and tear and grip. I am the crooked teeth that bite and the twisted legs that beat a tattoo against the ground like the rumbling of thunder. I am the open ribcage and I am the intestines dragging against the soil, the bloody footprints left in my wake. I am the mane of jet-black hair, loose upon the wind. I am riding a wave of lust and adrenaline as I face an army alone, a hundred to one and winning. I am the unblinking sun above and the baked ground below.
I move. I twirl. I laugh. I sing. I am a whirlwind of rage and joy. I am the happiest man in the world.
I am Pramaada, and I have never felt so alive and free.
The kukri — sheathed in dripping skin and greasy fat — presents as a bony promontory on a crooked arm, a curved spur with which I can bludgeon and maim. I cut through the rakshasa like a sickle through scarlet wheat. I trample soldiers and prisoners beneath my feet. I am close to the top of the hill, I can smell the musk of fear from the major, a good smell, a goading smell. It drives me onward and up that blood-soaked hill. I want to know how that smell tastes on my tongue, how his flesh feels between my teeth.
The Heart is being moved. The Heart is being taken. I cannot allow it. I will not allow it. I hear the crackling of rifle-fire on all sides, know in the farthest corners of the back of my mind that my comrades are picking off who they can during my distraction, but it is an afterthought. A footnote. I don't care for anything but the slaughter in front of me, the feast set before me. I laugh.
I reach the top of the hill bloody and tattered, my body blurring and burning and bulging at the seams. I loom over the laborers, twelve feet of broken arms and gnashing teeth. The bone spur buries its length deep in a laborer's chest and unzips his gut, emptying out his innards onto the ground. I swipe another aside and step on him, crushing his ribs and pulping his heart. But the Heart, the Heart wrapped in ropes and canvas, the Heart shiny and chrome begins to stir. The major looks at me, fear in his eyes, sweat beading upon his brow, musk thick in the air. He says something I cannot understand. The major has his hand in the machine. I see the words on his lips as they dribble out, a language I do not understand yet the meaning I know.
"Protect me from this monster!"
The Heart cogitates. The Heart obliges.
The Heart beats, and my head feels like it is splitting in two, tearing itself apart. The full psychic power of the Heart is brought to bear on a single target, focused with an intent to rend my consciousness to less than thought, to break my mind, to tear my memories to shreds.
I am brought down, knees cracking, skin sloughing, the will and passion that holds my body together failing in the face of the Heart's power.
I see the major's wicked grin.
But, above everything, above the Heartbeat in my mind and the crack of gunfire in the air, there is a sharp sound like the grating of stone and rending of metal, muting the throbbing of the Heart and my own screams. It is the sound of the victorious cry of a bird of prey. A shadow looms over me, a shadow of unfurled wings, blotting out the sun. It is the moon in the eclipse. It is the grasping dark in flickering candlelight. I am reduced under its gaze, a piece of meat destined for its salivating maw.
I am Kiran, and I have never felt so small and scared.
The City burns. Gold and iron melt to slag, jewels split and sinter, the wood of the great pagoda-palace catches flame and burns the fool-king, scorches his retinue, and sears the Heart of Darkness. There is the sound of a thunderclap, and the walls and the palace and the jewel-encrusted streets of the dread City crack and crumble under Mahadeva's gaze, and the chains of the mind are broken, slaves freed and made masters. The Water washes the City clean, the Earth grows to reclaim the land, the Sun sears all the merchants and slavers and diplomats that treated with that darkling City. And yet the Heart remains.
Forged with metals beyond man's knowledge, enchanted with spells beyond even the gods' wisdom, the Heart endures, crackling and smoldering beneath Mahadeva's gaze, stopping in its beat but not destroyed. For the Heart was made by beings not beholden to the gods' wills, beings uncaring of gods' power and might. Beings older than the gods themselves. So the Heart endures.
Seeing the Heart's survival despite the City's destruction, Mahadeva is not satisified. He, the Great God, knows that wherever the Heart lay, it will lure man with its promises of power and glory, turning them to sin and away from the path of enlightenment. So in Mahadeva's great wisdom, he plucks from the sky the carrion vulture Shukarabhakshakah — the immortal Asura that attempted to eat the Sun in ages gone by — and locks him within the Heart, charging him with protecting the Heart, in case any other man, god, or beast dare raise it up once more, such that it may never be made to beat again, and its evil may never blight the land again.
The Heart no longer beats, and that is because Mahadeva wills it so.
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