“The first one you need to know about is named Veer.”
The author said it the way you say something you’ve been carrying for a long time not dramatically, just with the weight of something that has been true in your mind for years before you finally said it out loud.
“Veer,” he continued.
“He’s from Earth.
Not the Earth you came from in your past life the same planet, but what it became.
Centuries passed.
The world changed the cities, the sky above them, what humans had to become to survive in it.
You’ll understand the shape of that change when you see it.
It’ll feel familiar in a way that doesn’t have a clean explanation.” He paused.
“You won’t find him on Earth though.
The Aevum has gates that connect back to it the way it connects to everything beneath it.
Veer moves between them.
That’s where your paths cross in the Aevum, not on Earth.” He paused.
“And Veer himself is young.
Genuinely young one of the youngest at his level in a world full of people who’ve had decades to build what they are.
That gap is what makes him worth watching.
He gets stronger by defeating things.
Every creature he overcomes, the strength of it becomes his, added to what he already is.
No ceiling.
No limit anyone has found yet.” A pause.
“He’s a fighter the way some people simply are.
Not trained into it.
Not told to be.
Just that’s what he is underneath everything else.”
Something shifted in the author’s voice.
Quieter now.
More deliberate.
“You’ll recognise something in him when you meet him,” he said.
“Your past life who you were before this body, before this world you had a mastery over weapons that most people thought wasn’t possible.
Every weapon that existed.
Every technique, every weight and edge and reach.
All of it yours.” He looked at Varun steadily.
“Veer will remind you of that.
Not because he’s the same as you.
Because he carries that same quality the sense of someone the world of combat was built for.
When you feel it, don’t ignore it.
It means something.” He paused, and something in his expression shifted brief, genuine.
“He’ll be the closest to you.
Not because I planned it that way.
Because of who he is.
You’ll understand when you meet him.” A pause.
“He has a wife.
Her name is Ruhi.
She matters to him the way very few things do.
Remember that too.”
He let that sit for a moment.
“The second one is Sarthak.”
The name landed differently.
The author’s tone shifted slightly not darker exactly, but more careful.
Like someone describing something rare and dangerous that they respect.
“He’s in the Aevum the universe above yours the one you’ll enter through the dungeon gates when you’re strong enough.
There’s a race there vampires, real ones, not the stories your world tells about them.
Sarthak is connected to them.
His power comes from that bloodline.
He’s fast.
Precise.
The kind of fighter who doesn’t waste a single movement.” A pause.
“He’s been through things that would have ended most people.
He hasn’t ended.
That tells you most of what you need to know about him.”
Varun filed this away.
“Third,” the author said, “is Vipin.”
His voice shifted again something almost fond in it now, the way someone sounds when they describe a person who surprised them.
“Vipin is from his own universe entirely.
Not yours, not the Aevum somewhere else, somewhere with its own rules and its own weight.
He’ll come to Tharaxis through a gate from his world, and that’s where your paths cross.” He tilted his head slightly.
“His ability is difficult to explain simply.
He sees flaws.
In techniques, in structures, in people’s fighting styles, in everything around him he looks at something once and the weaknesses become visible to him, as clearly as if they were written down.
It makes him an extraordinary teacher.
It also makes him someone who sees more than other people and carries that weight quietly.”
A brief pause.
“And the last one,” the author said, “is Shaurya.”
Something in the way he said it not heavier, but different.
Measured.
“Shaurya comes last.
You’ll meet him at Tharaxis, toward the end of what happens there, and he won’t feel like the others feel when you first meet them.
It’ll take longer.
But what’s built slowly tends to hold better.” He paused.
“He tames beasts.
That’s where he starts finding creatures that other people run from and bringing them to his side.”
As he said it, he stopped.
His gaze moved to Varun unhurried, deliberate, the way someone looks at a person when they’re thinking something they’ve chosen not to say.
It lasted only a second.
Then he looked away and kept talking, as if the moment hadn’t happened at all.
But it had happened.
Varun had seen it.
“But he doesn’t stop there,” the author continued, as if the pause hadn’t happened.
“Later, he goes further than any beast tamer has gone before generates a demon core, and with it the ability to tame demons too.
What he is at the beginning is only half of what he becomes.” A pause.
“That’s also, I think, something true about his character.”
He stopped.
The frozen room held its quiet around them.
Varun looked at the author.
Then he looked at Riya still motionless across the table, arm still mid-reach, completely unaware that in the space of this stopped moment her brother had just been handed the shape of four lives he hadn’t known about before.
“So,” Varun said.
“You’ve written a character on Earth.
One in a vampire universe.
One from his own separate world entirely.
One you’re saving for last.” He paused.
“And you want me to find all four of them.
Across multiple universes and whatever Tharaxis is.”
“Yes,” the author said.
“How.”
“You’ll be strong enough.
When the time comes.”
“You’re very confident about that.”
“I wrote you,” the author said simply.
Varun looked at him for a long moment with the flat expression of someone who has a great many things to say and is choosing them carefully.
“Do you understand,” Varun said, “what you’ve described to me.
One person from a version of Earth I’ve never seen, in a time I haven’t lived in.
One connected to a vampire bloodline in a universe above this one.
One from a completely different universe who ends up on a planet called Tharaxis.
And one you won’t even fully describe yet.” He paused.
“You wrote all of this and you think I can just find them.
Like picking up something you left on a table.”
“Not easily,” the author said.
“Not easily,” Varun repeated.
“That’s your reassurance.”
“I didn’t promise it would be easy.”
“You didn’t promise anything.
You just put four people in my head and said good luck.”
The author was quiet for a moment.
Then something shifted in his expression the kind of smile that doesn’t take over the whole face, that lives only at the edge of the mouth, like a person who finds something genuinely funny but has decided not to make a show of it.
“You’ll have more than luck,” he said.
Varun looked at him.
“You know everything that’s going to happen to me,” he said.
His voice stayed level, but something underneath it had gone pointed.
“You know how this ends.
You know every person I’ll lose and everything I’ll go through to get from this table to wherever the story finishes.” A pause.
“Show me.”
The almost-smile disappeared.
“No,” the author said.
“Why.”
“Because you wouldn’t go,” the author said quietly.
“If you knew everything.
You would make different choices not better ones, just ones that tried to avoid what’s coming.
And what’s coming is what builds you into what you need to become.” He met Varun’s eyes.
“I’m not hiding your future from you to be cruel.
I’m hiding it because a person who knows their ending stops living the middle.”
Varun held his gaze.
“That,” he said, “is a very convenient reason to have.”
“Yes,” the author said.
“It’s also true.”
The silence between them settled.
He was quiet for a moment.
Something shifted in his expression not the mysterious stillness he’d maintained through most of the conversation, but something underneath it.
Smaller.
More honest.
“I read something once.
A line that stayed with me longer than most things do.” He looked at the frozen room around them the stopped rain, the motionless sister, the handmade decoration hanging still from the light fixture.
“The story changed every time I read it.
The story was over but it wasn’t over.
The story wouldn’t end unless the reader gave up on the story.” He paused.
“I never forgot that.
Because it’s true of every story that matters including yours.
It only ends if someone gives up on it.” His eyes came back to Varun.
“I haven’t.
And I don’t think you will either.”
He paused again.
Then, more quietly:
“I should tell you something.
I am writing this story.
But I am also reading it.” He paused, as if deciding how much to give.
“When I created you when I was sitting alone and writing the person you are there was no one there.
No one to tell, no one to show.
Just me and the pages and the version of you I was slowly building.” A pause.
“You were the story I told myself when there was no one to listen.
And now” He looked at Varun directly.
“Now I get to read what you do with it.
That’s not nothing.
That’s everything, actually.”
Then the author said, more quietly still: “I’ll tell you one thing.”
Varun waited.
“Everything you lose,” the author said, “you lose for a reason.
Not because I’m cruel.
Because the story needs it to be real.” He paused.
“And I’m sorry for it.
I wrote it knowing what it costs you.
I want you to know that I know.”
Something in Varun went still.
Not the trained stillness, the practiced composure.
Something underneath that.
Something older the part of him that had survived a hundred battles in a life before this one, that had stood over the bodies of people he’d failed to protect and kept standing anyway.
That part knew exactly what this feeling was.
It just hadn’t had to name it in this life yet.
Some things you have to lose before the word for them exists.
He didn’t respond.
The author stood.
“You won’t remember this conversation,” he said.
“When time starts again you’ll know the four names and their stories not because you remember being told, just because you know, the way you know things sometimes without knowing how.
The knowledge will be there when you need it.”
“And you,” Varun said.
“Will I remember you.”
The author looked at him.
“No,” he said.
“You won’t remember me at all.”
He said it without apology.
Not cruelly just honestly, the way you tell someone something difficult because they deserve the truth more than they deserve comfort.
“One more thing,” the author said.
He reached into the stopped air of the room and for a moment his hand did something that didn’t fully belong to the physics of the space a gesture that left no trace, that Varun would not remember making, that would not leave any mark at all.
Then he turned back properly and looked at Varun one last time.
“Hold still,” he said.
Varun held still.
The author raised his hand left hand, Varun noticed, the same dominant hand and pressed two fingers to the center of Varun’s chest.
Not hard.
Just present, the way you press a key into a lock.
Certain.
Something ignited.
Not painfully.
Not even dramatically, from the outside.
But from inside Varun felt something that had been sealed open, the way a room opens when a wall you didn’t know was there suddenly isn’t.
A structure, vast and layered and entirely his, clicking into existence inside him.
Not the qi he had been reaching for in the dark.
Something above that.
Something that had been waiting under everything, patient, since before he was born into this body.
The author lowered his hand.
“It was already yours,” he said quietly.
“I just told it you were ready.” He paused, looking at Varun with the difficult-to-read expression and then, for the first time in the conversation, something in it went almost warm.
“Your past life that mastery you had over every weapon in existence.
I built this around that.
Around what you already are.” A brief pause.
“Every weapon has a soul, Varun.
You understood that once, without knowing you understood it.
What I just gave you it’s built for someone who knows that.” He didn’t explain further.
He didn’t name it.
“You’ll figure out the rest yourself.
That part I trust you with.”
He looked at Varun for one more moment, then said:
“When you wake up eat the rest of your birthday food.
Riya worked hard on it.”
Then the light came back.
Not differently from how it had arrived the same slow gathering, the same quiet way of filling a space.
The man who was ordinary except for his height stood in it for a moment, and then the light didn’t so much take him as simply include him, and then there was only the light, and then there was nothing, and the room was just a room again.
A frozen room.
Five years old, at a birthday table, with cold tea in front of him and four names sitting somewhere in his mind that felt like they had always been there.
Varun looked at Riya’s frozen arm.
He looked at the rain outside, each drop suspended.
He looked at the handmade decoration hanging from the light fixture with its slightly uneven edges.
Then time remembered what it was supposed to be doing.
The rain fell.
The guild hall sounds returned all at once, ordinary and immediate.
Riya finished her reach across the table, picked up his mug, pushed it back toward him.
“Drink that before it gets cold,” she said, already looking away.
Varun looked at the mug.
Something in his head that hadn’t been there before sat quietly, settled, like furniture that had always been in the room and he’d simply never noticed until now.
Four names.
Four stories.
Four people somewhere in a world larger than this table, this city, this planet.
He picked up the mug.
“It’s already cold,” he said.
“Then drink it anyway,” Riya said.
“It’s your birthday.”
He drank it.