The gates of Vishishtarajya disappeared behind them long before the kingdom itself did. From the open plain, Herald could still see its pale walls through the heat, shrinking with every mile until homes, shrines and crowded streets became another shape pressed against the horizon.
Hundreds of footsteps kept a steady rhythm across the dry earth as wind moved between the columns. Dust gathered along hems and armour straps, carrying the smell of leather, sun-warmed metal and old sand through the formation.
The easy conversation from the beginning of the march thinned with the distance, and even Peril had grown quieter. Somewhere behind them, Culpa was still bothering Lanthea, judging by the increasingly short answers drifting forward whenever the wind allowed them through.
Herald had expected his first remembered journey beyond the walls to feel more significant. Mostly, his feet hurt, sand had worked its way into his sandals, and the Yama Danda seemed to gain weight each time he changed hands.
Peril had also eaten most of the dried mango despite insisting he had packed it for the journey. Herald was deciding whether stealing the rest would be worth the argument when something brushed through his mind.
〈...Please...〉
The word was faint enough that Herald almost mistook it for cloth shifting in the wind. He looked toward Peril walking beside him.
"Did you say something?" Herald asked. Peril kept his eyes on the road and shook his head.
"No." He glanced over only after answering, confusion replacing the tired look on his face.
Herald faced forward again, but another thought reached him before he could dismiss the first.
〈...not today...〉
Something else slipped across it almost immediately.
〈...I promised I’d come home...〉
Dozens of soldiers occupied the rows around him, yet none of their mouths moved. Sandals and boots struck the earth in rhythm while the thoughts continued beneath them, too clear to be imagination and too directionless to belong to anyone Herald could identify.
〈...just let me make it back...〉
A prayer followed the plea, then a woman’s name repeated over and over. Beneath both came someone counting with desperate precision, each number forced into place as though losing track might mean losing control.
〈One. Two. Three. Four.〉
More fragments crowded in before Herald could separate them. One voice worried,
〈Mother said not to volunteer.〉
Another kept repeating,
〈I can do this. I can do this.〉
Somewhere beneath both, someone pleaded,
〈Vishnu, please.〉
Herald’s fingers tightened around the Yama Danda as the thoughts multiplied. They were no longer ahead, behind or beside him; hundreds of private fears simply existed inside and around him, bleeding together until the marching feet became the quieter sound.
His pace faltered, and Peril caught his shoulder before he drifted into the soldier beside him. Althea noticed from farther back and started toward them, the small spider on her shoulder shifting with her, but Peril raised one hand to show he had Herald. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
"Herald?" His grip remained firm enough to steady him without dragging him out of formation. Herald pressed two fingers against his temple, but the pressure did nothing.
"Why is everyone so loud?" Herald asked. Peril surveyed the rows around them before looking back at him.
"Nobody’s talking." The answer made Herald swallow against the dry taste in his mouth.
"I know." That was the part frightening him, and another thought passed through his mind so clearly that for a heartbeat he mistook it for his own.
〈Did I tell her I loved her this morning?〉
Someone nearby was thinking about food left unfinished at home. Another kept imagining an arrow entering his eye, while farther back a soldier repeated the same promise until the words blurred together:
〈My daughter won’t lose her father today. She won’t. She won’t.〉
"They’re everywhere." Herald tried to isolate one voice, and dozens rushed toward his attention at once.
Prayers tangled with names, promises with regrets, and frightened thoughts began and ended before he could understand whose they were. His breath caught halfway into his chest while sweat made the Yama Danda slick beneath his palm.
"Don’t listen to all of them," Peril said, shifting closer until his shoulder blocked part of Herald’s view of the moving columns. Herald gave him a strained look.
"I don’t know how not to." He could barely hear himself beneath the crowd inside his head.
"Then don’t fight them either. If it’s your Pathway, forcing it away might only make the drawback worse." Peril slowed his speech, separating each word from the noise surrounding it.
"That’s helpful." Herald almost laughed, but Peril ignored the tone and tapped two fingers against his own chest.
"Pick one thing instead. Something you can actually hear." When Herald muttered that there were hundreds, Peril kept his eyes on him.
"Then pick me."
He told Herald to follow his breathing and let everything else remain where it was instead of reaching for every passing thought. Herald tried because he had nothing better, matching Peril’s slow inhale until the first breath stopped scraping against his throat.
One breath became another, and the thoughts began losing their edges. They did not disappear, but prayers and frightened promises receded until they resembled a distant crowd rather than hundreds of strangers pressing against the inside of his skull.
"Better?" Peril asked, keeping one hand close to Herald’s arm without touching him. Herald rolled a shoulder and felt some of the tension shift down his back.
"A little." The answer seemed enough for Peril.
"That’s enough for now. Pathways always take something when they give." Peril looked toward the road again. "You learn to live with the drawback, or eventually it teaches you the hard way."
There was enough experience behind the words to catch Herald’s attention. "What’s yours?" he asked, and Peril immediately became fascinated by the horizon.
"Beautiful weather today."
The refusal was so obvious that Herald almost laughed, but something else brushed his awareness beneath the fading noise.
It was not a sentence this time, only a sharp reluctance that did not belong to Herald. Whatever Peril’s drawback was, he very much did not want the conversation moving anywhere near it.
Peril noticed Herald watching him. "What?" he asked, and Herald turned toward the horizon with exaggerated interest. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
"No reason. Beautiful weather today." Culpa’s laughter carried from somewhere behind them, followed by something Peril muttered too quietly to deserve an answer.
For the first time since the thoughts began, Herald felt his shoulders loosen. Then another one surfaced from the crowd, carrying none of the panic, prayer or bargaining surrounding it.
〈If I die, put my ashes in the fountain. The old one near the eastern houses. I spent my childhood there.〉
There was no desperate plea behind the thought, only a quiet certainty. The last trace of Herald’s amusement left his face as marching feet continued around him without interruption.
He could not identify where the thought had come from before it disappeared among the others. This time, Herald made no attempt to search for it.
The army travelled deeper into the plains as the afternoon wore on, and vegetation thinned until even the stubborn desert shrubs disappeared. Weathered stones and dry channels replaced them, along with pieces of old structures half consumed by sand.
They passed what might once have been a roadside shrine, though only half of the carved deity remained standing. Its broken face watched the road while dust filled the cracks, and the columns moved around it without slowing.
The land began to rise beneath Herald’s feet, burning his calves after hours of walking. Dry wind had roughened his lips by the time Erudite’s voice carried back from the front.
"Final ridge." The words travelled down the formation, and whatever remained of the casual march disappeared with them.
Peril loosened the Vel across his back while Culpa’s voice went quiet behind them. Across the larger army, metal whispered free of leather and hundreds of bodies drew closer into disciplined ranks.
Herald had spent the journey surrounded by people who joked, complained, stole food and worried about those waiting at home. As the ridge drew closer, those same people settled into themselves, and he finally understood what it meant to see the Siddhas among them.
The thoughts remained beneath the armour and controlled breathing. Herald could keep them farther away now, but quieting them had not erased the fear carried by hundreds of people who would never speak those things aloud.
The soldiers ahead reached the crest first and slowed, compressing the formation behind them. Herald heard the rhythm of sandals break apart before he climbed high enough to see why.
Kurukshetra stretched below them, and for several breaths even the voices inside his head seemed small. Calling it a battlefield felt insufficient.
Sand flowed across the plain in slow sheets, pouring over ridges and into trenches before the wind uncovered them again. Nothing stayed buried for long, and the land seemed to rearrange itself with every gust, exposing pieces of wars too old for Herald to tell where ruins ended and remains began.
A trident rose from the sand far to the east, only partly visible yet still towering above the dunes. Rust and blackened stains covered the metal, while torn prayer cloths snapped from a shaft thick enough that several men together could not have wrapped their arms around it.
Farther out, the upper half of a chariot wheel emerged from another dune. Its cracked spokes stood taller than the houses Herald remembered from Vishishtarajya, while most of the rim remained swallowed beneath moving earth.
Then he noticed the bones and realized he had first mistaken them for pale hills. An enormous rib cage curved from the sand, each exposed bone large enough to form an archway, while beyond it something resembling a spine disappeared toward the horizon.
Weathered vertebrae rose like a broken mountain range, too large for Herald to imagine the creature that had once carried them. When the wind shifted, sand poured from the bones and uncovered smaller relics beneath them: broken swords, shattered shields, arrowheads and armour buried one war over another.
Peril came alongside him and followed his stare across the plain. "First time seeing Kurukshetra?" he asked.
"That I remember." Peril’s mouth tightened briefly at the answer before he looked back toward the shifting dunes.
"Does the sand ever stop?" Herald asked as another gust hissed against the stones around their feet. Peril watched a sheet of sand spill down one distant slope.
"No. People have been asking where it all comes from longer than either of us has been alive." He paused before adding, "I’ve heard some say it’s been here since the wars of the Treta Yuga, but that’s speculation."
Herald looked from the trident to the giant bones and the half-buried wheel. For once, no question came quickly enough to fill the silence, and he did not know what to ask.