The morning of Vyan’s eleventh birthday was too beautiful for the tragedy it held.
They sat outside their small hut, the air cool and humming with the sound of the forest.
His mother had made him a sweet—a simple ball of pounded wild grain and forest honey.
Vyan took it, but he didn’t eat.
His eyes were red, his face a mask of stubborn, youthful grief.
“Vyan,” she said, her voice lighter than usual.
“Don’t be such a gloomy soul. If you cannot smile for yourself today, at least smile for your mother’s departure. It is a transition, not an end.”
Vyan looked at her with sharp, blunt eyes, refusing to speak.
He wanted to scream, to beg, to be the child he was, but her lessons on detachment held his tongue.
She felt the weight of his gaze and let out a soft, rare laugh.
“I have a gift for you, Vyan. Something of your father’s.”
At the mention of his father, the boy’s eyes lit up despite his resolve to remain upset.
She went into the hut and returned with a small, intricately carved box.
Resting inside was an Yantra—a Storage Yantra, a shimmering lattice of space-logic that looked like a small Black pouch.
She didn’t ask.
She pressed the Astra to Vyan’s chest and placed her other hand on his brow.
Vyan felt a sudden, heavy warmth expand behind his ribs as the yantra anchored itself into his spirit.
“It is done,” she whispered.
“Inside that space, I have left things for the man you will become. Not the child you are.”
The realization that this was truly the end broke Vyan’s dam.
He began to sob, the sound jagged and raw.
“Mother, please… don’t go.”
“It is almost time, Vyan.” She stood up and, for the first time in a long while, she picked him up.
She hugged him with a strength that felt like it could hold the world together.
For an hour, they stayed like that.
She let him wail, let him ruin her shoulder with his tears, until he was empty.
“Vyan,” she whispered into his hair, her voice beginning to sound like dry leaves.
Vyan’s sobbing renewed.
He felt her arms begin to lose their substance.
Her form was fading, turning into a mist of golden and silver threads.
“Listen to me, Vyan,” she said, her voice echoing as if from a distance.
“Long ago, when there was no one, there were two. One of them was Vashi, the one I devoted my soul to. Remember, He is the beginning and the end. Do not love or hate. Do not hold grudges. Have abundant emotions—feel everything, taste the ecstasy of the state itself—but never do it for the outcome. Chase the one thing a man does not have: Freedom.”
Vyan clutched at the air where her back had been.
She was nearly transparent now.
“Defy the fate, Vyan,” she gasped, her breath a final, shimmering vapor.
“Though I am an Asura, I loved a man. Though I am a devotee of Vashi, I loved my son. But you are free. Do not be bound like me by love, or like your father by his responsibilities. Be an Asura if you wish. Be a Dharma if you must. Be both and don’t, be free.”
Her final words were a whisper that filled the forest: “Vashi is everything and everyone; He is the universe itself.”
With a final, silent pulse of light, she dissolved into a thousand golden-silver threads that drifted up toward the canopy and vanished into nothingness.
Vyan was left kneeling in the dirt, crying and screaming loudly, the first light of a beautiful dawn falling across his empty arms.
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