The thirteenth-day rites brought the entire extended family flooding back into Lohaghat, filling the ancestral house once more with the low, steady murmur of prayers and the thick, cloying smell of incense burning in every room simultaneously.
Vihaan sat through most of the ceremony in his usual practiced silence, watching the ritual unfold around him with careful attention rather than active participation, tracking the small details everyone else seemed too absorbed in grief to notice.
It was during a quiet lull in the proceedings, tasked with carrying additional offerings to the small shrine room at the back of the house, that he found the drawer.
It wasn’t hidden, exactly — simply tucked away beneath a stack of old shawls inside a heavy wooden almirah that had clearly, unmistakably belonged to his grandfather, its surface carved with decorative patterns that had faded and smoothed with decades of use.
Inside, beneath the shawls: a thick stack of yellowed notebooks, their covers softened and worn with age and handling, and a single brass key that fit no lock Vihaan could immediately identify anywhere in the room.
He opened the topmost notebook carefully, half-expecting the brittle pages to crumble at his touch.
They didn’t.
Instead, page after page revealed dense, careful handwriting, dated in the corners going back decades, filled with intricate diagrams of what were unmistakably bells — not one bell, but several, each sketched with meticulous attention and annotated in the margins with notes written in a script Vihaan didn’t recognize at all, something older and more angular than the Devanagari he was familiar with.
Interspersed among the diagrams: a rough, hand-drawn map of the hills surrounding Lohaghat, with small symbols marked carefully at several distinct points across the terrain, one of them — positioned exactly where the temple stood — circled twice in dark, deliberate ink.
One line, further down the page, had been underlined with such force that the pen had actually torn through the paper in places: “The Ninth must never be found before the others are returned.
If she wakes before the circle is whole, everything we have kept silent will surface — and there will be no bell left to silence it again.” Vihaan stared at the words for a long, cold moment, feeling something crawl slowly up the back of his neck.
He had no idea who “she” referred to.
But some quiet, buried part of him — the same stubborn, instinctive part that had refused to be genuinely surprised by an impossible girl standing on an empty temple roof — already, uncomfortably, suspected he was about to find out.
He closed the notebook carefully and slid it into his shoulder bag before anyone passing by the shrine room could notice what he’d found.