The sanctuary felt different after the rooftop encounter.
The air was still. But not peaceful.
Like the city outside was holding its breath.
---
Arjun sat in silence, staring at the pendant.
Mira had taken him downstairs after the Revenant vanished — no wounds on his body, but something felt broken inside. Not physically.
Deeper.
He hadn't spoken much since.
Now, in the dim light of the sanctuary's inner chamber, the spiral pendant sat heavy in his palm. When he focused, he could feel the thread inside his chest resonating with it — humming low, like a tuning fork touching bone.
"Why me?" he muttered again.
Footsteps. Mira entered, tossing a rolled-up scroll onto the table beside him.
"Answers," she said.
He raised an eyebrow.
Mira crossed her arms. "It's your birth record. We found it encrypted in a vault linked to the Eastern Threads Division. One of the last Ananta sanctuaries."
"You... have my birth record?"
"Parts of it," Mira replied. "Name, date, place. Then one word, written in old Prakrit script."
She tapped it: "Asurja."
Arjun frowned. "I don't know what that means."
"It's not a name. It's a designation."
Mahir entered then, face pale.
"Tell him," Mira said.
The old man sighed. "Some children… were born with threads already awakened. Dangerous. Their existence was hidden. Marked as 'Asurja' — meaning carrier of cursed thread."
Arjun stared at him. "So I've had this… thing… since birth?"
"It was sealed," Mahir said. "That flicker you felt all these years? That wasn't new. It was your body trying to remember."
Mira added quietly, "The Revenants knew that seal was breaking. That's why they attacked. Not just to kill you."
"To take me."
"To use you," Mahir said. "An Asurja isn't just a thread-bearer. They're a key. A gate."
Arjun's voice was barely a whisper. "A gate to what?"
Mira didn't answer.
Because none of them knew yet.
---
That night, the sanctuary's alarms blared.
Sirens howled across the ancient stone walls. Arjun jolted awake, the spiral pendant glowing hot against his chest.
A voice rang from the hallway. "Breach on the eastern wall!"
He grabbed his staff and ran.
The corridor pulsed with red light. He passed Mira already mid-sprint, dual blades drawn.
Then he saw them.
Figures in black and red, masks like skeletal jackals, their movements distorted like glitching frames in a broken film.
Revenants.
They phased through walls — their forms half-real, their presence warping sound.
One turned toward Arjun. Its eye — only one visible — was red.
Not like the man on the rooftop.
Worse.
A hunger that didn't blink.
The creature lunged.
Arjun raised the staff — and the flicker inside exploded.
---
It was like being unmade.
His body floated, suspended in gold.
Every thread in his chest vibrated — unraveling, reconnecting, spinning outward into the air around him.
He saw symbols — floating, ancient, burned into reality.
He heard a voice.
Not outside.
Inside.
> "Remember who you were."
Then—
Everything snapped back.
Arjun stood in the hallway, staff glowing white-gold in his hands.
The Revenant froze mid-step. For a breath — it looked afraid.
Then it hissed, twisted in on itself, and vanished like smoke into a crack in the wall.
---
Mira and Mahir caught up seconds later.
"You felt it too?" Arjun gasped.
Mira only nodded. "You opened it. Even just for a moment."
"The thread?"
"No," she said. "You."
---
Later that night, Arjun stood in the map room.
Mira joined him. They stared at the central panel — a projection of Mumbai with golden dots marking hidden sanctuaries, old ley lines, and fading threads.
"What happens next?" Arjun asked.
She looked tired for once. "This was a scouting party. They didn't want to fight."
"Then what?"
"They wanted to test how far your seal has fractured."
Arjun's grip on the pendant tightened. "They'll come again."
Mira nodded. "And next time, they won't just be testing."
Silence stretched.
Then she added, almost whispering:
"They're not hunting you, Arjun."
He turned.
"They're waiting for you to become something else."
---
That night, in his dreams, Arjun stood in a sea of stars.
A thread stretched from his chest into the void — pulsing, infinite.
And in the distance, a shape watched him.
Burning red eyes.
A smile that split across too many faces.
---
End of Chapter 5 – Beneath the Skin