A man standing with his back to nothing.
Before him, the plain of cracked obsidian stretched toward five beings.
Four were shadows made solid. Darkness that swallowed light. They had no faces, no flesh. Only horns, four arms each, and white eyes glowing like embers in a tomb.
The fifth was clover white, with golden hair. Six wings spread behind him. A halo did not sit upon his head. Instead, it folded in on itself, rings within rings spinning through dimensions that broke the eye. His face held no age. His eyes held nothing.
Behind them stood the army. Mountain-sized behemoths. Winged serpents. Crawling things. Ten thousand dark creatures breathing as one. Silent.
The angel spoke. His voice was soft, almost kind.
"You came all this way. You lost your arm. You lost your blood. You lost everyone who ever walked beside you."
He drifted closer. The folded halo clicked.
"And for what? To stand here and bleed at my feet?"
Silence.
Then a sound.
Weak at first. A dying man's breath shaped into something broken.
Hah.
The man's shoulders trembled.
Hahaha.
Blood dripped from his chin.
HAHAHAHA.
The laugh tore across the Ashen Plain. It bounced off the skeletons of titans. It climbed into the wounded sky and shook the vortex itself. Behind the five, the army shifted. Ten thousand monsters took one step back.
The laugh stopped instantly, as if it had never happened.
The man turned.
His chest was a ruin. A vertical cleft split his sternum. Gashes crossed his ribs. Blood poured from his scalp, down his temple, and across the thin horizontal scar between his eyes. His face was half-hidden by black, spiky hair. One eye glowed grey.
He raised his right arm, the one holding the sword, and pointed it at the Five.
The blade caught something. A light that was not there. A reflection of nothing.
His grey eye burned.
THE MAN
(voice low, so low, like grinding stone)
"Weakness is just a word."
He took a step forward. His left arm dragged behind him, painting a black line across the obsidian.
"I don't know what it means.
I've never felt it."
Another step. The ground cracked beneath his bare foot.
"I only know one thing."
He grinned.
Blood poured from his mouth. His teeth were red. His face, half-hidden by black hair streaked with crimson and crossed by that precise scar, was no longer the face of a man.
It was the face of something that had crawled out of a nightmare and liked it there.
"HOW TO CUT!"
He swung the sword to his side. The air screamed.
"And today, right here, in this dead place beneath your broken sky,"
His grey eye flashed white.
"I will cut all of you."
A beat. The army held its breath. The four shadows' white eyes narrowed, if shadows could narrow.
"Even if it kills me."
His smile widened.
The sword hummed.
The sword began to glow, emitting a dark sound.
The four shadows raised their arms.
SCREEN CHANGE.
We saw a solitary figure stood at the edge of the rooftop of an abandoned twenty-three-story residential tower in South Delhi. Cracked concrete and rusted iron railings groaned under the wind. The building had been left to squatters and ghosts years ago. Tonight it held only him.
He was forty-four, but his face belonged to a much older man. Deep grooves ran from the corners of his mouth to his jaw like dry riverbeds. His brow sat heavy and furrowed. Hair that had turned gray too soon lay matted against his scalp, sticky with sweat and city dust. The wind tugged at the torn black suit that hung from his broad shoulders. The jacket missed a button. The left sleeve had split at the seam. A dark, unidentifiable stain spread along the collar.
His trousers carried smears of dried mud and something darker.
One thick hand gripped a 9mm pistol. The metal felt warm against his palm, almost alive. The magazine was gone. He had left it three floors below, together with his wallet and the single photograph he could no longer bear to carry.
Empty.
Useless.
Exactly like the rest of him.
Far below, the city roared. Police cruisers jammed the narrow streets, their blue and red lights flashing across the faces of concrete buildings and the gathered crowd.
Office workers in wrinkled shirts pressed against the barricades. A woman clutched a small child to her chest. The local chai wallah had abandoned his steaming cart to stare upward with the rest. Horns blared. Sirens wailed. A metallic voice crackled through a megaphone, sharp and urgent.
"You cannot run anywhere now! Surrender or we will shoot!"
He did not look down at the lights or the faces or the guns pointed toward the sky. He lifted his eyes higher, past the edge of the rooftop, past the haze of pollution, and stared straight into the open sky.
Today the sky was heartbreakingly beautiful.
Year 2040
My name is Veda Das.
I am forty-four years old.
And I am already a dead man walking.
But I was not always like this.
I was not always this hollow thing standing on the edge of nothing with empty pockets and an emptier soul.
Once, long ago, I was a soldier.
Once, I had a wife.
Once, I had a child who never drew his first breath.
2013. Age 17.
I joined the Indian Army carrying nothing but my dead father's surname and the weight of my mother's silent tears.
My mother was forty-two that year, yet she looked closer to sixty. Strands of white already threaded through her black hair. Her face had tightened into sharp lines carved by years of hunger, worry, and endless labor. She moved through each day with the slow, stubborn rhythm of someone who had never been allowed to stop.
My father had disappeared the day I was born. He ran away with another woman and left behind only silence. I never saw his face. Never heard his voice. Never received a single word of explanation. He simply ceased to exist, as if I had never been born at all.
We lived in a single rented room near the Jagannath Temple in Puri. The space was barely wide enough for a narrow cot and a small kerosene stove. The walls had once been painted pale green, but the color had peeled away in large flaky patches, revealing gray cement beneath. A tiny window looked out onto the blank wall of the neighboring building, only two feet away. Sunlight rarely reached inside.
My mother worked two jobs without rest. During the day she sat hunched over a sewing machine in a garment factory, stitching collars for ten rupees per hundred pieces. Her back curved like a question mark that no one ever answered. At night she cleaned offices in Connaught Place, scrubbing floors on her knees until her knuckles swelled and cracked. She slept no more than four hours each night. She never complained. She never asked why life had chosen her for this endless punishment. She simply kept moving, kept fighting, kept believing.
"God is watching, beta"
[ Note- beta mean son or child ]
she would whisper while rubbing oil into my tired shoulders. "Always watching."
I wanted to believe her. I tried. But belief never settled comfortably inside my chest.
At seventeen I was not clever. Books felt like enemies. School was a punishment I endured in the back row, eyes lowered, never raising my hand. Teachers skipped over me as if I were invisible. My uniform was always too short because we could not afford a new one. The other boys whispered and laughed. I learned early to keep my mouth shut and my head down.
My mind moved slowly, thick and heavy, as though pushing through deep water. But my body was different. At seventeen I already possessed the frame of a man ten years older: thick neck, wide chest, powerful shoulders, and hands rough with calluses from hauling sacks at the weekend market. My back was strong. My will to endure was stronger.
The army did not ask for intelligence. It did not demand degrees or sharp answers. It only needed bodies willing to bleed and break. At seventeen, that door stood open, and it was the only one that offered money.
I did not join for glory or patriotism. I joined because my mother's hands were growing tired. Because someone had to carry the weight before she collapsed under it. I joined because staying home meant watching her kill herself slowly for a son who could offer nothing except his own flesh.
The thought of leaving her alone in that cramped room tore at me every night. Yet staying felt even worse. Staying meant I would remain useless. Staying meant she would never stop destroying herself for me.
So I made the choice.
She cried when I told her. She held me so tightly I could feel her heartbeat against my ribs, frantic and afraid.
"Don't go, son. We will manage. We always manage."
I lied through my teeth. I told her I would be fine. I told her it would only be a few years. I told her I would return rich, with enough money to let her rest for the rest of her life.
We both knew the words were hollow, but she released me anyway. That is what mothers do. They open their arms and let their children walk into fire if it means the child might survive.
I stepped out of that tiny room and closed the door behind me. I did not look back. If I had turned my head even once, I would have run back inside and never left.
That was 2013.
I was seventeen.
And my life as a soldier began.