“The celebration continued through the night. The Aksharans produced food from the orchards — fruit, grains, prepared dishes that used spices I'd never tasted, the cuisine of a ten-thousand-year-old civilisation that had refined cooking into: art. The food was: incandescent. A grain dish cooked with a spice that tasted like: electricity — not unpleasant but: startling. A fruit preserve that tasted of: memory, the specific sweetness that made you feel: nostalgic for something you'd never: experienced. A tea — an actual tea, brewed from leaves that grew in the Dharani orchards — that tasted the way the ancient texts described chai: "the drink that warms the soul's hearth."”
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