Chapter 7: The Riders of Devlok

Carmen was seventeen and furious, which in Devlok was a dangerous combination, because fury in a Tejasvidya practitioner had a tendency to manifest physically—sparks flying from fingertips, objects vibrating on shelves, the ambient temperature of a room rising three degrees in the time it took to clench a fist.

She was furious because of the Anarchists.

They had arrived six weeks ago—a faction from the northern territories, led by a man who called himself Reeve and who wore his righteousness like armour. Reeve and his followers believed that Tejasvidya was a tool of oppression, that the ruling council of Tejaspuram used magic to maintain power over the non-magical populace (of which there were none, but this did not seem to bother Reeve's ideology, which, like most ideologies, was resistant to factual correction). They had marched into the city, occupied the council hall, and declared a new order: no more Riders, no more Sarpentii flights, no more military use of magic. Peace through disarmament. Freedom through submission.

The Sarpentii were the worst part. The great winged serpents—the pride of Devlok's aerial forces, creatures of ancient intelligence and devastating power—had been grounded. Literally grounded. Confined to their stables by Reeve's decree, their riders dismissed, their wings folded, their luminous eyes dulled by captivity and boredom. Carmen's serpent, Thea, was among them. Carmen had been bonded to Thea since she was twelve—the psychic link between Rider and Sarpentii was as intimate as any human relationship, a constant exchange of thought and emotion and sensation that made separation feel like amputation. For six weeks, she had been cut off from Thea, reduced to baking bread in the palace kitchens (Reeve had assigned her a civilian role, because what better way to neutralise a warrior than to hand them a rolling pin), and the separation was eating her alive.

She sat outside the stable, hugging her knees. Her Rider's boots—forbidden by decree but worn anyway, hidden under her long baker's skirt, a small act of defiance that kept her sane—were scuffed and worn but still carried the scaly texture of Sarpentii hide, still held the shape of stirrups and flight straps, still smelled of wind and altitude and the electric ozone of Thea's breath. She ran her fingers over the scales and closed her eyes and imagined herself in the sky, Thea's massive body beneath her, the wind in her face, the world spread below like a map of possibility.

A sound from above. Wings.

Carmen's eyes flew open. She scanned the night sky—cloudy, the moon barely visible, the stars hidden—and heard it again. The unmistakable, rhythmic flapping of Sarpentii wings. Not the heavy, powerful strokes of a serpent in flight—these were softer, more cautious, the wingbeats of a creature trying to fly quietly, which was roughly as effective as a temple elephant trying to tiptoe.

Carmen.

The whisper entered her mind like water entering a crack in stone—gentle, insistent, undeniable. Not a sound heard through ears but a thought received through the bond, the psychic link that six weeks of separation had weakened but not broken.

Thea?

She was on her feet. Her heart was hammering. The stable was dark—she peered through the doorway, letting her eyes adjust. Empty. The stalls were empty. The musky, electric smell of the Sarpentii lingered, but the creatures were gone.

Young Rider. We are above.

Carmen looked up. The stable had a rooftop opening—designed for aerial launch and landing—and through it she could see nothing but cloud. But the bond pulsed with Thea's presence—close, real, alive—and tears came to her eyes without permission, the involuntary response of a body that had been separated from its other half for too long and was now being told that the separation was over.

How?* she thought. *Reeve's guards—the chains—

The chains are broken. The guards are sleeping. Your brother's friend, the one called Khare—he unlocked the stable. We are free. All of us.

Vikram. Carmen's older brother. He had disappeared three weeks ago, along with Khare, his closest friend—vanished in the night without explanation, without goodbye, without any indication of where they had gone or why. The household had been frantic. Carmen's mother had wept. Reeve had posted notices declaring them deserters. And now, it seemed, they had been planning this—a coordinated liberation of the Sarpentii, timed for the night when Reeve's guard rotation was thinnest and the cloud cover was thickest.

Come up,* Thea said. *We fly tonight.

Carmen did not hesitate. She grabbed the flight harness from its hook on the wall—Reeve's people had confiscated the formal equipment but had missed this one, an old training harness that Carmen had hidden in the feed store—and climbed. The stable's interior scaffolding was designed for Rider access, a series of platforms and ladders that spiraled up to the rooftop opening, and she ascended with the speed and sureness of someone who had been climbing these scaffolds since childhood, her baker's skirt hiked above her knees, her forbidden boots finding purchase on rungs that her feet knew from memory.

She emerged onto the roof. The wind hit her face—cold, clean, carrying the moisture of the clouds and the electric charge of an approaching storm—and there, hovering above the stable with wings spread and eyes blazing with the amber luminescence that was the Sarpentii's signature, was Thea.

She was enormous. Carmen had forgotten—or had forced herself to forget, because remembering the scale and majesty of her serpent while confined to a bakery would have destroyed her—how enormous Thea was. Forty feet from snout to tail, her body covered in scales that shimmered between sapphire and emerald, her wings translucent membranes stretched over bone struts as delicate as calligraphy, her eyes—four of them, two large and two small, arranged in a diamond pattern on her wedge-shaped head—burning with intelligence and fury and a joy so fierce it was indistinguishable from grief.

I have missed you, Carmen thought, and the thought was inadequate—a teaspoon measuring an ocean—but it was all she had.

And I you, young one. Now climb on. We have work to do.

Carmen swung onto Thea's neck—the scales warm and smooth under her thighs, the muscles bunching and releasing as the serpent adjusted her hover—and strapped in. The harness clicked. The bond flared—a surge of shared consciousness, shared sensation, shared purpose that hit Carmen like a wave and left her gasping, not from pain but from the overwhelming relief of reunion, of wholeness, of being complete again after six weeks of being half.

They launched into the clouds. The night swallowed them. Below, Tejaspuram slept—Reeve's guards patrolled the streets, the council hall was occupied, the Anarchists' flags hung from the towers—but above, in the dark and the wind and the freedom of the sky, the Riders were rising. Carmen could feel them through Thea's extended awareness: twelve Sarpentii, twelve Riders, all airborne, all free, all furious, streaking through the clouds in formation toward a rendezvous point that Vikram and Khare had established in the mountains to the north.

The resistance had begun.

Meera learned about the Anarchists on her twenty-first day in Devlok. She was in the middle of an advanced shaping exercise—constructing a Tejasvidya representation of the Rift's geological cross-section, a three-dimensional model that required her to hold seventeen separate light-forms in simultaneous suspension—when Arjun arrived at the training clearing with an expression that she had come to recognise as his bearer-of-bad-news face: jaw tight, eyes guarded, the amber warmth dimmed by concern.

"The northern provinces have fallen to the Anarchists," he said. "Reeve's forces control Tejaspuram's council hall. The Sarpentii have been grounded. The Riders have been dismissed."

Meera let the model dissolve. Seventeen forms of light scattered into the air like startled birds. "Anarchists?"

Arjun explained. The Anarchists were a movement—political, philosophical, militantly anti-establishment—that believed the ruling council of Devlok had become corrupt, that Tejasvidya was being used to maintain power rather than serve the people, and that the solution was radical decentralisation: dismantle the council, ground the military, redistribute magic. Their leader, Reeve, was charismatic, intelligent, and absolutely convinced that his cause was just, which made him the most dangerous kind of revolutionary—the kind who believes his own propaganda.

"And the Sarpentii?"

"Confined. Chained. Reeve considers them weapons of oppression."

"They are sentient beings."

"Reeve does not acknowledge sentience in non-human species. It is philosophically inconvenient for his position."

Meera absorbed this. The picture of Devlok that she had been building—a civilisation of light and learning and advanced magic—was more complicated than she had assumed. There were fractures here, tensions, the same kinds of power struggles and ideological conflicts that plagued Suryabhoomi, just expressed through different language and different tools. Utopia was a myth. Even a city made of light could contain darkness.

"What does this mean for us?" she asked. "For the training? For the prophecy?"

Arjun's expression shifted. The concern was still there, but underneath it was something harder, more strategic. "It means we are running out of time. If Reeve's faction controls the military, they will not support any action against Mahishasura. They do not believe the threat is real. They consider the prophecy superstition. And without the Sarpentii, without the Riders, without a unified Devlok—"

"We cannot fight what is coming."

"Correct."

Meera looked east, toward Tejaspuram, toward the towers she had seen on her first day—the towers that now flew Anarchist flags instead of the council's standards. She thought about her father, who had tried to solve the Rift problem by pretending it did not exist. She thought about Reeve, who was trying to solve Devlok's problems by pretending that the outside world—including the thing sleeping beneath the Rift—did not exist. Two men on opposite sides of a chasm, both building walls, both refusing to look down.

"Then we go to Tejaspuram," she said. "We talk to Reeve. We make him understand."

"Reeve does not listen to outsiders. Especially not to the half-Suryabhoomi daughter of the man who sealed the Rift."

"Then we do not talk. We act. Where are the Riders?"

Arjun smiled. It was a small smile, tight and fierce, the smile of a young man who had been waiting for someone to say exactly this. "There is a resistance forming in the northern mountains. Carmen—one of the Riders, the youngest—escaped with the Sarpentii three nights ago. They are regrouping."

"Take me to them."

"That would mean leaving your mother. Leaving the training."

"The training is useless if there is no one left to fight alongside. My mother will understand. She sent me here to face what is coming, not to hide from what is already here."

Arjun studied her. The amber eyes took in everything—the set of her jaw (her father's jaw, Devyani had said), the glow in her hands (her mother's gift), the determination that was not bravado but the quiet, structural certainty of a person who has identified the correct course of action and is going to follow it regardless of the cost.

"You are very much your mother's daughter," he said.

"I am both their daughter. That is the point."

They left for the mountains that afternoon. Vajra, naturally, came with them—the Vanara had spent twenty-one days in Devlok maintaining a state of vigilant discomfort that would have exhausted a lesser being, and the prospect of actual danger was, paradoxically, a relief. At least in the mountains, the threat would be tangible. At least in the mountains, he could use his sword.

Agni carried them north, the great Garudavaahana's copper wings catching the thermals that rose from the heated earth, climbing above the forest canopy into the clear, cold air of altitude. Behind them, Tejaspuram shrank to a point of light on the green landscape, its towers still glowing, its flags still flying, its politics still churning in the endless, exhausting cycle that is the human condition regardless of which side of a rift you happen to be on.

Ahead, the mountains waited. And in the mountains, the Riders waited. And beneath the Rift, in the darkness that was less dark than it had been forty years ago, Mahishasura waited too.

Everyone was waiting. The only question was who would move first.