POWER
CHAPTER ONE: ANARYA
The morning of her coronation, Anarya broke three things.
First: a mirror. She hadn't meant to — her elbow caught the edge of the dressing table and the thing went over, and the sound it made when it hit the marble floor was the sound of something that could not be put back together. She stood over the shards and looked at her own face, fractured into a dozen pieces, and thought: this is a bad omen. Then she thought: I don't believe in omens. Then she thought: I believe in omens.
Second: a promise. Her father had asked her, the night before, to smile during the ceremony. Not a real smile — he knew better than to ask for that. Just the shape of one. The kind that said I am grateful, I am ready, I am exactly what this kingdom needs. She had promised. She had meant it. But when she stood at the window of her chambers and looked down at Devagiri spreading below her — the white stone terraces cascading down the mountain like frozen waterfalls, the market squares already filling with Gandharvas who had come from every corner of the realm to watch her crowned — she felt something in her chest that was not gratitude.
It was dread.
She didn't know why. She pressed her palm flat against the cold glass and breathed through it — the glass smelled faintly of rainwater and dust, the smell of a window that hadn't been opened in too long — the way her mother had taught her. Feel the cold seeping into your fingers, feel the weight of your own hand against the stone. Feel the weight of your feet on the floor. Her mother had called it grounding. Anarya called it surviving.
Third: a vow — silent, internal, the kind spoken only to the self. Not to anyone who could hold her to it. But she stood at that window with the dread sitting heavy in her sternum and she made herself a promise: I will find out what is wrong with the lake.
Because something was wrong with the lake.
The Amrita Sarovar — the Lake of Immortal Nectar, the source of Gandharva power, the sacred water that had flowed through their bloodlines for ten thousand years — had been dimming for six months. The water was still blue with the ethereal glow that had lit her childhood like a permanent aurora. The amrita still flowed, though something in its rhythm had changed — a hesitation, barely perceptible, like a heart skipping every hundredth beat. But the caretakers who tended the lake had been reporting, in careful, frightened whispers, that the light was less. That the water tasted different. That the creatures who lived in its depths had gone still.
Her father had told her not to worry about it. Her father told her not to worry about many things.
"Anarya." Her handmaid, Priya, appeared in the doorway. She was a Gandharva woman of forty, with silver-streaked wings folded neatly at her back and the particular expression of someone who had been managing a difficult princess for twenty years and had made peace with it. "Your wings."
Anarya turned from the window, her reflection dissolving in the glass as she moved. "What about the humans, Priya — the ones everyone pretends not to notice?"
"They need to be oiled before the ceremony. The light will catch them during the procession and if they're dry—"
"They'll look dull. I know." She crossed to the dressing chair and sat, and Priya began the ritual — the warm oil, the careful strokes along each feather from base to tip, the smell of sandalwood and something sweeter underneath, the amrita-infused oil that kept Gandharva wings supple and bright.
Her wings were amber-gold. Unusual. Most Gandharvas had wings in shades of white or silver or deep blue — the colors of the divine, the colors of the sky. Gold was rare. Her father's advisers had called it auspicious when she was born. Her mother had called it a warning.
Gold burns,* her mother had said, once, when Anarya was seven and had asked why her wings were different. *Everything gold burns eventually. The question is whether it burns bright or burns out.
Her mother had died three years ago. Fever. Quick and merciless, the way death was when it decided not to wait.
Anarya had not cried at the funeral. She had stood beside her father with her hands folded and her face still and her wings held perfectly, and she had not cried, and afterward her father had put his hand on her shoulder and said, You did well. She had hated him for it. She had also understood it. This was what it meant to be Gandharva royalty: you did not grieve in public. You grieved in the dark, alone, where no one could see the cost of it.
She was still grieving in the dark.
"The human servants have been assigned to their positions for the ceremony," Priya said, working oil into the secondary feathers along Anarya's left wing. "The new one arrived this morning."
"Which new one?"
"The one they pulled from the fighting pit — the one your father gifted to you like a dog he'd found interesting at market."
Anarya went still, her whole body locking into the particular immobility of someone recalculating every assumption they'd made in the last week. "He assigned me a pit-fighter?"
"Former pit-fighter. He's been cleaned up." Priya's voice was carefully neutral, which meant she had opinions she wasn't sharing. "Your father thought it would be useful to have someone with combat experience in your personal retinue. Given the current... political climate."
Political climate. A delicate way of saying: Rudra is circling. Her cousin had been circling for two years, since her father's health had begun to fail, since it became clear that Anarya would inherit the throne and not him. Rudra was older. Rudra was male. Rudra had spent twenty years believing that the throne was his by right, and the fact that Gandharva law did not agree with him had done nothing to diminish his certainty.
"What's his name?" Anarya asked.
"The human? Kael."
Just that. One syllable, hard as a stone dropped into still water, and she filed it away in the part of her mind that collected dangerous information.
"Send him to me after the ceremony," she said. "I want to see what my father thinks is worth giving me."
The coronation was everything it was supposed to be.
The Hall of Ascension was carved from the living rock of the mountain, its ceiling so high it disappeared into shadow, its walls inlaid with lapis and gold in patterns that told the history of the Gandharva people — the descent from the celestial realms, the wars with the Rakshasas, the binding of the Nagas, the subjugation of the humans. Ten thousand years of history, rendered in stone and precious metal, and Anarya had walked past it so many times she had stopped seeing it.
Today she saw it.
The hall smelled of amrita-wax and burning camphor and the heavy musk of a thousand Gandharva bodies packed into stone. She walked the length of the hall with her wings spread — not fully, not the aggressive display of a warrior, but the ceremonial half-spread that said I am open, I am ready, I am yours. The amrita-oil caught the light from the thousand lamps and her wings burned gold, and she heard the crowd's breath change when she entered, that collective intake that meant: she is real, she is here, she is ours.
Her father waited at the far end, seated on the Throne of Devagiri — white stone carved into the shape of two wings meeting at the apex, the seat worn smooth by ten thousand years of rulers. He looked smaller than she remembered. He had been looking smaller for two years. The illness was taking him slowly, the way the lake was dimming slowly, and she wondered if the two things were connected, and then she wondered why she was thinking about this now, in the middle of her coronation, when she was supposed to be thinking about the weight of the crown.
The crown was made of gold and amrita-crystal, and it was heavy. She had tried it on once, in secret, when she was twelve. It had given her a headache that lasted three days.
The High Priest placed it on her head. The priestess said the words of coronation in the old tongue. Anarya repeated them, her voice carrying further than she expected in the thin mountain air. The crowd echoed them back in a wave of sound that rolled down the terraces like water finding its level. The lamps flared — a trick of the amrita in the oil, a flash of blue-white light that was supposed to represent divine blessing.
She smiled. The shape of one, just as she'd promised.
And in the crowd, she caught a glimpse of Rudra watching her with his wings folded tight against his back and his face perfectly still, and she thought: he is going to try to take this from me.
She smiled wider.
Let him try.
The feast afterward was everything a coronation feast should be and nothing she wanted.
The Great Terrace had been laid with tables carved from the white stone of the mountain — three hundred of them, arranged in concentric semicircles around the central dais where the royal family sat. The food was extraordinary: saffron rice cooked in amrita-water until each grain glowed faintly blue, smoked river fish from the eastern territories glazed in a sauce of wild honey and crushed Vanamala berries, flatbreads baked on volcanic stone imported from the Rakshasa borders, dusted with a salt that tasted of the sea and something older. Desserts in the Gandharva fashion — crystallized amrita-fruits that dissolved on the tongue with a sweetness so sharp it bordered on pain, followed by a warmth that spread through the chest like the first breath of flight.
She ate none of it. She sat at the high table with the crown pressing its weight into her skull and moved food around her plate and watched.
The nobles were performing. That was the word — performing. Every gesture calculated, every smile a transaction, every toast a declaration of allegiance that could be retracted before the wine was cleared. She had grown up watching this performance. She had been trained to participate in it. But tonight, from the vantage of the crown, she could see its machinery with a clarity that made her stomach turn.
Lord Vikram of House Ashvina was laughing too loudly with Lady Sunita of House Vasanta — they hated each other, everyone knew they hated each other, their houses had been in dispute over eastern timber rights for three generations. But tonight they laughed like old friends, because a new queen meant new alliances, new favors, new opportunities to get what you wanted by pretending to want what someone else had.
She watched them and thought: I am twenty years old and I am already tired of this.
"You're not eating." Rudra materialized at her elbow. He had the particular talent of appearing without being noticed — a large man who moved like smoke, who could cross a crowded room and arrive beside you before you registered the approach. He held a goblet of amrita-wine. His smile was the same smile he had worn during the ceremony — controlled, precise, the kind that said I am being observed and I know it.
"I'm not hungry."
"You should eat. The nobles will talk if the new queen doesn't eat at her own coronation feast." He sipped his wine. "They'll say she's nervous. Or ill. Or already regretting the crown."
"Let them say what they want."
"Spoken like someone who doesn't yet understand how power works." He leaned closer. She could smell him — amrita-cologne, the expensive kind that the noble houses favored, sharp and sweet and underlaid with something acrid, the chemical edge of ambition. "Power is not what you do, cousin. It's what people believe about you. And right now, three hundred nobles are watching you not eat and forming opinions that will determine whether they support you or — explore other options."
She turned to look at him. His eyes were pale blue — lighter than most Gandharvas, a genetic quirk of the Tamlane bloodline that made his gaze colder than intention alone could account for. His wings were silver-white. Perfect. The wings of a man who spent an hour each morning having them oiled and groomed by three human servants.
"Is that a threat, Rudra?"
"It's advice." He smiled. "From your loving cousin. Who wants nothing but the best for this kingdom."
"The best for this kingdom," she repeated. "And for you?"
"I serve the kingdom, Anarya. I always have." He raised his goblet. "To the new queen. Long may she reign."
She watched him walk away. Watched the way the nobles' eyes followed him — not with the deference they showed her, but with something else. Calculation. Assessment. The look of people weighing their options.
She ate a piece of fish. It tasted like ashes and the faintest trace of amrita-honey that turned sour on her tongue.
Later, after the feast, after the last of the nobles had bowed and made their insincere promises and drifted away to their chambers to scheme, she stood on the balcony outside her rooms and looked at the city.
Devagiri at night was a thing of impossible beauty. The amrita-lamps lined every terrace, every stairway, every bridge — thousands of them, each one a small globe of blue-white light suspended in a cage of silver filigree. The city glowed. From above, from the palace balcony, it looked like a constellation that had fallen to earth and arranged itself into streets and buildings and market squares. The air at this height was thin and cold and tasted of ice crystals and the particular ionized sweetness of altitude, the taste of air that had never been breathed.
Below the city, at the mountain's base, the lake glowed. Dimmer than the lamps. Dimmer than it should have been.
She wrapped her arms around herself and stared at the lake and thought about Rudra's smile, and her father's illness, and the caretakers' frightened whispers, and the crown pressing against her skull like a hand trying to push her under water.
She thought: something is coming.
She did not know yet how right she was.
© 2025 Atharva Inamdar. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Free to read and share with attribution.