POWER
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: KAEL
The Dweepas changed him.
Not in the way that the pit had changed him — the pit had changed him through violence, through the systematic dismantling of everything soft, everything trusting, everything that believed the world was fundamentally good. The Dweepas changed him through gentleness.
Mahabali was, Kael discovered, the most dangerous man he had ever met. Not because of his size or his strength or his ability to crush a coconut between his thumb and forefinger (though he could, and did, regularly, with an absent-mindedness that suggested this was a fidget rather than a demonstration). He was dangerous because he was kind, and his kindness was not weakness. It was a choice made by someone strong enough to have chosen otherwise.
"You have a problem," Mahabali said to him on the first day, standing on the beach while the surf rolled over their feet. Kael's feet, rather — the water barely reached Mahabali's ankles.
"Several, actually."
"One main one." Mahabali looked down at him. "You believe power is the same thing as control."
"Isn't it?"
"No." Mahabali picked up a conch shell from the sand. Held it in his enormous palm, where it looked like a seed. "Power is what you have. Control is what you do with it. The Gandharvas confused the two — they believed that having power gave them the right to control. Everything they built comes from that confusion. The hierarchy. The amrita system. The slavery." He put the shell down. "You're doing the same thing. You raise the dead. You control them. You believe this is what your power is for."
"What else would it be for?"
"That's what we're going to find out."
The training was unlike anything he'd experienced.
Mahabali didn't teach him to fight. He didn't teach him to strengthen his necromancy or to raise more dead or to hold them longer. He taught him to sit.
"Sit," Mahabali said, on the second day. They were on a cliff overlooking the sea — the wind warm and constant, carrying the smell of salt and sun-heated coral and the green vegetal scent of jungle canopy that grew right to the cliff's edge, its roots gripping the rock face like fingers refusing to let go. Below, the waves hit the base of the cliff in a rhythm that was almost a heartbeat, and the spray rose high enough to mist his face with brine.
"I'm sitting."
"You're perching. You're ready to spring. You're tracking exits — I can see it in the muscles of your calves, coiled like springs, and the way your eyes sweep left-right-left every eleven seconds." Mahabali's amber eyes were gentle. "Stop tracking exits, Kael. Nothing here is going to hurt you."
It took him three weeks to believe that.
Three weeks of sitting on a cliff while the wind blew and the sea moved and Mahabali sat beside him — a mountain of calm, immovable, the most patient being Kael had ever encountered. Three weeks of his body slowly, reluctantly, unclenching — the tension leaving in layers, like sunburn peeling, each layer revealing something rawer underneath. Three weeks of learning that not every silence was a trap, not every kindness was a transaction, not every open space was a kill zone. Three weeks of the Dweepas working on him the way the sea worked on stone: not with force but with constancy, the warm salt air and the sound of the surf and the smell of frangipani that bloomed outside his hut every evening, filling the dark with a sweetness that had no agenda.
On the fourth week, he cried.
He didn't mean to. He was sitting on the cliff and the sun was setting and the sky was the color of — the color of her wings, he thought, and then he was crying, not because of her, not exactly, but because of everything. The pit. The chains. The dead men's hands. The taste of copper. The four years of surviving that had left him alive but had taken everything else.
Mahabali put his hand on Kael's shoulder. His hand covered Kael's entire shoulder and most of his upper arm. It was warm.
"Good," Mahabali said. "That's been in there for a long time."
"I'm fine."
"You're crying."
"Crying and fine aren't mutually exclusive."
Mahabali laughed. The sound rumbled through the cliff like a small earthquake.
In the second month, Mahabali taught him about the dead.
"You raise them," Mahabali said. "You control them. But do you hear them?"
"They're dead. They don't talk."
"Everything talks, boy. The sea talks. The stone talks. The wind talks. The dead talk louder than any of them — they just speak in a language the living have forgotten." Mahabali sat in the sand, cross-legged, his enormous frame somehow fitting into the posture with more grace than Kael would have expected. "Your power is not control. Your power is communion. You are a bridge between the living and the dead. You can give voice to the voiceless."
"That sounds nicer than what it actually looks like."
"What does it look like?"
"Corpses following me around."
"Because you're using the wrong end of the gift." Mahabali leaned forward. "Try something. Reach for the dead — not to move them. Just to listen."
Kael closed his eyes. He reached — the same reaching he always did, the formless extension of consciousness into the dark space between life and death. But instead of grabbing, he waited.
Silence. Then:
Whispers. Not words — something older than words. Images. Feelings. The last moments of living things, preserved in the space he occupied. A fish's final view of the surface — light through water, the shadow of a net. A bird's last heartbeat — the sky, the wind, the sudden stop. A human — a Rakshasa, actually, long dead — the smell of salt and the sound of children laughing and the feel of sand between toes and then nothing, the great nothing, the silence that was not empty but full of everything that had ever been.
He opened his eyes. They were wet.
"There it is," Mahabali said.
News of the marriage reached the Dweepas in the third month.
A Naga envoy brought it — swimming up through the deep channels between the islands, surfacing in the harbor with the particular efficiency of a being that could breathe underwater and didn't need to bother with boats. The Naga was young, silver-scaled, water streaming from his body in sheets that caught the afternoon light and threw it back in fragments. He carried news from the mainland the way messengers always carried news: quickly, without investment, the words belonging to someone else's life. Anarya had married Veer. A small ceremony. Mayapur harbor. The alliance was consolidating.
Kael heard the news while he was eating. He put down the coconut shell he'd been drinking from — the milk still cool, still sweet, the taste suddenly wrong in his mouth, curdled by context — and went to the cliff.
He sat there for a long time. The wind carried the smell of plumeria and woodsmoke from the Rakshasa cooking fires below, and he breathed it in and let it sit in his lungs like something solid. The sea was doing what the sea always did — moving, changing, refusing to hold any shape for longer than a moment — and he watched it and thought about how the sea was the opposite of grief, which held its shape forever.
He thought about the kiss in the library. About the scroll crunching under their feet. About the way she had said don't say my name like that and he had said it matters and she had kissed him with the desperation of someone letting go of the last rope.
He thought about Veer. A good man. A nobleman who had lost his wings and still loved her. The right choice. The smart choice. The choice that consolidated power and legitimized her claim and gave the alliance a Gandharva face.
He thought about the fact that he had known, from the first moment in the throne room, that a human slave and a Gandharva princess were not possible. Not in this world. Maybe not in any world. He had known it and he had kissed her anyway, because knowing a thing was impossible had never stopped him from wanting it.
He sat on the cliff and watched the sunset and did not cry.
He was done crying.
The third month brought combat training. Not from Mahabali — from Tarini.
Tarini was Mahabali's war-chief, his general, his right hand in all matters of violence. She was seven feet tall and built like a monsoon — wide-shouldered, thick-armed, with hands that could have wrapped around Kael's entire head. She had a scar that ran from her left temple to her jaw, the souvenir of a border skirmish with Gandharva scouts fifteen years ago. She wore it the way other people wore jewelry — openly, proudly, as a declaration of something survived.
She looked at Kael the first morning and said, "You're small."
"I'm human."
"You're small for a human." She circled him, the way a predator circles something it hasn't decided whether to eat or befriend. "Mahabali says you raise the dead. Mahabali says you're powerful. Mahabali says I should be gentle with you."
"And?"
"I don't do gentle." She threw a practice sword at him. Wooden, heavy, scaled for Rakshasa hands. He caught it and nearly dropped it — the weight was absurd, like holding a log. "The dead won't always be there. Your power won't always be available. What happens when it's just you and a sword and someone who wants to kill you?"
"That's been most of my life."
Something shifted in her face. Not softness — recognition. The look of a warrior acknowledging another warrior.
"Good. Then you know the rules." She drew her own practice blade. Wooden as well, but in her hands it looked like a toothpick. "Rule one: don't die. Rule two: don't be where the weapon is. Rule three: if you can't be stronger, be faster. If you can't be faster, be smarter. If you can't be smarter, be more willing to bleed."
She swung. He dodged. Barely.
"Again," she said.
The training was brutal and precise and exactly what he needed. Four years in the pit had taught him to fight — to kill, specifically, which was a different thing entirely from fighting. Killing was about efficiency: find the opening, end it fast, don't waste energy. Fighting was about survival over time: endurance, positioning, reading the opponent's body for the telegraphed intentions that preceded every strike.
Tarini taught him the Rakshasa way. Not technique — philosophy. The Rakshasas fought the way the sea fought: in waves, relentless, rising and falling and rising again, never the same approach twice. She taught him to use his size — not as a disadvantage but as a weapon. A smaller target. A faster target. A target that could fit into spaces a Rakshasa couldn't, that could move under a swing instead of blocking it, that could turn a larger opponent's momentum against them.
She broke his nose on the third day. His ribs on the fifth. A finger on the seventh.
"You're getting better," she said, standing over him while he lay in the sand spitting blood.
"I'm getting injured."
"Same thing." She offered him a hand. He took it. She pulled him up with the casual strength of someone lifting a leaf. "Again."
By the end of the third month, he could last three minutes against her. Not win — lasting was the victory. Three minutes against a Rakshasa war-chief who had killed more enemies than he had years of life.
Mahabali watched from his driftwood throne, cracking coconuts and nodding.
"He's ready," Tarini said to Mahabali, the night before Kael was to leave.
"He's been ready since the pit," Mahabali said. "He just didn't know it."
The night before he left the Dweepas, Kael sat on the cliff one last time.
The sea was dark. The stars were the bright hard stars of the tropics — no haze, no clouds, just the naked sky and the sound of the water and the smell of the ocean that had become, over three months, the smell of safety.
He thought about going back. About seeing her again. About the three arm-lengths that had become the width of a kiss that had become the width of a marriage to another man.
He thought: I love a woman who married someone else, and I am going to war for her, and I will probably die, and none of these facts changes anything.
He stood. Brushed the sand from his clothes. Turned his back on the sea.
Mahabali found him at the cliff's edge. The Rakshasa king moved quietly for something his size — the footsteps barely registered on the stone, a paradox of mass and grace that Kael had never fully gotten used to.
"You're thinking about the Gandharva woman," Mahabali said. Not a question.
"I'm thinking about the war."
"You're thinking about the Gandharva woman who is now married to the Gandharva man while you sit on a cliff on an island where the air smells like plumeria instead of her." Mahabali settled beside him. The cliff groaned under the redistribution of weight. "I may be old, Kael, but I'm not stupid."
The silence between them was companionable. Three months of sitting on cliffs together had built a particular kind of intimacy — the kind that came from shared silence rather than shared words.
"She chose correctly," Kael said.
"She chose politically."
"It's the same thing, for a queen."
"Is it?" Mahabali cracked a coconut. The sound was like a gunshot. He offered half to Kael. The coconut water was sweet and warm from the tropical sun, and Kael drank it and felt the sweetness sit on his tongue like a word he couldn't say. "My wife — my first wife, before the war, before all of this — she was from the northern islands. Her people and my people had been feuding for sixty years. She married me to end the feud. Political. Strategic. The smart choice."
"What happened?"
"I loved her until I couldn't breathe when she walked into a room. And she loved me the same way. The politics were the excuse. The love was the reason." He threw the coconut shell over the cliff. It disappeared into the dark. "Sometimes the smart choice and the heart's choice are the same choice, and the person making it hasn't figured that out yet."
"She married someone else, Mahabali."
"She married someone safe while the dangerous one was learning to control the power of the dead on a volcanic island three hundred miles away." Mahabali looked at him with those ancient amber eyes. "She didn't choose against you, boy. She chose survival. There's a difference."
Kael thought about that. He thought about it the way he thought about everything Mahabali said — slowly, carefully, turning it over in his mind like a stone in his hands, feeling the weight and the texture and the warmth of it.
"It doesn't change anything," he said.
"No. It changes everything. You just don't know it yet." Mahabali stood. The cliff sighed with relief. "Get some sleep. The ship leaves at dawn, and the sea between here and the mainland is not kind to humans who haven't slept."
He left. His footsteps faded into the dark, and the sound of the surf filled the space he'd occupied.
Kael sat for a while longer. He listened to the dead — not with purpose, not with intent, but the way Mahabali had taught him, the way you listen to rain or wind or the sea itself, letting the sound wash through you without trying to hold it. The dead whispered their last moments into the space between, and he held the bridge open and let them speak, and their voices were gentle and sad and old, and they sounded, he thought, like the sea itself — constant, and patient, and full of things that would never be said aloud.
He went to his hut. Lay on the sleeping mat. Closed his eyes.
He dreamed of amber-gold wings and the taste of amrita on someone's mouth.
In the morning, he boarded the Rakshasa ship — a massive vessel carved from a single tree, crewed by warriors who looked at him with something that might have been respect — and sailed north toward war.
© 2025 Atharva Inamdar. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Free to read and share with attribution.