POWER
INTERLUDE: RUDRA
The crown was heavier than he expected.
Not physically — the weight of gold and amrita-crystal was nothing, a few pounds of metal and stone that sat on his skull with the particular indifference of objects that didn't care who wore them. The weight was something else. Something that settled behind his eyes and in the back of his throat and in the space between his shoulder blades where his wings — magnificent, silver-white, the pride of House Tamlane — attached to his body.
He wore it for the first time in the throne room, three hours after the blood had been cleaned from the walls. His uncle's blood. The word uncle felt strange now — too intimate, too familial for what had been, in the end, a political transaction. Devraj had been king. Devraj had been an obstacle. The obstacle had been removed.
Rudra sat on the Throne of Devagiri and felt the stone under him — cold, ancient, worn smooth by ten thousand years of rulers who had been better than him. He knew they had been better. That was the thing no one understood about him, the thing that made his particular brand of ambition so dangerous: he was not delusional. He did not believe he was the best person for the throne. He believed he was the only person willing to do what was necessary.
Anarya would have destroyed them.
She didn't know it yet — or maybe she did, maybe that was exactly her plan, the journals and the lake visits and the whispered conversations with her human pet. She would have read the journals and discovered the Yantra and felt the particular Gandharva guilt that came from learning the truth about the amrita, and she would have done something catastrophically noble. She would have broken the machine. She would have ended the hierarchy. She would have turned ten thousand years of civilization into dust because it was built on an injustice.
And then what?
This was the question Anarya never asked. This was the question idealists never asked. And then what? You destroy the Yantra. The amrita fails. The Gandharvas lose their wings, their magic, their blood, their purpose. Ten thousand years of culture, art, philosophy, architecture — gone. Not reformed, not improved, not evolved. Gone. Because a twenty-year-old girl read a journal and decided that theft was theft regardless of what you built with the stolen goods.
Rudra disagreed.
Theft was theft. He accepted that. The Yantra fed on humans. The amrita was manufactured from stolen praana. The hierarchy was a lie built on exploitation. He had known this for seven years — longer than Anarya, longer than anyone suspected. He had found his own copy of the records. He had his own sources in the caretaker order. He had known, and he had decided: the lie is worth maintaining.
Not because he was cruel. Not because he didn't care about humans. But because the alternative — the collapse of everything the Gandharvas had built, the dissolution of every institution, every alliance, every structure that kept the realm from descending into chaos — was worse than the lie.
He believed this the way zealots believed in gods: totally, unshakeably, with the particular ferocity of someone who had examined every alternative and found them all inadequate.
The throne room was quiet now. The torches flickered — orange, smoky, the crude light of a kingdom that had lost its divine illumination. Outside, the city was under curfew. His soldiers patrolled the terraces. The market squares were empty. The residential districts were dark.
The lake was dark.
He stood. Crossed to the window. Looked down at the dead lake — black water in the moonlight, no glow, no luminescence, just the ordinary flatness of water that had stopped being sacred.
He could feel the amrita leaving his body. Slowly. A little each day. His wings were still strong — he had been hoarding amrita for seven years, building a private reserve that he kept in crystal vials in a vault beneath the palace, enough to sustain his magic for months after the general supply failed. But even hoarded amrita ran out. Even private reserves had limits.
He had perhaps six months.
Six months to consolidate power. Six months to find a way to restart the Yantra — or build a new one — or find another source of praana. Six months to solve a problem that ten thousand years of Gandharva engineering had failed to solve.
He turned from the window.
"Bring me the caretakers," he said to the guard at the door. "All of them. And the records from the eastern wing."
The guard saluted and left.
Rudra sat back on the throne. The weight pressed against his skull. The blood — his uncle's blood, now cleaned from the walls but still there, he could feel it, soaked into the stone itself — was everywhere.
He pressed his palms against the cold stone armrests and breathed.
I am not the villain,* he thought. *I am the only one willing to be the villain so that the rest of them can keep pretending to be heroes.
The torches flickered. The crown pressed down. The lake was dark.
He closed his eyes and planned.
In the weeks that followed, he learned the precise architecture of his own isolation.
The noble houses that had declared for him — Tamlane, his own; La'Char, bought with promises of territory; Vasanta, coerced by the arrest of Lady Sunita's eldest son — were loyal in the way that houses were always loyal to usurpers: contingently. They watched him the way wolves watched the alpha after a challenge — not with submission but with assessment. Waiting to see if his grip was real. Waiting to see if there was profit in obedience or opportunity in betrayal.
He gave them profit. He distributed the stored amrita — his private reserve, portioned out in careful doses, enough to keep the noble houses' wings functional while the common Gandharvas' wings failed. A visible hierarchy within the hierarchy. A demonstration that loyalty was rewarded with the only currency that mattered anymore.
The common Gandharvas — the merchants, the artisans, the lower bureaucrats, the people who had no house allegiance to trade for amrita — lost their wings in the first month. Some slowly, the feathers thinning and falling over weeks. Some all at once — waking in the morning to find their wings on the pillow beside them, molted completely, the body having decided overnight that the cost of maintaining a divine appendage was no longer worth paying.
The streets of Devagiri filled with feathers. White ones. Silver ones. The occasional gold — rare, valuable once, worthless now. They gathered in drifts along the terrace walls, caught in the gutters, piled against doorways. The sweepers — humans, still humans, always humans — collected them in baskets and burned them. The smoke smelled like burnt hair and something sweeter underneath, something that made the remaining winged Gandharvas flinch.
Rudra watched this from the palace window and felt something he had not expected to feel.
Grief.
Not for the individual Gandharvas — he had never been sentimental about individuals. But for the thing itself. For the wings. For the flight. For the ten thousand years of a species that could touch the sky, and the loss of it, and the knowledge that the loss was — ultimately, inevitably, despite everything he did — irreversible.
He went to the vault. Drew another vial. Drank it.
The amrita hit his tongue with the old familiar sweetness — honey and lightning, the taste of divinity — and he felt his wings brighten, his blood hum, the power flow through him like a river finding its channel.
It lasted six hours. Then it faded, and the dimming came back, and he drew another vial.
He counted them. Forty-three vials left. At this rate of consumption, he had four months. Maybe five if he rationed.
He looked at the vials in the vault — crystal tubes filled with liquid light, each one containing enough stolen human praana to keep him divine for six hours. Forty-three of them. The last of the amrita. The end of divinity, measured in glass and gold.
He sealed the vault and went back to the throne room.
The caretakers had given him the Yantra records. He studied them — obsessively, sleeplessly, the way a drowning man studies the surface of the water. The mechanism was ancient, complex, built by engineers whose understanding of praana dynamics exceeded anything modern Gandharva science could replicate. The crystal lotus in the lakebed. The root network. The extraction process.
It was breaking. Had been breaking for decades. The human population in Gandharva territories was too depleted to sustain the draw. The caretakers had known this for thirty years. His uncle had known for ten. Everyone had known, and no one had done anything, because doing something meant admitting what the Yantra was.
Rudra was willing to admit what the Yantra was.
He was even willing to fix it.
The solution was obvious, if you were willing to think the thoughts that civilized people refused to think. The Yantra needed human praana. There wasn't enough human praana in the current population. Therefore: increase the population. Not gradually, not through natural growth, but through deliberate, systematic cultivation. Breeding programs. Immigration from the eastern territories. The optimization of human bodies for praana production.
He wrote the orders. Signed them with the royal seal. Handed them to Lord Vikram of House Ashvina, who read them with an expression that progressed through surprise, understanding, and finally, something that looked very much like relief — the relief of someone who had been handed a terrible plan and realized it was someone else's responsibility to execute.
The orders went out.
The humans in Devagiri — already subjugated, already enslaved, already the foundation on which everything was built — felt the change before they understood it. New quotas. New restrictions on movement. New medical examinations. New breeding incentives — extra rations for pregnant women, penalties for families below a certain size.
Kael's people. The people whose praana had been stolen for ten millennia. Whose lives had been shortened, whose children had been weakened, whose potential had been siphoned into a lake so that Gandharvas could fly.
Rudra sat on the throne and signed the orders and felt the weight of the crown and thought: I am saving us. I am saving all of us. The cost is unconscionable and I am paying it because someone has to.
He did not sleep well.
He did not sleep well, but he slept. That was the difference between him and Anarya. She would have been paralyzed by the guilt. He was not paralyzed. He was functional. He was effective. He was king.
The crown pressed down. The lake was dark. The vials diminished one by one.
And in the south, he knew — because his spies were not idle, because information flowed to power the way water flowed downhill — Anarya was building an army.
Let her come, he thought. Let her come with her refugees and her Nagas and her Rakshasas and her human pet with the death-touch. Let her come to take back the throne she wasn't strong enough to hold.
He had been preparing for this fight his entire life.
He just hadn't known it would be against family.
© 2025 Atharva Inamdar. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Free to read and share with attribution.