Chapter 11: Do You Hear Voices Too?

Nidhi

The Divya Shakti had opinions.

This was not, strictly speaking, new. Divine power had always been semi-sentient — Papa had explained this when she was a child, sitting on his knee in their old house in Pune while he described the nature of the force that ran through their bloodline. The Shakti was not a separate entity. It was an extension of the self — a deeper, older, more primal version of consciousness that operated below the threshold of rational thought and communicated through instinct, emotion, and the occasional physical manifestation that was difficult to explain to neighbours.

What was new was the volume.

Since arriving at the Chaturbhuj Sanctuary — since meeting Arjun, since the mate bond had activated like a dormant circuit suddenly flooded with current — Nidhi's Divya Shakti had gone from a whisper to a running commentary. It had opinions about everything: the weather (too cold, sit closer to Arjun), the food (more ghee, the body needs fat reserves), the training sessions with Hiral (excellent, do more of the knife work), and most insistently, most persistently, most annoyingly — Arjun.

The Shakti wanted Arjun. Not in the romantic sense that Nidhi's conscious mind was cautiously, tentatively approaching — the careful experiments in proximity that had progressed from leaning on his arm to holding his hand to the previous evening's revelation that his chest made an excellent pillow when they watched the sunset from the roof. The Shakti's desire was more fundamental: a gravitational pull, a magnetic alignment, a cellular-level conviction that physical proximity to this specific person was a biological necessity on par with oxygen and water.

It was extremely distracting when you were trying to learn knife combat.

"Focus," Hiral said, for the fourth time in ten minutes.

"I am focused."

"You're looking at the window. Arjun is on the training ground outside the window. Connect the dots."

Nidhi's face heated. "I was not looking at Arjun."

"Your Shakti flared when he took off his shirt for sparring practice. My water glass vibrated. I felt it." Hiral's knife hand spun lazily. "You're broadcasting, sunshine. Every person with divine sensitivity in this Sanctuary knows exactly what your Shakti thinks about his abs."

"Kill me."

"Focus first. Then I'll consider it."

Nidhi refocused. The training room was a converted hall in the Sanctuary's east wing — high ceilings, stone floors, weapons racks lining the walls with everything from traditional Indian fighting blades to modern tactical equipment. It smelled of sweat, metal polish, and the particular leather-and-cotton scent of training mats that had absorbed decades of exertion.

Hiral was teaching her the siren method of close-quarters combat — a style that prioritised speed and precision over strength, using the body's momentum rather than its mass. It was elegant, efficient, and deeply satisfying in the way that finding the exact right technique for your body type was satisfying. Nidhi's frame — lean from malnutrition, wiry from years of fighting in confined spaces — was better suited to this style than the brute-force approach the dungeon had taught her.

"Again," Hiral said. She came at Nidhi with a practice blade — blunted edge, real weight — in a strike that was fast enough to be genuine and controlled enough to be survivable. Nidhi parried, redirected, and stepped into the opening with a counter-strike that would have landed on Hiral's ribcage if Hiral had not, at the last possible moment, twisted away with the fluid grace of a species that moved through water as naturally as air.

"Better," Hiral conceded. "Your instincts are good. Your muscle memory from the dungeon is keeping you alive but limiting your range. We need to overwrite the survival patterns with combat patterns."

"How long will that take?"

"Depends on how quickly you stop flinching when I aim for your face."

"I don't flinch."

Hiral struck without warning — a lightning-fast jab toward Nidhi's nose. Nidhi flinched.

"You flinch."

"That was a reflex."

"A reflex is a flinch with a better excuse. Again."

They trained for two hours. By the end, Nidhi's arms were trembling with exertion, her knuckles were bruised from the practice blade's grip, and she had managed to land three genuine strikes on Hiral — a number that, Hiral admitted grudgingly, was impressive for someone who had been training for less than a month.

"You're fast," Hiral said, towelling sweat from her neck. "Faster than you should be at this stage. Your Shakti is boosting your reflexes — the mate bond with Arjun is strengthening your entire system. I've seen it before with bonded pairs. The shared divine resonance amplifies both parties."

"So I'm getting stronger because of him."

"You're getting stronger because of the bond. It goes both ways — his Shakti is amplifying too. You're making each other more powerful."

Nidhi absorbed this while drinking water that tasted like mountain springs and the mineral tang of the Sanctuary's old stone pipes. The implications were significant. If the mate bond amplified both parties' divine power, then the Chandramukhi Coven was facing not just a rescued prisoner but a bonded pair of divine warriors whose combined Shakti was greater than the sum of its parts.

"Good," Nidhi said.

Hiral looked at her with the particular expression of someone who recognised a kindred spirit in the art of turning pain into power. "Good," she agreed.

The voices started that night.

Not external voices — not Arjun outside her door, not Sahil's bedtime stories, not Aarav's growing vocabulary. Internal voices. The Divya Shakti, which had been gradually increasing in volume since the mate bond's activation, reached a new register: a voice that was not quite separate from Nidhi's own consciousness but was distinct enough to feel like a second opinion.

Home, the voice said, when she felt Arjun's Shakti through the wall between their rooms.

Danger, it said, when she dreamed of the coven.

Trust, it said, when Hiral demonstrated a new technique and Nidhi's body followed the instruction before her mind could process it.

Love, it said, when Aarav crawled into her bed at midnight and pressed his small warm body against hers and whispered "Nini" in his sleep with a trust so absolute it could have illuminated the dark.

She mentioned it to Gauri during the morning healing session. The healer's response was calm, clinical, and reassuring.

"It's your Shakti reawakening fully. The suppression in the dungeon kept it dormant. The mate bond is accelerating the recovery. Think of it as — your divine power spent ten years in a coma, and now it's waking up and trying to catch up on everything it missed. The voice is your Shakti's way of processing input — it'll become less intrusive as it integrates."

"And if it doesn't?"

"Then you'll have a very opinionated internal advisor. There are worse things." Gauri's hands glowed amber as she worked on the remaining damage to Nidhi's ribs. "Your father's Shakti does the same thing. He told me once that Mrityu's power has been giving him unsolicited commentary since he was fourteen. He said the voice told him to marry your mother before he'd even spoken to her."

"My mother?"

"Priya. She was — is — from a non-divine family. Human, technically, though she carried dormant Shakti from a distant lineage. Your father fell in love with her at a wedding — a cousin's wedding, in Kolhapur. She was wearing a green sari, and his Shakti apparently said one word: 'Her.' That was it. Twenty-five years of marriage because divine power has the romantic subtlety of a brick."

Nidhi laughed. The sound was still evolving — warmer now, more frequent, less painful — and she noticed that it made Gauri's healing energy pulse brighter, as if her own emotional state directly affected the treatment's efficacy.

"My mother. Is she—"

"Alive. With your father in Varanasi. She didn't come with Vikram because—" Gauri hesitated. "Because she was afraid. Not of you. Of what seeing you might do to her. She's been mourning you for ten years. The grief — it changed her. Your father processed the loss through action — searching, fighting. Your mother processed it through withdrawal. She hasn't left the Varanasi compound in three years."

The information settled in Nidhi like a stone dropping into still water, the ripples expanding outward in concentric circles of pain and understanding. Her mother was alive. Her mother was broken. Her mother had spent ten years in a different kind of prison — one made of grief rather than stone, but equally confining.

"I want to see her," Nidhi said.

"I know. When you're ready. When she's ready."

"What if she's never ready?"

"Then you go to her. Because that's what daughters do."

Yes, the Shakti agreed. Go to her.

For once, Nidhi and her divine power were in complete agreement.