CHAPTER SIX

They walked along a narrow path that climbed the hill behind the house, through the apple orchard — bare trees in winter, their branches skeletal against the sky — and into the deodar forest. The trees closed around them like a fist.

The path led them upward, past a stone shrine with a brass bell hanging from a chain — a Nag Devta shrine, its small stone idol worn smooth by centuries of touch and weather — and deeper into the forest. The temperature dropped. The light changed, from the grey-gold of mountain dusk to something flatter, stranger, like looking at the world through clouded glass.

Dev was waiting where the path forked — one way leading up toward the ruins on the ridge, the other descending into a stand of trees so ancient and vast that the trunks were wider than the Maruti she'd driven here.

He was leaning against a deodar, his arms crossed, his angular face half-hidden in shadow. The gold hoops in his ear caught the last light.

"You came." He sounded like a man who'd won a bet with himself. "Both of you."

"Stop gloating." Vikram's voice was flat. "Take us through."

Dev pushed off the tree and started walking, not down the path but directly into the forest where no path existed. The undergrowth should have been thick — tangled rhododendron and wild bramble — but it parted for him like water around a boat's prow.

"Stay close," Vikram murmured. "Don't touch anything that glows. Don't respond to any voice that isn't mine or his."

They walked.

The forest changed.

It happened gradually, the way a dream changes without you noticing the seam. The deodars grew taller, impossibly tall, their trunks wider than houses. The mist thickened until Meera couldn't see more than ten metres in any direction. The sounds of the mountain — birdsong, the distant rush of the Beas, the creak of wind in branches — died away, replaced by a silence so deep it had weight, pressing against her eardrums like water pressure.

Dev began to chant.

The sound was low, rhythmic, in a language she almost recognised — Sanskrit-adjacent, with cadences that made her think of the Vedic mantras she'd studied but couldn't quite place. The chanting seemed to vibrate in the air itself, in the ground under her feet, in the bones of her skull.

Between the trees, lights appeared.

Not fireflies. These were too bright, too deliberate in their movement — drifting orbs of blue and gold and green that floated between the trunks like lanterns held by invisible hands. Some hovered at eye level. Some drifted low, near the ground, illuminating the forest floor in patches of cold light.

"Don't look at them," Vikram said.

She looked.

One of the lights drifted closer, and inside it — or behind it — she could see a face. Small, delicate, with eyes too large for its head and a mouth that was smiling at her with an expression that was not quite kind.

A hand closed around her arm. Vikram's. His grip was hard enough to hurt.

"I said don't look."

She turned her face forward and walked.

The lights multiplied. Dozens of them. Hundreds. They filled the spaces between the trees like a luminous fog, and their presence pressed against her skin — not physically, but psychically, a sensation like being watched by a thousand eyes that all wanted different things from her.

Dev's chanting rose in volume, and the air around them seemed to resist — thick, almost solid, like walking through warm honey. Meera felt pressure building in her ears, behind her eyes. The ground changed under her feet — softer, damper, as if the earth was breathing.

And then Dev stopped.

The silence was sudden and absolute.

They were standing at the edge of a clearing — not a natural one but a circle of bare earth surrounded by trees that had grown into an archway, their branches woven together overhead in a pattern that was too regular, too symmetrical, to be accidental. At the centre of the clearing, a stone stood upright — carved, ancient, covered in script she could almost read.

Dev drew something from inside his clothes — a blade made of bone, its edge gleaming with a light that didn't come from the sky. He drew the blade across his palm without flinching.

The blood that ran from the cut was not red.

It was gold. Bright, viscous gold that dripped from his hand and hissed when it hit the stone, running into the carved channels like liquid metal filling a mould. The carvings lit up — not slowly but all at once, a flash of amber light that turned the clearing into noon for a split second before it faded to a deep, pulsing glow.

The stone seemed to breathe.

"Go," Dev said. His voice was strained, as if the act of opening this passage was costing him something. "Walk straight through. Don't stop. Don't look back."

Vikram grabbed Meera's hand and pulled her forward. They stepped over the threshold of the stone circle, and the world shifted.

It wasn't violent — no explosion, no lightning, no Hollywood special effects. It was more like stepping from one room into another through a door you hadn't noticed was there. One moment the air tasted of deodar and mountain cold; the next it tasted of something else entirely — older, wilder, like drinking from a river that had never been mapped.

The pressure in her ears popped. The light changed — softer, more diffuse, as if the sky itself was a different colour. The temperature dropped, then rose, then settled into a cold that felt different from Himalayan cold. Wetter. Greener. Like the cold of a forest in a dream.

Meera stumbled. Vikram caught her arm.

"Keep walking."

They walked. Behind them, the amber glow of the gateway faded to nothing, and the forest closed in — but it was a different forest now. The trees were massive hardwoods she didn't recognise, draped in moss, their canopies forming a cathedral ceiling so high that the sky between the leaves was the colour of old pewter.

She looked back. The clearing was gone. There were only trees, stretching in every direction, their trunks disappearing into mist.

Vikram didn't release her hand.

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They walked for what felt like hours but might have been minutes. The forest changed as they descended from the highland — the enormous hardwoods thinned, giving way to oaks and ash and silver birches draped in moss. Hawthorn bushes crowded the path, their berries bright red against the grey-green landscape. Ferns unfurled from tree roots. A stream appeared beside the path, its water clear as glass over stones that seemed to glow faintly from within.

"You said that was a gate." Meera's voice came out steadier than she felt. "A gate between what?"

"Prakash Lok and Chhaya Lok," Vikram said. "Between our world and the one Arjun grew up in. Walk quietly now."

The questions rioted inside her skull like a mob demanding answers, but she held them.

The hills evened out as they descended. The path widened, became rutted with narrow wheel tracks. The undergrowth thinned, and the first sounds of life returned — birdsong, insect hum, the distant lowing of what might have been cattle.

In the deep shadows between the trees, Meera caught movements — thin, tall figures that flickered between the trunks like flames. But when she turned her head, the forest was still.

"Stop looking," Vikram whispered. "They've noticed you."

"The —" She stopped herself. She knew the word. "The dark ones?"

"Please. Be quiet. Be still."

Long minutes later, the land evened out and the forest lightened. Birds sang. Insects chirred. The occasional evergreen dotted the landscape, and the mist thinned to reveal glimpses of hills beyond hills, blanketed in colours that were — wrong.

Not wrong. Different.

The greens were too green. The purples of the distant mountains were too vivid, like a painting where the artist had mixed their colours with light instead of pigment. The sky overhead was pewter-grey but luminous, as if the sun existed but was hidden behind a layer of cloud that glowed from within.

"It should be night," Meera said. She checked her wrist — no watch, she'd left it behind — but her body knew. They'd entered the forest at sunset.

"It's night in the Prakash Lok," Vikram said. "Which means it's day here."

An alternate dimension. The thing Priya had always insisted was theoretically possible, with her patient engineer's explanations about quantum superposition and membrane theory. How on earth had they gotten here? By walking through a forest?

"Vikram, please." She stopped walking. "I need a real explanation. Where are we?"

He turned to face her, and his expression was stripped bare — no hostility, no gruffness, just a man looking at a woman who deserved the truth.

"I asked you if you believed in fairy tales and you said you did."

"I believe in fairy tales as metaphors for human experience. Learning tools. Cultural transmission vehicles. They tell us about —"

"Look around you." His voice was soft. "This isn't a metaphor."

She looked. The too-green hills. The luminous sky. The flowers in the meadow — gold and purple and white — blooming in what should have been deep winter. The air, which tasted of rain and wild herbs and something underneath that she had no name for, something that made her skin prickle and her breath deepen.

"No," she said quietly. "It's not."

"Come this way." He took her hand again. "My cottage is close. We can rest, and I'll answer everything."

They walked through a meadow where the grass was chest-high and threaded with wildflowers that shouldn't have existed in this season. Lights danced over the heads of the grass — the same kind she'd seen in the forest, but smaller, gentler, like the embers of a fire drifting on a breeze.

A stone cottage appeared at the edge of a copse of silver birches, its thatched roof green with moss, smoke rising from a chimney built of river stone. Herbs grew wild around the front door, and the garden was a tangle of vegetables and flowering plants that looked half-tended and half-feral.

"This is yours?"

"Arjun keeps rooms at the — at the main house." He pushed the door open and ushered her inside. "He gave me this for when I visit."

The cottage was small, warm, and smelled of firewood and dried herbs. A stone hearth dominated one wall, and an empty brass bowl sat on the hearthstones. Vikram immediately set about building a fire, his hands moving with the automatic efficiency of long practice.

Meera sat on a wooden bench and looked at her hands. They were trembling.

She was in another world.

Vikram got the fire going and turned to face her, his back to the flames.

"Ask," he said.

"Where are we?"

"Chhaya Lok. The Shadow Realm. This part mirrors the mountains we just left — they call it Devgarh." He sat across from her. "The old names for everything."

"And Arjun was born here?"

"He grew up here. He's human — but Chhaya Lok humans can learn to use some magic. They call it being dev-sparsh — god-touched." He leaned forward. "Arjun is dev-sparsh when it comes to music. His voice can do things that voices shouldn't be able to do."

She'd known that. Even in Pune, when he played guitar at the Nukkad café on Friday nights, the room would go still — not just quiet but still, as if the air itself was listening.

"So this is an alternate dimension?"

"I don't know. Maybe things were more fluid once. There are gates between the realms — the deodar grove behind my house has one. Things get through sometimes. That's why there are still stories of devtas and spirits in the mountains. That's why your grandmother told you not to follow lights into the forest."

"My grandmother never told me that."

"Someone should have."

She processed. "If this is real — if everything you're saying is real —"

"You're here. You walked through the gate. You saw Dev bleed gold."

"I saw that, yes." She took a breath. "But if fairy tales are real — really real —"

"You know they are." He leaned forward, his eyes holding hers. "You've probably walked near gates before and felt something wrong. A chill that didn't come from the weather. A sound in the forest that made you want to run. That flicker in the corner of your eye."

"The forest behind our house in Pune," Meera whispered. "My mother used to talk to the trees."

Vikram said nothing.

"So everyone here has a twin in our world?"

"Every person you meet here is the Chhaya-Bandhu of someone in Prakash Lok. A shadow-twin. Born at the same moment, wearing the same face, living a different life." He paused. "Nothing is born in Chhaya Lok except by magic. The Gandharvas — the ones you'd call devtas or fae — they control the gates between worlds. When a child is born in Prakash Lok, the Gandharvas take a fragment of that soul and bring it here. A twin is born in Chhaya Lok — same face, same blood, different destiny."

"By who?"

"The old gods? The Gandharvas? The spirits of the forest?" He shrugged. "All of them? I don't know, Meera. But I've seen it. Arjun is my mirror image, and according to my mother, she only had one child on my birthday. I've seen others too — people here wearing the faces of men and women I know in my world. My neighbours. People I grew up with. Same faces, different people."

"And everyone has a twin." She frowned. "Everyone? Even me?"

Vikram's face went very still. Then he looked at the fire.

"Where were you born?"

"Goa. Panaji."

He closed his eyes. "And your mother. She painted landscapes of impossible places."

"Yes." Meera's heart was beating faster now. "How did you know that?"

"Because the woman with your face" — Vikram's voice was barely above a whisper — "was the most beloved person in this realm. And she's been dead for two years."

The fire crackled in the silence.

"Her name was Tara," Vikram said. "And she was Arjun's wife."

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