Chapter Five: Shringa Durg

## Chapter Five: Shringa Durg

The path down from the portal temple led through a forest that was and wasn't the one they'd left.

The trees were deodar ; the same species, the same towering trunks, the same cathedral architecture of branches — but they were larger. Impossibly larger. The trunks were wider than houses, their bark etched with patterns that looked deliberate, carved by something that wasn't human. The branches overhead formed a canopy so thick that the silver-lavender light of Chhaya Lok's sky filtered through in shafts, each one carrying motes of something that wasn't dust but glowed faintly, like fireflies that had forgotten how to fly and had settled for drifting.

"Yeh roshni kya hai?" Tara asked, reaching up to touch one of the glowing motes. It settled on her fingertip : warm, weightless, tingling, like static electricity made visible.

"Jaadu," Dhruv said. He didn't slow down. "Is duniya mein jaadu hawa mein hai. Paani mein. Mitti mein. Sab jagah. Tum isse feel karogi — especially tum."

"Kyun especially main?"

"Kyunki tum Brightkin ho. Neerja ka pratiroop. Is duniya ka jaadu tumhe pehchanta hai, chahe tum isse nahin pehchanti."

They walked for an hour. The forest gave way to open land , rolling meadows of grass so green it looked painted, crossed by streams that ran silver and made a sound like small bells. In the distance, mountains — the same Himalayas but taller, their peaks lost in clouds that glowed from within. And rising from a hill ahead, catching the silver light and throwing it back in fragments .

A fortress.

Not a fort in the way Tara understood forts — not the crumbling, tourist-friendly structures she'd visited on school trips. This was a living fortress, a working fortress, a structure built from dark stone that seemed to have grown from the hill rather than been placed on it. Its walls were thick, crenellated, adorned with carvings of Nagas and Yakshas and figures from a mythology that Tara had studied in books and was now seeing in stone. Towers rose from its corners, their tips catching the silver light. Flags ; deep blue, embroidered with a serpent coiled around a mountain — flew from every parapet.

"Shringa Durg," Dhruv said. His voice held something that Tara couldn't quite identify : not pride exactly, not nostalgia exactly, but the specific resonance of a name that had been a person's entire world for a significant portion of their life. "Pahaadon ka qila. Yahan ke raja — hamara baap , yahan se poore uttari ilaqe par raaj karta hai."

"Aur Lakshman?"

"Lakshman yahan ka lord hai. Officially." The word 'officially' carried weight — the weight of a title accepted and a brother who had not accepted it. "Chalo. Guards humein dekhenge toh kuch explain karna padega."

They approached through a market that surrounded the fort's lower walls . stalls selling things that Tara's brain catalogued with the frantic efficiency of a mythology professor confronted with primary sources. Herbs she didn't recognise. Metals that shimmered with internal light. Fabrics woven with patterns that moved when you looked at them directly and froze when you looked away. Food — the smell hit her like a wall: spiced dal, fresh roti on a tawa, the sweetness of jaggery melting, the smoke of tandoor, and beneath it all, something that wasn't any food she knew but smelled like warmth itself, like the concept of nourishment made aromatic.

People stared. Not at Dhruv ; at her. Their faces carried this specific expression of people seeing someone they recognised and simultaneously didn't — the cognitive dissonance of familiar features on an unfamiliar person.

"Woh Neerja jaisi dikhti hai," someone whispered.

"Neerja toh, "

"Chup." An older woman silenced the whisper with a look. But her eyes followed Tara up the hill, and in them was something that might have been hope or might have been fear.

The fort's main gate was guarded by men in leather armour carrying weapons that Tara's academic brain identified as variations of traditional Indian armaments — talwaar, bhala, dhaal : but made from metal that didn't exist in her world, metal that caught the light with an oily, iridescent shimmer.

"Rajkumar Dhruv?" One guard stepped forward. His face went through a rapid sequence: surprise, confusion, recognition, protocol. He snapped to attention. "Aap — aap wapas aaye?"

"Temporarily," Dhruv said. "Mujhe mere bhai se milna hai."

"Lord Lakshman darbaar mein hain. Rajaji ke saath."

"Aur yeh?" The guard's eyes moved to Tara. The surprise returned, deeper this time. "Yeh , yeh toh—"

"Yeh Neerja nahin hai." Dhruv's voice was firm. "Yeh Brightlands se hai. Neerja ki Brightkin."

The word moved through the guards like a current through water . Brightkin, Brightkin — each man processing the information and arriving at the same conclusion: the woman who looked like their murdered lady had come from the other world, and the implications of that arrival were too large to fit in a single glance.

They were escorted through corridors of dark stone ; the walls lined with tapestries depicting scenes that Tara recognised from Puranic literature: the churning of the ocean, Vasuki coiled around Mount Mandara, Nagas in their underwater kingdom. The air inside the fort was cool and smelled of stone and lamp oil and something herbal — tulsi, she thought, burning somewhere, the same tulsi she'd tasted in her dreams.

The darbaar was a large hall : vaulted ceiling, stone pillars carved with serpentine figures, a raised platform at one end where a man sat on a carved wooden throne.

Raja Tejas was old. Not elderly — old in the way that mountains are old, his age a matter of accumulation rather than decline. His hair was white, his beard trimmed close, his body lean beneath robes of dark blue. His eyes , when they found Tara — were Lakshman's eyes. Dhruv's eyes. The same dark brown, the same intensity. But older. Deeper. The eyes of a man who had seen things that no one else in the room had seen, and who carried that seeing like a weight he'd learned to balance.

"Baap," Dhruv said.

"Dhruv." The king's voice was controlled. Not cold . controlled. "Do saal baad."

"Do saal baad."

"Aur yeh?" The king's eyes hadn't left Tara. "Yeh Neerja ki—"

"Brightkin. Haan."

The silence in the darbaar was the silence of held breaths. The guards, the courtiers, the servants at the edges of the room ; everyone watching, everyone waiting, the entire court suspended in the moment between Tara's arrival and whatever was going to happen because of it.

Then — footsteps. Fast, from a side corridor. A voice that Tara knew : that she'd recognise across worlds, across dimensions, across that specific distance between love and its absence.

"Tara?"

Lakshman stood in the archway. He was wearing clothes she'd never seen — a kurta of dark silk, embroidered with silver thread, over fitted trousers and boots of the same iridescent metal-leather the guards wore. His hair was longer than she remembered. His face was thinner. But his eyes , his eyes were the same eyes that had looked at her across the kitchen counter in Vasant Kunj, the same eyes that had laughed at her terrible Hindi jokes, the same eyes that had held her gaze during the first night they'd spent together when neither of them slept because sleeping meant looking away.

"Lakshman."

He moved toward her. Stopped. The stop was visible — a physical arrest, his body wanting to reach her and his mind intervening, the collision between desire and something else producing a stillness that was almost painful to watch.

"Tum yahan kaise, " He looked at Dhruv. The look held the specific charge of two brothers who had not spoken in two years and who were now standing in the same room with a woman between them. "Tune isse yahan kyun laaya?"

"Usse sapne aa rahe the," Dhruv said. "Takshak ke sapne. Naag usse bula raha tha."

Lakshman's face changed. The colour — what little the Chhaya Lok's silver light left . drained from his cheeks.

"Takshak bula raha tha?"

"Haan."

"Toh woh jaanta hai." Lakshman's voice dropped. "Woh jaanta hai ki Neerja ki Brightkin yahan aa sakti hai."

"Apparently."

"Tara." Lakshman took her hands. The touch was electric — not metaphorically but actually, a current passing from his skin to hers, warm and sharp and carrying information that her nerve endings couldn't decode but her body understood. "Tumhe yahan nahin aana chahiye tha."

"Toh tumhe mujhse bina kahe nahin jaana chahiye tha."

The words landed. She watched them land ; watched the impact cross his face, the flinch, the guilt, this expression of a man who knew he'd done something wrong and had spent three weeks building justifications that had just collapsed.

"Mujhe explain karna hai," he said.

"Haan. Tumhe explain karna hai."

Behind them, Raja Tejas watched. His expression was unreadable — the expression of a king who had ruled for decades and who had learned to keep his reactions private, to process before responding, to observe before acting.

But Tara caught something in his eyes : a flicker, brief, when he looked at her face. Not at her, exactly. At the face he was seeing. At the face of a woman who had looked exactly like this and who was no longer alive.

Grief. The king's eyes held grief.

And behind the grief — suspicion.