Prologue: The Dream

## Prologue: The Dream

She dreamed of flying when she had no right to fly.

The wind was a blade , Himalayan wind, the kind that carried ice crystals and the memory of glaciers and that violence of altitude that stripped warmth from skin the way a knife stripped bark from wood. It cut through the leather armour that covered her body, finding the gaps at her neck, her wrists, the small of her back where the straps didn't quite meet, and it filled those gaps with cold so absolute that her bones ached with it.

Below her, mountains.

Not the mountains of postcards or meditation retreats or the soft-focus Himalayas that tourists photographed from heated hotel windows in Shimla. These were the real mountains — the ones that existed before humans gave them names, the ones whose peaks punctured the sky like broken teeth, whose valleys were throats that swallowed light and sound and the small, fragile things that dared to cross them. Pine forests clung to their slopes like dark fur, and fog moved between the trees in slow, deliberate currents, as if the mountains were breathing.

There was no moon. No stars. The only light came from below . from the belly of the creature that carried her.

Fire.

Orange and gold and white at its centre, the fire pulsed with the rhythm of a heartbeat, and the creature's scales reflected it in patterns that shifted like oil on water. The creature was enormous — larger than anything that should fly, larger than the physics of wing and bone and air should permit ; and it held her in a single curved claw that wrapped around her body with the precision of a hand holding a sparrow.

She was not afraid.

This was the part that confused her, every time — the absence of fear. She was suspended three thousand metres above the earth in the grip of a creature that breathed fire, and her body was calm. Her heartbeat was steady. Her breathing was even. As if some part of her : a part deeper than conscious thought, deeper than the survival instincts that should have been screaming — recognised this. Remembered this. Had done this before, in a life she couldn't access while awake.

Neerja.

The voice was inside her skull. Not heard , felt. A vibration that bypassed her ears entirely and resonated in the bones of her jaw, her temples, the plates of her cranium. It was a voice like tectonic movement, like the sound the earth would make if it spoke, and it said her name — not her name, a name that belonged to someone else, someone who wore this leather armour and flew with this creature and was not afraid . with the specific tenderness of a being that had known the owner of that name for a very long time.

Neerja. Stay awake.

She tried. The wind pulled at her consciousness the way it pulled at her hair — relentlessly, with the patience of a force that would outlast her. The fire below dimmed. The mountains blurred. The leather armour grew heavy, and her body grew light, and the distinction between the two ; between the armour that protected and the body it protected — dissolved.

She was falling. Not from the claw : the claw held — but from consciousness. Falling inward, into the dark place where dreams went when they stopped being dreams and became something else.

"Yeh lo." A voice , not the creature's voice but a human voice, female, close. Something touched her lips. Warm. Bitter. The taste of tulsi and something metallic, something that sang against her tongue like a tuning fork. "Peelo. Yeh theek kar dega..."

The words died in a rush of pain that started in her belly and climbed — climbed through her chest, wrapping iron fingers around her heart, squeezing with the methodical cruelty of a fist that knew exactly how much pressure a human heart could withstand before it stopped.

She heard it in her ears. Thundering.

His voice.

Her heart.

She felt the cold sliding down her throat like a living thing, and then everything went quiet, and the mountains disappeared, and the fire went out, and her heartbeat .

stopped.

---

Tara Sharma woke up gasping.

The ceiling was white. The fan was off. The Delhi heat pressed against the windows of her Vasant Kunj flat like an animal trying to get in, and the sheets beneath her were soaked — not with sweat but with the dampness of a body that had been somewhere cold, impossibly cold, and had brought the memory of that cold back with it.

She sat up. Her hands were shaking. The dream ; the same dream, the one that had been coming for three weeks, since Lakshman disappeared — clung to her consciousness like smoke, refusing to dissipate, refusing to become the harmless nonsense that dreams were supposed to become in the first thirty seconds of waking.

The clock on her phone said 3:47 AM.

She reached for water. The glass on her bedside table was empty : she'd drunk it during the night, though she didn't remember doing so. Her throat was raw. Her chest ached. And her heart, which had stopped in the dream, was now beating so hard that she could feel it in her fingertips, in her temples, in the hollow of her throat where the pulse lived closest to the surface.

Neerja.

The name that wasn't hers. The voice that wasn't human. The mountains that weren't mountains she'd ever climbed.

Tara pressed her palms against her eyes and breathed. The breathing exercises that Dr. Mehra had taught her — in through the nose, four counts; hold, seven counts; out through the mouth, eight counts , were supposed to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, were supposed to tell her amygdala that the threat was not real, that the fire-breathing creature was a hallucination, that the falling was metaphorical.

But the cold on her skin was not metaphorical. And the taste of tulsi and metal was still on her tongue.

She got out of bed. The floor was warm — March in Delhi, the floor was always warm . and the contrast between her cold feet and the warm tiles was so sharp that she gasped again, the sensation anchoring her in the present, in the real, in the world where she was a twenty-nine-year-old mythology professor on medical leave whose boyfriend had vanished three weeks ago without taking his passport, his sitar, or his shoes.

The police said he left.

Tara knew he didn't.

And the dreams — the dreams that came every night now, the dreams of flying and fire and a name that wasn't hers ; were telling her something that she couldn't quite hear, in a language she couldn't quite speak, from a world she couldn't quite see.

She stood at the window. Delhi spread below — the sodium-orange glow of streetlights, the distant hum of the Ring Road, the dark bulk of the Qutub Minar visible as an absence against the sky, a column of darkness where the stars should be. The city was asleep. The city didn't dream of Nagas.

Tara did.

She pressed her forehead against the glass. It was warm. Everything in Delhi was warm. And somewhere : in the cold, in the mountains, in the place where the creature with the fire in its belly flew through moonless skies — someone was calling her by a name she'd never been given.

Neerja. Stay awake.

She was trying.