(Book 6) Hayden Mackay and The Third-Eye of the Pancharatna

1. Unholy Alliance

Part 1: The Standoff

Chapter 1: Unholy Alliance

Haimavati

Dakshinpur 1011 CD.

Nobody helped her build the funeral pyres.

Haimavati wiped the sweat and the grease from her forehead. The heat was insufferable, her breathing affecting her physically. She huffed and puffed, bearing the smoke filling in her lungs. Her cotton brown tattered saree dampened with precipitation. Despite the exhaustion, she remained undeterred and persisted to finish the task she'd started a day ago. It was slow and challenging work, nevertheless, the only way to commit these bodies to their afterlife. As eerie and funereal as it was, Haima treated it as an experience she may never forget.

Twenty more, she thought, twenty more bodies only.

The magnitude of the despair in her heart was enormous. There was the longing to be freed of returning to the life she'd once cherished. But you do the right thing, always the right thing in the end, to gain satisfaction and freedom from the burning guilt. Haima lifted the adze and swung it hard against the trunk. She lifted it again, grunting, and swung down hard. She repeated the process, chopping down trees and lashing the logs together, and dragging them one after the other. She made her way across the street, towards her destroyed garden littered with dead bodies.

Somewhere from the distance came a ragged howl of the wolfhounds. Haima winced and pressed her eyes shut, wishing for it to stop. Just stop! She made a concerted effort to ignore the call of death...as always. She wouldn't want to take such an extreme step. It was wrong. There was no point in rattling the cage of the sleeping giant, not ever.

Staggering to her feet, he held the wood and brought closer to the face of a young girl who had one eye half opened and another was a searing black hole. How naïve and unworldly the girl looked. Haima's eyes moistened and it wasn't due to the thick acrid smoke coming along from the pyre next to her. Her throat pained and she let out a muffled sigh.

Everything she'd done, no matter how wrong and selfish it may have looked to the next person, was never meant for her ill-gotten gains. She'd believed with extreme optimism that stopping the battle against those two former friends would save the future of this country. It was a mistake though, a terrible mistake, the result of which was in front of her- dried bones, carcasses, and gut piles. Agreeing to comply with Lady Chandrika's offer had brought this doom upon her country. Mistake! The statements against her publicized as facts were simply not true, and she was held responsible for the damages she couldn't deny.

Being reverent, she thoroughly covered the corpse with wood logs. Turned back and searched for a log on the fire in the wide swath of burned trees cut in half. There it is. She carried the log back to her body and let the flames take over. She stepped back watching the flames crackle, a mournful cry of loss and sorrow tore up in her heart. The destroyed garden, once famously known as the Haimavati's Gardens, was aggressively growing into the venue for the funeral.

She looked up, eyes heavy and brimming with tears and guilt. A few passersby stopped at the street between the woodlot and her garden giving a peak at the event. They began pointing fingers at her and whispered in one another's ears.

She felt dizzy, oppressively hot, and weak but that didn't stop her from using her powers. Energy surged through her, as easily as the flow of the water, and she listened to the passersby mouthing insults.

"She has the blood of crores of innocent people on her hands."

"A traitor for a queen."