Words - once spoken can only be forgiven. The irreversible nature of them have always made the oldest caution the young lest they carry the regret like their ancestors. Alas! No one learns this lesson until it is too late.
(Blurb to be edited)
Vāc i...
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The world was dim, bathed in twilight, neither day nor night. A strange scent of damp earth and fallen leaves filled the air, sharp and ancient.
Abhijishya stood barefoot on the forest floor, her feet sinking into the cold, dew-laden soil. The wind was different here—soft but weighty, carrying whispers that she could not decipher. Her breath came in slow, measured rhythms, as if her body remembered something her mind did not.
She turned. The forest stretched endlessly, its towering trees swaying like sentinels of a forgotten past. Shadows stretched long across the earth, curling around her ankles like vines. Somewhere in the distance, a river murmured, its voice weaving into the silence.
And then, she saw herself.
Not as she was now—but as someone else. A woman draped in simple, earthen-colored garments, her hair unbound, dark as the sky before a storm. The woman’s frame was lean, her skin sun-kissed, her gaze serene yet unyielding.
Abhijishya tried to call out, but her voice did not rise.
The woman bent forward, collecting fallen leaves, her movements slow, deliberate. She held them in her cupped palms, eyes lowered in devotion. The rustling of the leaves was deafening in the silence, as if the world held its breath for her.
You used to eat only the leaves of the trees which fell to the ground.
The words were not spoken, yet they echoed in the vast emptiness, reverberating through Abhijishya’s bones.
She stumbled back, but the earth pulled at her, refusing to let her leave. Her head throbbed with something unspoken, unseen—memories that did not belong to her, yet clung to her like an old sorrow.
A voice—deep, steady—spoke from nowhere and everywhere at once.
Prishni.
The name crashed against her like a wave.
She gasped, her breath hitching. It was not her name. It was a name lost in time, belonging to someone who had walked these lands long before her. But the way it was spoken—it was as if the very air embraced it, as if the trees had always known it.
The woman—Prishni—lifted her head now, and for the first time, their eyes met.
Abhijishya’s stomach twisted.
The face was hers.
But the eyes—they held the weight of lifetimes. A quiet endurance. A knowing.
"You controlled your senses and performed severe austerities…" The voice whispered again, a current of truth running through it. "You endured the rain, the wind, the burning heat… You cleansed your heart, beyond the grasp of the material world."
