wheels_of_time
Mayuri has spent her life digging up the past - never once imagining the past would reach back and pull her in.
One moment she is standing on the Gujarat coastline, staring at a relic rising from the sea, trying to decode the language inscribed across its surface. The next, she is standing in a world that should not exist - a world of gold-spired palaces and rivers that have not yet been named on any map she knows. Dwapara Yuga. The age of the Mahabharat. The age of Krishna.
She always believed him to be a story. A metaphor wearing a crown. A god invented by people who needed one.
She was wrong.
And the moment she realizes it, she does something no one in any scripture ever dared to do - she challenges him. If he is truly who they say he is, if fate truly bends to his will the way every text claims, then surely it can bend to hers too. She tells him she will change it. The war. The deaths. The grief written into every page of a story that hasn't been written yet.
Krishna only smiles, and tells her to try.
What follows is not the rewriting she imagined. Every thread she pulls tightens another. Every fate she tries to spare finds its way back to ruin by a different road. She is drowning in a war that was never supposed to be hers to fix, in a yuga that was never supposed to let her in - and the longer she stays, the less certain she becomes of which world she is fighting to save: theirs, or the one she left behind.
Some stories are written to be read.
This one was written to be lived - and Mayuri is running out of time to change the ending.