‘Ready?’ he asked caustically.

‘Aye, aye. Stop fretting!’ she said as she finally managed to disentangle herself.

Jerking their sword belts straight, they strode towards the palace. The red doors yawned open, as welcoming as a burning pyre. Inside, grim-faced Daeva guards spoiled the mood under every archway they passed under.

‘I swear this palace is just ghastly,’ Asha sniggered as they finally reached the Inner Sanctum.

It felt like they had crossed over into a different realm. Playful fountains threw pink spray at them. Closely scythed grass spread below their feet. Hedges, carved into wondrous monsters, stood like a guarding legion on either side of the grassy pathway that led to the Dome.

The Daevas were a strange race, Muchuk reflected. In his time here, he had realized that the Daevas had ceased to procreate; had in fact, stopped living. Immortality was their curse. They merely continued to…exist. Passion had been extinguished from their beings, and along with passion, bloodlust, gluttony and envy – all the things that made life delicious. If they were indeed Gods, then the Gods were really bored. And yet, they were obsessed with something as dull as gardening. Just one of the many ironies of his employers he had unravelled over time.

The other irony he had uncovered was about why the Daevas once swooped down to his world to seduce earthlings when the Daevas themselves were such exquisite creatures. Turns out, Mortals excited and enflamed them, gave them reason to feel again. A fact he had unfortunately come to learn from her sister’s accounts of Daevic endurance.

There was also the whole thing about sacrificial worship which the Mortals had once practiced to revere the Daevas when they had not known any better. Muchuk didn’t quite understand how, but these ornate rituals fed the Daevas. Not with food but with… vitality, a currency in which the Daevas were most impoverished.

Not that it mattered any longer for this was ancient history. All of it had happened a long time ago, much before Muchuk’s time, before the Daevas had been banished from his world after being defeated in the War of Spring.

Come to think of it, no one really won that War, Muchuk reflected. The Daevas, though beaten, survived, and were gone. As for the Mortals, a hundred races became extinct overnight, and along with them the one thing that had helped them win that War. Elementals. To think he was going to be the one to bring it back to his world…

‘Asha…’

‘Yes?’

‘This is my last season in this Daeva nonsense,’ Muchuk declared. ‘Their War is won. They can manage the measly battles that remain on their own. And they may be virile in bed, but I need the smell of mud again.’

Asha stared evenly back. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have brought up your wretched family.’

‘It’s not just about them, Asha. You were right. The staleness here has affected me. Let’s go back now, while we’re still young. Don’t you wish to go back to awe the other races into bending the knee; to rule over all with an iron fist, and not be answerable to anyone, anyone, regardless of how easy defeating them now sounds?’