‘Why would it chop off our heads?’ asked Storm.

‘That’s what they built their reputation on,’ Jambavan told her. ‘Demons made of light and fire. The ancient enemy. The only one that matters.’

Storm shrugged. ‘They’ve done nothing to me.’

‘The Daevas are long dead; as dead as the Immortals and the Children of Blood, gone twenty thousand years ago,’ Krishna explained. ‘Any newly graduated Acharya will tell you they never lived at all. No living man has ever seen a Daeva. But here we have proof that they did indeed exist. This...’ Krishna pointed to the ship around them, ‘was how they travelled, as I travel on Garud.’

‘Children of Blood? Immortals? What—’

‘One question at a time, Storm. One at a time,’ Krishna said, holding up a hand to pause her queries.

‘Then what is this?’ Satyaki raised a finger at the throbbing translucent figure of the Daeva.

‘It is a reflection of sorts. A memory or a letter, if you will.

The Daevas knew how to send messages using this device, using secrets we don’t yet understand.’

‘And what does the letter say?’

Jambavan pressed the trinkets on the orb, and suddenly the figure of the Daeva spoke, its voice crackling like dry leaves in a forest fire, Though the form stood before them, the sound came from everywhere around them, through small black webbed boxes placed in different alcoves in the Syamantaka. The speech was garbled, with gaps in between. Sorry, Muchuk Und—--the Others didn’t approve of your methods-----they were afraid of you---the cannibalism, the destruction, the cruelty you left in your wake, they saw themselves----they will come now to enslave your kind again----mortals have forgotten Astras----I left your zinth dagger------I will miss her----We all deserve the deaths you wish upon us--- For your sake, I hope you never wake from your sleep. Savitre Lios May your Night be Bright.

The Daeva’s form then fizzled into nothingness. Krishna smiled at the horror-struck expression on Satyaki’s face. The Daevas of yore, the Children of Light, the monsters of fables that made little boys squeal, riding their winged horses, hungry for sacrifice and fire; to know they had really existed, filled even him with an exhilaration no conspiracy could match.

‘Madness!’ Satyaki finally sputtered. ‘What is this?’

Krishna could see Satyaki did not feel well at all. Things he had dismissed as myth were suddenly revealed as fact before his eyes; the world was a different place than it had been the night before, an unsettling place where a tiny jewel turned out to be an otherworldly ship, where his ancestors were owned by monsters of myth, where those monsters spoke of a future when they would come again. Satyaki closed his eyes, his lips moving in fervent prayer.

‘Breathe, Satyaki. Let us take it easy on him, Jambavan. Enough for today.’

‘I do not understand why I am here,’ Satyaki said grumpily, opening his eyes on a world that suddenly eluded his understanding.