Venkat turned to see King Vasuki and Queen Naga Yakshi gliding toward them through the chaos, the many hoods of their fearsome coronas hissing. The monarchs had expanded to match Garuda’s massive stature, and the air thrummed with their dominion, driving the few nagas still upright to genuflect. Even Venkat found himself off the chair and kneeling. The garudas alone resisted the pull.

“I could create the illusion of boons,” Garuda told Venkat, as matter-of-fact as if the leaders of his enemies weren’t bearing down on him. “I could guide you through the process of forging our revisioning. But only you, with your mortal’s grief-ridden yet compassionate heart, could actually forge it.” Garuda’s sharp gaze pierced through Venkat, skewering his doubts and laying bare the most secret part of him. “And now you must be the one to rectify the ills of the past.”

Venkat felt like someone had shoved him outside himself. He’d wanted this chance so badly, so very badly he would have sacrificed anything for it, but he’d resigned himself long ago to the idea that it could never happen.

Suddenly that was no longer true. His family, alive again. With him.

Garuda smiled, a terrifying thing. “The elements we have chosen include a pocket of potential specifically for you to rewrite your own past. To undo your own tragedy. Tell me you do not want it.”

The long-nurtured fantasy, securely stored in the vault of Venkat’s heart, expanded now, merging into the tapestry, until they were one and the same. He couldn’t say he didn’t want it, as Garuda well knew.

“Both of us will benefit,” Garuda said, as he faced the nagaraja and nagarani. “Justice will be served, and you will be reunited with those you love best.”

Mummy. Papa. His grandmother. Everybody Venkat had lost appeared in his imagination, so richly alive, so close he could see the wave of a breeze dancing through their hair. He’d lost count of the nights he’d prayed for the privilege of being pestered by his little brother one more time.

Butterflies made of need fluttered against his rib cage, eager to be let out.

How many times had he wished his own dreamsmithing could bring them back?

And now, if Garuda was right, it would.

“You!” the nagarani spat. “We granted you succor in our land. Our court. How dare you?”

Another naga guard, somehow free, rushed Garuda, and he swatted the man as easily as crushing a beetle.

“How foolish are you, Cousins,” Garuda mocked, “not to have registered my presence among you all this time? Thousands of years have passed for mortals, so you, too, fail to recall your own history? Or did you think I would simply forgive and forget?”