His breathing quickened. He pulled it back under control through force and turned the torch forward. A staircase emergedfrom the dark. Narrow steps led down into the earth. The passage looked tight, barely enough for his shoulders.
He stared into the blackness below.
There was no choice.
He moved, step after step, deeper into the ground. The air grew cooler, damp. The torch showed only a narrow path ahead. He kept moving.
Then the light caught a carving.
He stopped.
It was a lotus.
‘A lotus.’
Recognition hit at once.
The same lotus carved into the archways of Anand Mahal.
His stomach dropped. “What the…?”
The beam swept across the wall. More carvings appeared. Familiar lines. Familiar placements. The same patterns Meera had traced while telling him the history of the underground chamber.
Cold spread through him.
The vanished door had shaken him. The woman’s disappearance had unsettled him.
This tore reality apart.
Because this place could not exist here. He had taken turns across the city. Roads that should never have led back to Anand Mahal. Yet these walls stood before him.
His pulse pounded in his ears. “How’s that possible!”
His hand pressed against the stone. It was solid, real. That made it worse. A sharp thought cut through him suddenly.
‘I’ve lost my mind.’
No other explanation would fit inside reason anymore. No hidden passage could connect impossible distances. No road could fold the city into itself.
His breath turned uneven. Then another thought rose and cut through everything.
‘Meera.’
If this chamber was real… if there was even the smallest chance she was here… He moved… faster now.
His fingers skimmed the wall, reading the stone almost without thought. The rough grain. Tiny shifts in the surface. Details his body remembered from following her before.
Left where the ceiling dipped. Right where the floor smoothed. Straight where the air opened.
His pace broke into a run. The beam shook, bouncing across walls he barely needed help recognizing anymore. Hope rose hard enough to hurt.
‘Don’t trust it yet.’
He had been wrong before. He couldn’t survive being wrong again.
Then he saw light ahead. A single flame burned softly in the dark. His steps slowed instinctively. One step. Another.
The underground chamber revealed itself around him.
