chapter one: Eternal Echoes

It was a full-moon night. Outside the window, the moon hung high in the dark sky, pale and round, surrounded by hundreds of tiny stars. They were scattered across the darkness like little pieces of silver someone had thrown carelessly into the night. Moonlight slipped quietly through the single window of the room and rested on the wooden floor in a long, pale patch. It touched the edge of a table, the corner of an old chair, and a few flower petals lying near the wall. Everything looked peaceful from outside.

But inside the room, there was no peace.

The room was small and rectangular, with four plain walls and a wooden floor that had grown dull with age. The walls had once been painted in soft colours—warm yellow mixed with a little peach, the kind of colours that made a place feel comfortable and safe. There were tiny marks on the paint now, scratches that had gathered over the years, and in one corner the wall had begun to lose its colour. The room was not beautiful, but it had once felt lived in. It had once known laughter. It had once known love.

On ordinary nights, one might have heard the soft sound of a chair being pulled across the floor, the rustle of a blanket, or the quiet laughter of two people trying not to wake anyone else. There had been whispered promises here, the kind that sound small when they are spoken but become priceless after the person who heard

them is gone.

Tonight, however, those memories seemed to have remained behind after everything else had disappeared. There were no footsteps outside. No voices. No traffic. No television playing in another room. Nothing moved. Even the wind seemed to have lost its voice.

The only sound was the faint sound of breathing.

Then a girl began to cry.

At first, it was not really a cry. It was only a small tremble in her chest, followed by a breath that seemed to hurt on its way out. Her shoulders moved once. Then again. She tried to control herself, but the pain inside her was stronger than the strength she had left.

She was sitting on the cold wooden floor in the middle of the room. Her knees were pulled close to her body, and one thin arm rested around them. Her other hand lay beside her on the floor, her fingertips trembling slightly against the wood. She looked as though she had been sitting there for a very long time.

Her hair was tangled badly. Once, someone had loved touching that hair, brushing it gently, moving the strands away from her face. Now it was knotted and messy, with loose strands stuck to her damp cheeks. Tears had soaked her skin, and a thin layer of sweat covered her forehead. Her simple dress hung loosely from her shoulders. The fabric was wrinkled and torn in a few places, making her look even smaller than she really was.

She looked exhausted. Not the ordinary kind of tiredness that disappears after sleep. This was the tiredness of someone who had forgotten what peace felt like.

She lowered her head and cried again. The sound was soft, but the silence around her made it feel enormous. She was crying as though she had been carrying the same grief for years and had finally run out of places to hide it.

THE MOON MOVES. THE ROOM GROWS DARKER.

Slowly, the moonlight moved across the floor as the moon travelled through the sky. The stars remained outside, calm and distant, as though they knew nothing about the broken girl sitting beneath them.

Then something changed. A shadow began to spread across the room. It came from the far corner first, so slowly that it could almost be mistaken for an ordinary change in the light. It moved beneath the table and across the wooden boards, swallowing the pale moonlight piece by piece.

The girl did not notice. The shadow reached her feet. Then it climbed behind her. It seemed to grow taller, wider, heavier, until it felt less like a shadow and more like a wall standing between her and the rest of the world.

And just when the darkness seemed too heavy to bear, a tiny sound appeared.

Music.

It was faint, almost lost somewhere in the room. A small speaker was playing a song from far away, its voice soft and trembling. The girl stopped crying for a moment. She listened.

“Lag jaa gale ki fir yeh hasin raat ho naa ho… shayad fir iss janam mein mulakat ho naa ho…”-a Bollywood song

The song floated through the darkness. For a few seconds, it felt as though the room had remembered something beautiful.

Then the girl slowly lifted her eyes. And she saw the decorations.

There were red and pink flower petals scattered across a wooden table. Thin ribbons hung from the ceiling and moved gently in the air. There were little signs of preparation everywhere, the kind of small details someone might arrange when they wanted another person to feel special.

A birthday. Her birthday. Or perhaps his.

The room had been prepared for a celebration. For one brief moment, everything looked warm again.

Then the first flower petal moved.

The edges curled inward. The bright red colour slowly darkened. The petal dried before her eyes. Then it became black. It crumbled into ash.