Veerendra sat on the edge of her bed, the weight of his chainmail suddenly unbearable. This was the moment he had dreaded for sixteen years. He could use her. Train her as a weapon. Send her into the tilism to destroy Tej Singh and the sorcerers. She would win. He knew it.
The labyrinth screamed. Mirrors shattered. The magic feeding on his fear dissolved. On the surface, Tej Singh’s aaina army flickered and vanished. The tilism crumbled into harmless dust.
For the first time, Chandrakanta saw her father not as a king of stone, but as a man of deep, silent rivers—capable of drowning his own demons so she could breathe. irrfan khan chandrakanta
Veerendra sat in silence, his hooded eyes fixed on the shard. He remembered the last time he had fought magic. He had won the kingdom but lost his wife’s sanity. He had seen what power did to a person.
Veerendra crawled out of the ruins at dawn, his hair turned white, his eyes seeing ghosts. Chandrakanta ran to him, weeping. Veerendra sat on the edge of her bed,
“You are the tilism’s keeper, Veerendra,” the ghost smiled. “Your paranoia. Your guilt. That is the real cage. And now, your daughter will pay the price.”
He looked at the rising sun over a now-ordinary Vijaygarh. “The magic was never the enemy, child. The fear of losing control was.” He smiled—a small, tired, genuine smile. “Your mother knew that. I was just too slow to learn.” Train her as a weapon
“You already know,” she said, not looking up. Her voice was calm, like his. “The tilism calls to me, Father. I can feel it beneath the fort. It’s not a labyrinth. It’s a cage. For something they put inside our bloodline.”