# Veera – a Sci Fic Novel from Kiran Kumar Chava

## Chapter One: The Oldest Tree

Veera woke to the smell of cake. Not the synthetic kind that came in sealed pouches from the auto-kitchen – real cake, the kind his mother baked only on birthdays, filling the apartment with the warm, yeasty fragrance of actual flour and actual eggs and actual sugar. He lay still for a moment, eyes half-open, watching dust motes drift through the pale morning light that filtered through his bedroom window. Seattle’s skyline glittered beyond the glass – towers of steel and carbon-fiber rising into a sky so clean it almost looked fake. Somewhere below, a transit pod honked while zooming past on its magnetic rail – a sound so rare it cut through the pleasant fog of his half-sleeping brain. Transport was nearly silent these days. You only heard a honk when something went wrong.

There on the ceiling, he saw five stars glowing brightly – holographic stickers that hadn’t been there when he’d fallen asleep. He knew instantly it was his sister’s doing. It brought an involuntary smile to his face.

He sat up in bed and found her drone already hovering at the foot of his mattress, its tiny dot light blinking red.

“Happy birthday, Veera!” Anika’s voice came through the drone’s tiny speaker, slightly compressed and cheerful. She was recording. She was always recording. “Say something for the archive!”

“Go away,” Veera said, pulling the blanket over his head.

“Perfect. That’s going in the family reel.”

He heard her laughing from the next room, and despite himself, he smiled under the blanket. Anika was seven – two years older and approximately two hundred years more annoying. But she had a talent for making him smile when he didn’t want to.

He threw off the blanket, brushed his teeth, washed his face, and padded out of his room in bare feet. Their home occupied the entire twenty-eighth floor of the Cascadia – one of Seattle’s most celebrated residential towers, a building his father had helped design the exterior murals for before Veera was born. Every room bore the touch of his parents’ artistic sensibility. The entryway walls displayed a hand-painted mural of the Pacific North West at sunset – rolling hills rendered in burnt sienna and cadmium orange, a sky that deepened from with different shades of orange. The living room ceiling was an intricate geometric pattern inspired by ancient Telugu temple architecture, each intersection fitted with a tiny light that shifted color with the hour. The hallway was lined with his father’s sculptures – abstract forms in reclaimed wood and hammered brass that caught the light differently depending on where you stood. Even the kitchen, where practical considerations should have won out over beauty, had hand-thrown ceramic tiles and a backsplash mosaic his mother had assembled from river stones collected during their honeymoon in Kerala.

The balcony garden was his mother’s domain – tomatoes, basil, curry leaves, and a jasmine vine that scented the entire floor on summer evenings. The floors were warm beneath his feet, heated by the building’s geothermal loop. The walls shifted color gently with the time of day – pale gold in the morning, cooling to soft blue by evening – a feature his father had programmed himself, because “a home should breathe with you,” he liked to say.

Veera barely noticed any of it anymore. It was just home.

His family was waiting in the kitchen.

“There he is!” His father, Arjun, stood at the counter with his arms wide open. He was a tall man with kind eyes and a thin beard that he kept trimmed with almost artistic precision – which made sense, because everything Arjun did had that quality. He was one of the most celebrated public artists in the Pacific Northwest, responsible for several major installations commissioned by the state – the kinetic sculpture garden at the new Capitol building, the light-and-water memorial at Puget Sound, the twenty-meter bronze relief at Seattle Central Station. For the past two years, he had been deep in his magnum opus, a work he refused to describe to anyone, including his wife, saying only that it wasn’t ready to be talked about yet. “The birthday boy. Five whole years on this planet.”

“Five years of losing my exclusive privileges, indeed,” Anika said, appearing behind her drone. She had their mother’s sharp face and their father’s habit of saying things that made everyone slightly uncomfortable.

“We multiply by sharing,” their mother said. Priya was at the table, arranging plates around the cake – a beautiful, uneven, slightly lopsided thing covered in white frosting with five orange candles shaped like little flames. Real beeswax candles. Veera couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen real beeswax. “Happy birthday, Veera.” She kissed the top of his head. “Come sit.”

They sang. It was a small, imperfect song – Arjun slightly off-key, Anika rushing ahead, Priya’s voice steady and warm beneath them both. Veera blew out the candles. The tiny drone circled silently, recording from every angle.

Then came the gifts.

His mother slid the cake toward him first. “I used real vanilla,” she said, watching his face. “Not the synthesized extract. Your grandmother used to get it from a trader in Kerala. I found some at the heritage market last week.”

Veera took a bite. It tasted like something he couldn’t name – something older than him, older than the apartment and the skyline and the transit pods. He chewed slowly.

“Good?” his mother asked.

He nodded, mouth full.

Anika went next. She pushed a thin package across the table – recycled paper wrapping, sealed with a strip of tape. “Open it.”

Inside was a book. An actual, physical book with paper pages and a spine and a cover that showed a boy standing at the edge of a vast, dark forest. The title read: *The Last Cartographer – Volume III*.

Veera’s eyes went wide. “This isn’t out yet.”

“Limited test reader edition,” Anika said, trying and failing to look casual. “I know someone who knows someone. Only two hundred copies exist. You’re welcome.”

He turned it over in his hands, feeling the weight of it, the texture of the cover. Most people let their nanobots feed books directly into their heads – entire novels absorbed in minutes, effortlessly, like breathing. But Veera had always preferred the feel of paper. Nanobot-fed stories felt too unreal to him, too frictionless, like dreams that dissolved the moment you tried to hold them. He was a little slow to adopt them as the mainstream necessity everyone else seemed to think they were.

“My turn,” Arjun said. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out something small, something that caught the morning light and held it. A gold chain, thin and old, with a pendant shaped like a lotus bud. The gold was dull in places, worn smooth by generations of skin and sweat and prayer.

“This was your grandfather’s,” Arjun said. “And his father’s before him. And his father’s before that. We don’t know how far back it goes – maybe five generations, maybe ten. In our family, the eldest son receives it on his fifth birthday.” He unclasped it and reached across the table. “Bend your head.”

Veera bent his head, and his father fastened the chain around his neck. The pendant rested against his chest, cool and heavy.

“It suits you,” Priya said softly.

Veera touched the pendant with his fingertips. It felt important in a way he couldn’t articulate – not just old, but alive somehow, as if the gold itself remembered the hands that had worn it before.

Then Arjun pulled out a second chain – this one new, gleaming, the gold bright and unblemished. A matching lotus pendant, freshly crafted. He held it out to Anika.

“I made this myself,” he said. “In the studio, last month. I’m starting a new tradition – everybody in the family inherits one now.”

Anika took it with both hands, her eyes wide. For once, she had nothing clever to say. She just held it against her chest and looked at her father with an expression that made Priya blink hard and look away.

“Now eat your cake before it’s time for school,” Anika said, recovering quickly, already fastening the chain around her neck.

—

School was a glass building shaped like a curved leaf, situated three levels above ground on a platform that jutted from the side of a residential tower. Veera’s class had eleven students – which was, by current standards, a large class. The world’s population had been declining for decades. At its peak, there had been nearly ten billion people on Earth. Now there were far fewer, and the number kept falling – not from war or disease, but from choice. People lived longer. They had children later. Some didn’t have children at all. The cities had grown quieter, the air cleaner, the forests thicker. The world was emptying, slowly and peacefully, like a room clearing after a party. Nature calmly reclaiming everything vacated by its human subjects.

Veera liked school. His teacher, Ms. Elizabeth, was patient and strange and had a habit of asking questions that had no correct answer. Today they were supposed to study river ecosystems, which Veera found genuinely interesting – he liked the idea of things flowing, changing, carrying pieces of one place to another.

But midway through the morning, the classroom door chimed and his father’s face appeared on the threshold.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Arjun said, nodding to Ms. Elizabeth. “Family matter.”

Ms. Elizabeth waved her hand. “Go on, Veera. Happy birthday, by the way.”

Veera gathered his things with a sinking feeling. He knew what this was about.

In the corridor, his mother was waiting, arms crossed.

“We talked about this, Arjun,” Priya said as they walked toward the lift. Her voice was calm but her jaw was set in that particular way that meant she was not calm at all.

“It’s tradition,” Arjun said.

“It’s a forest in the middle of nowhere. He’s five.”

“I was five when my father took me. He was five when his father took him.”

“And what exactly happens there? You walk around some old buildings, look at some trees, and come back. What’s the educational value?”

Arjun was quiet for a moment. They stepped into the lift. The doors closed.

“I’m glad nothing happens,” he said. “Maybe in the olden days it was a hunting tradition – a way of declaring the boy is growing up. Or maybe it was simpler than that. A celebration of surviving the first five years. Do you know that thousands of years ago, before all these modern advancements, they used to name children only if they survived to age five?”

“That’s so cruel,” Anika said. She was trailing behind them, drone floating at her shoulder, apparently unwilling to miss the argument.

“Yes, indeed,” Arjun said. “It was a hard world. Anyhow – this is a tradition to remember the survival of generations, with all the odds stacked against them. A way of saying: we’re still here.”

“It’s the only thing I promised my father,” he added, his voice softer now. “The only thing he ever asked of me. Take the eldest boy to the ancestral home on his fifth birthday. That’s it. One day, one visit. Our family has been doing this for over two thousand years, Priya. I’m not going to be the one who breaks it.”

Priya looked at him. Then she looked at Veera.

“I don’t want to go either,” Veera offered helpfully.

“See?” Priya said.

“He didn’t want to eat vegetables last week. We still made him eat vegetables.”

Priya exhaled through her nose. “Fine. But he sees Dr. Meera first. The nanobot activation check was supposed to be this afternoon anyway. We do that first, then you take him to your forest.”

“Deal.”

“And you bring him back before dark.”

“Of course. I don’t want to spend a minute more there than we need to. We take the hyperloop to the nearest junction, pay our respects, forage some fruits, eat, and come back.”

—

Dr. Meera’s clinic was on the forty-second floor of the City Medical Tower, a spiral building in the health district that looked, from the outside, like a giant strand of DNA. Inside, it smelled like clean cotton and something faintly citric – the signature of the sterilization abbots that crawled along every surface, keeping the place impossibly spotless.

Dr. Meera was his mother’s oldest friend – they had grown up in the same residential block, gone to the same school, shared the same tutors. She was a compact woman with short gray hair, quick hands, and a laugh that sounded like a small engine starting.

“Veera!” She clapped her hands when he walked in. “Five years old! You’re practically grown up! Come, come, sit on the big chair.”

Veera felt a little embarrassed.

The big chair was a reclining diagnostic seat that looked intimidating but was, Veera knew from previous visits, actually very comfortable. He climbed up. Dr. Meera pulled a thin display toward her and tapped it a few times.

“So,” she said, peering at the readouts. “Your little friends have been busy.” She was talking about the nanobots. Everyone got their first dose at age two – a painless injection of organic nanobots that took up residence in the body and quietly began their work. For the first three years, they were in passive mode: boosting immunity, repairing minor cellular damage, clearing toxins. The body’s silent maintenance crew.

But at five, things changed.

“Everything looks beautiful,” Dr. Meera said, scrolling through the data. “Immune markers are excellent. No anomalies. Your nanos have replicated well – we’re seeing a healthy population of active units, right in the target range. Cellular repair functions are optimal. Your body isn’t rejecting them – which is nice, though not surprising. They’re custom-built from your own DNA, after all.” She looked at him over the display. “You’ve been eating well?”

“He eats like a small horse,” Priya said from the corner.

“Good. He needs to. The nanos draw energy from his metabolism – carbohydrates especially, and protein for structural repair work. Keep feeding him.” She turned back to Veera. “Now. The fun part.”

She explained it in terms a five-year-old could understand, though Veera suspected she would have used the same words with an adult.

“Until now, your nanos have been taking care of your body – fixing scrapes, fighting germs, keeping everything running smoothly. Starting now, they’re going to start helping your brain too. Not controlling it – helping it. They’ll make it easier to remember things. They’ll help you learn faster. And over the next few years, they’ll give you access to things – languages, knowledge, information – that would normally take a lifetime to learn.”

“Like what?” Veera asked.

“Like languages, for instance. Right now, you speak Telugu and English, right? By the time your nanos are fully synced, you’ll be able to understand and speak ten languages – Telugu, English, Sanskrit, Hindi, French, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, Japanese, and Portuguese. Without studying. Without a single lesson. And you can add more languages as needed – no wonder the auto-translation bots went out of business. The knowledge will just – be there. Like remembering how to breathe.”

Veera stared at her. “That’s cheating.”

Dr. Meera laughed – the small engine sound. “It’s not cheating. Your brain is doing the work. The nanos just help it access information that’s already stored in their own memory. If anything isn’t already part of their storage, they pull it from the global knowledge network. Think of it like… your brain is a room, and the nanos are opening windows.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No. But it might feel strange for a while. Your brain is used to working alone. Now it’s going to have company. Some children feel a tingling, or they get headaches, or they have very vivid dreams. That’s normal. It goes away.”

She leaned forward.

“But here’s the important part, Veera. Listen carefully. The sync between your brain and your nanos needs to happen slowly. If it goes too fast, it can be overwhelming – too much information, too many inputs, and your brain can’t keep up. So I’m going to teach you something that will help. It’s called meditation.”

“Like what Nanna does?”

“Exactly like what your father does. Except you don’t need to do it for hours from day one. You just need to sit quietly, close your eyes, and breathe. Focus on the breathing. In and out. When your mind wanders – and it will wander – gently bring it back to the breath. That’s it. Start with a few minutes every morning and every night, and slowly build your stamina. Eventually you’ll work your way up to an hour at a time, or more.”

“That’s boring.”

“Yes. That’s the point. Boring is what your brain needs right now. Excitement activates the nanos. Calm lets your brain catch up. Think of it as giving your brain permission to be slow.”

She showed him the technique – sitting upright, hands on knees, eyes closed, breathing through the nose. In for four counts, hold for four, out for four. She sat with him for ten minutes, guiding his breath, and Veera was surprised to find that when he opened his eyes, something did feel different. Not dramatic. Just – quieter. As if someone had turned down the volume on the world by a single notch.

“Good,” Dr. Meera said. “You’re a natural.”

—

The hyperloop station was a twenty-minute walk from the medical tower, but they took a transit pod – a small, egg-shaped vehicle that glided along magnetic rails embedded in the building facades. Arjun keyed in their destination: Kadapa Junction.

The pod accelerated smoothly. Through the curved window, Seattle streamed past – towers, gardens, bridges, the silver thread of the Sammamish River below. Then the city gave way to the outskirts, and the outskirts gave way to the deep green of the Pacific Northwest forests. The hyperloop tunnel swallowed them.

Inside, it was quiet – just the faint hum of electromagnetic propulsion and the occasional click of the pod adjusting its orientation. Seattle to Kadapa Junction. Halfway around the world, through the transoceanic hyperloop network that now connected every major continent. A journey that would have taken his ancestors days of flying was reduced to hours in a pressurized tube hurtling beneath the ocean floor.

Veera pressed his face against the window, but there was nothing to see. Just darkness, interrupted every few seconds by rings of blue light marking the tunnel walls.

“Nanna,” Veera said.

“Hmm?”

“When Anika turned five, you didn’t take her to the forest.”

Arjun shifted in his seat. “The tradition is for the eldest son.”

“That’s not fair.”

“I know.”

“Why only sons?”

“Because the tradition is very old. When it started, two thousand years ago, things were different. People thought differently about sons and daughters.”

“That’s stupid.”

“I agree with you. But it’s still the tradition, and I promised your grandfather.” He paused. “I did offer to take your sister a couple of times after she turned five. She wasn’t interested. Even I’m not interested, if I’m being honest – I know! But it is what it is. The things we do for the people no longer alive.”

Veera was quiet for a while. The blue rings of light pulsed past.

“What’s in the forest?” he asked.

“Our old home. Where our ancestors lived. It’s not a house anymore – it’s more like ruins, but a group of people take care of it. They maintain the old buildings, keep the paths clear. It’s beautiful, Veera. You’ll see.”

“Did you like it? When your father took you?”

Arjun smiled. It was a complicated smile – the kind that contained both happiness and sadness, layered like sediment.

“I remember a tree,” he said. “There’s a tree there – a banyan – that’s at least three thousand years old. Maybe older. Its roots hang down from the branches like curtains. When you stand under it, you feel… small. But not in a bad way. Small the way you feel when you look outside from space station.”

Veera considered this. He touched the gold pendant at his chest.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll look at your tree.”

—

At Kadapa Junction, they transferred to a sky-copter – a compact, four-rotor aircraft that could carry two passengers and a small amount of luggage. Arjun piloted it himself, though the navigation was mostly automated. They lifted off from the junction’s rooftop pad and climbed into the late morning sky.

Below them, the landscape unfolded like a green blanket. The Deccan plateau stretched in every direction – gentle hills covered in forest, punctuated by the dark mirrors of reservoirs and the thin silver lines of rivers. Here and there, a village appeared – a cluster of white buildings surrounded by fields – but they were few and far between. Most of the old villages had been abandoned decades ago as the population shrank and people consolidated in the cities. The land had been returned to the forest, and the forest had accepted it gracefully.

They flew for forty minutes. The forest below grew denser, older, wilder. The canopy was an unbroken ocean of green, ancient trees crowding shoulder to shoulder, their crowns merging into a single living surface. Birds wheeled below them – Veera could see eagles, their wings spread wide, riding thermals above the treetops.

“There,” Arjun said, pointing.

Veera looked. In the middle of the forest, a clearing appeared – not a natural clearing but a careful one, shaped like an oval, with old stone buildings arranged around a central courtyard. The buildings were simple – whitewashed walls, tiled roofs, pillared verandahs – and they looked impossibly old, as if they had been growing out of the earth for centuries. Solar panels glinted on the rooftops. A small wind turbine turned lazily at the edge of the clearing. And surrounding everything, pressing close like a crowd at a spectacle, the forest.

The sky-copter descended into the clearing and settled on a stone landing pad with a gentle bump.

Veera stepped out and was immediately struck by the air. It was different here – thicker somehow, richer, filled with the smell of earth and wet leaves and something floral he couldn’t identify. The silence was astonishing. No transit pods, no building hum, no city sound at all. Just birds, wind, the distant murmur of water.

“Welcome to Kandimallayapalle,” Arjun said.

A figure was walking toward them from the largest building – a tall, thin teenager with dark skin and serious eyes. He moved with an unhurried grace that made him seem older than he was. He wore simple clothes – a white kurta and cotton trousers – and carried a tablet under one arm.

“Namaskaram,” the boy said, pressing his palms together. “I’m Govind. I look after this place.”

Arjun stared. “You’re… how old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“I expected someone older. The last time my father visited, the caretaker was-“

“My grandfather. Yes. He passed last year. My father has no interest in the society, so it came to me.” He allowed himself a small grin. “This also helps me get my volunteer hours.” Govind said this without self-pity. It was a fact, delivered like a weather report. He turned to Veera. “And this is the birthday boy.”

“How did you know?” Arjun asked.

“We’ve been expecting you. My grandfather told me – when the time comes, the eldest son will be brought on his fifth birthday. It’s been our job to keep this place ready.” He smiled – a quick, private smile, as if he and Veera shared a secret neither of them yet understood. “Come. Let me show you around.”

—

The estate was larger than it looked from the air. What Veera had taken for a few buildings was actually a complex of structures spread across several acres – the main house, a meditation hall, a small library, storage rooms, and a kitchen garden tended by three gardening abbots that moved between the rows of vegetables like patient, methodical insects. Everything was clean and maintained, though clearly nobody lived in most of the buildings. The abbots kept them pristine – sweeping, dusting, repairing – running on solar power and requiring no human supervision at all.

“My family has been maintaining this place for over five hundred years,” Govind said as they walked along a stone path that wound through the trees. “Before that, another family. Before that, another. The records go back almost two thousand years. It’s always been someone’s responsibility to keep it standing.”

“Why?” Veera asked.

Govind looked at him. “That’s a good question. The honest answer is – I don’t entirely know. My grandfather said it was because something important happened here once, and something important would happen here again. He was a little vague on the details.” He kicked a pebble along the path. “I think even he didn’t trust most of the reasons. But this gives more meaning to our so-called exciting mundane lives.”

They walked deeper into the forest. The trees grew taller, their trunks wider. Veera saw species he recognized from his ecology lessons – teak, neem, peepal – and banana plants heavy with clusters of ripe fruit, their broad leaves swaying like green flags. A troop of monkeys had claimed the nearest banana plant, chattering and squabbling as they stripped the fruit with expert fingers. Some trees Veera didn’t recognize at all – gnarled and ancient, their bark thick with moss and lichen, their roots gripping the earth like the fingers of old hands.

A small river wound through the trees, its water so clear he could see the stones on the bottom. Dragonflies hovered above the surface – dozens of them, their wings catching the light like chips of stained glass.

“That’s the Panchama Saraswathi,” Govind said, noticing Veera’s gaze. “The Fifth Saraswathi.”

“Fifth?” Veera asked. “Where are the other four?”

“Good question. There is at least one in north and one is further south. Some say they’re other rivers in the region. Some say they dried up centuries ago. Some say they were never rivers at all – that ‘Saraswathi’ was a word for something else.”

Veera filed the question away. He would research it later for his school project.

They crossed the river on a bridge made of a single flat stone, worn smooth by centuries of feet.

“The lake is that way,” Govind said, pointing. “It looks natural, but it was actually dug by hand about two thousand years ago. The engineering is remarkable – it fills from underground springs and the river overflow. It’s never gone dry. Not once in two millennia.”

They emerged into a second clearing – and Veera stopped.

The tree stood at the center.

It was the largest living thing Veera had ever seen. Its trunk was not a single column but a congregation of trunks, fused and braided together over millennia, forming a structure that was part tree, part cathedral, part living geology. Aerial roots hung from its branches like ropes, some thin as fingers, others thick as a man’s waist, descending from the canopy to the earth and taking root there, becoming new trunks, which sent out new branches, which dropped new roots. The tree was expanding outward in all directions, a slow green explosion frozen in time. Its canopy covered an area the size of a small stadium, casting a shade so deep it felt like twilight underneath.

“Three thousand years old,” Arjun said quietly. “Maybe more. Nobody knows exactly.”

Veera walked toward it slowly. The ground beneath the canopy was cool and soft – a carpet of fallen leaves, decomposing into dark, sweet-smelling earth. The aerial roots hung around him like curtains in an ancient hall. Somewhere above, a bird called – a single, clear note that echoed through the branches and faded into the green.

He reached out and touched the nearest trunk. The bark was rough and warm under his palm. He could feel something – not a vibration exactly, but a presence. A sense of deep, patient, immovable life. This tree had been here before the hyperloop, before the abbots, before the nanobots, before the cities. It had been here when his ancestor – whoever that first person in the gold-pendant line had been – had walked this same ground. It would be here long after Veera was gone.

He understood, suddenly, why his father had wanted him to come.

“I like your tree,” Veera said.

Arjun laughed. It was a good laugh – surprised and genuine. “I told you.”

They spent the next hour exploring. Arjun told him stories – fragments of family history, half-remembered tales his own father had told him. How their ancestors had been craftsmen, artisans who worked with gold and iron and wood. How one ancestor – nobody remembered his name anymore – had been a great teacher, a man who could see things others couldn’t. How the family had kept this land for generations, even when keeping it made no practical sense, even when the world changed around them in ways that made old places like this seem pointless.

Veera listened. He walked along the river. He threw stones into the lake and watched the ripples spread. He chased a butterfly – bright yellow, the size of his palm – and lost it in the trees. He stopped to watch the dragonflies, marveling at how they could hover in one spot and then vanish sideways faster than his eyes could follow. The gold pendant bounced against his chest as he ran.

Anika’s drone followed him everywhere, its rotors humming softly, its lens recording. She was watching from home, Veera knew. She’d insisted on sending the drone so she could see the famous forest.

As the afternoon light began to soften, Veera found himself back at the banyan tree. He walked under the canopy, through the hanging roots, into the deep green shade at the center. The air was different here – cooler, denser, charged with something he couldn’t name. The hanging roots surrounded him, forming a kind of room – an organic chamber with walls of living wood.

He stood still. The pendant rested warm against his chest. The drone hovered at the edge of the canopy, recording.

He closed his eyes and breathed. In for four counts. Hold for four. Out for four. The way Dr. Meera had shown him.

Something shifted.

It was subtle – not a sound, not a movement, but a change in the quality of the air, as if the atmosphere had thickened by a fraction. The hairs on his arms rose. The pendant seemed to pulse – a single, faint throb of warmth, like a heartbeat.

Veera opened his eyes.

The light was different. The green was deeper. The hanging roots seemed to glow faintly at their edges, outlining themselves against the shade. The world had gone very, very quiet – not the natural quiet of the forest, but an absolute silence, as if someone had pressed a mute button on reality itself.

Then – a feeling like falling, except he wasn’t falling. Like the ground beneath him had become liquid and he was sinking, not downward but inward, through something, past something, into something vast and dark and warm.

Pain.

It hit him all at once – a searing, full-body agony unlike anything he had ever felt, as though every cell in his body were being pulled apart and reassembled simultaneously. He tried to scream. No sound came. His vision went white, then black, then white again. The world shattered into fragments – light, dark, heat, cold – all happening at once, in every direction, without logic or sequence.

Deep inside him, his nanobots registered the crisis. Billions of organic units snapped to attention like a vast, silent army receiving emergency orders. They organized themselves with machine precision – triaging damage, stabilizing vital organs, flooding his bloodstream with endorphins to block the pain, reinforcing neural pathways to prevent his brain from shutting down entirely. A thousand tiny doctors, working in frantic coordination to keep a five-year-old boy alive through something none of them had been programmed to understand.

Veera’s last conscious thought was not a word. It was a sensation – the cool weight of the gold pendant against his chest, the only thing that still felt real.

Then everything went dark.

—

Arjun noticed the silence first.

He was sitting on the stone bridge, legs dangling over the edge, watching the river move. It was a luxury he rarely allowed himself – stillness, purposelessness, the simple act of watching water. The forest hummed around him. The sky was turning gold.

Then he realized he hadn’t heard Veera in a while.

He stood. “Veera?”

No answer. Just birds.

“Veera! Time to go.”

He walked toward the banyan tree, unhurried at first. The boy was probably climbing roots, exploring hollows, doing what five-year-olds do. But as he entered the canopy’s shade and looked around, he saw only the hanging roots, the dappled light, the undisturbed carpet of leaves.

No Veera.

“Veera!”

His voice bounced off the trunks and died. He moved faster now, circling the tree’s massive circumference, peering behind roots, pushing through the curtains of hanging wood. Nothing. He checked the river, the lake, the path back to the buildings. Nothing.

His heart was beating hard. He pulled up his comm-link and pinged Anika’s drone. “Anika. Where’s Veera? Where did the drone see him last?”

His daughter’s voice came back immediately, tight with confusion. “He was under the tree, Nanna. Like two minutes ago. Let me check the footage.”

Arjun ran back to the banyan tree. He stood in the exact center of the canopy, turning in place, scanning every direction. The forest was empty. The only sound was his own breathing.

“Nanna.” Anika’s voice was different now. Smaller. “I’m looking at the footage. He was standing under the tree. Just standing there. And then… he’s not.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean one frame he’s there and the next frame he’s gone. There’s no movement. He doesn’t walk away, he doesn’t fall, he doesn’t anything. He just – stops being in the picture.”

Arjun’s hands were shaking. He replayed the footage on his own display – the drone’s wide-angle view showing the banyan tree, the hanging roots, and in the center, a small figure in a blue shirt. Veera. Standing still. Eyes closed.

Then – nothing.

Arjun scrubbed back, played it again at quarter speed. Frame by frame. Veera was there. Veera was there. Veera was there. Veera was not there. No blur, no transition, no motion. He simply ceased to exist in the image, as cleanly as if he had been deleted from a photograph.

Arjun’s legs felt weak. He sat down on the ground beneath the ancient tree and tried to think. His mind produced nothing useful. There was no rational framework for what he had just witnessed. Boys do not simply vanish. Not in the real world. Not in any world.

He called Priya. The conversation was short and terrible.

Then he remembered Govind.

—

The office of the heritage society was in the main building – a small room with stone walls, a wooden desk, and shelves lined with old things. Ledgers, bound in cracked leather. Rolled scrolls. Palm-leaf manuscripts in sealed glass cases. Framed photographs, yellowed and faded – men in white dhotis, women in cotton saris, families posing stiffly before these same buildings in these same clearings, decade after decade, going back to the earliest days of photography.

Govind was sitting at the desk, turning the pages of a ledger so old its paper had the color and texture of dried leaves. He looked up when Arjun burst in.

“My son,” Arjun said. He was breathing hard. “My son is gone. He was under the tree and he vanished. I’ve checked the drone footage – he just disappears. I can’t find him anywhere. I need to call the authorities, I need-“

Govind held up his hand. His expression had changed. He was surprised, shocked but then as if he remembers he rushed speaking.

“It’s this generation,” he said. His voice was barely above a whisper, as if he were speaking to himself. “My father didn’t believe it. My grandfather wasn’t sure. But it’s happening.”

Arjun stared at him. A cold thread of suspicion wound through his fear. “What are you talking about? Do you know something about this? Did you do something to my son?”

“No. I didn’t do anything.” Govind stood up. He was calm – unnervingly calm for a sixteen-year-old who had just been told a child had vanished on his property. “Please. Come with me.”

He led Arjun through a door at the back of the office, down a narrow corridor, and into a room Arjun hadn’t seen before. It was smaller than the office – windowless, lit by a single lamp. The walls were lined with more shelves, but these held different things. Not ledgers and scrolls, but photographs – dozens of them, arranged in chronological order around the room. And at the center, on a wooden stand, a glass case containing a single palm-leaf manuscript, its edges dark with age, its surface covered in neat rows of Telugu script scratched into the leaf with an iron stylus.

“This manuscript is hundreds of years old,” Govind said. “It’s a fragment – a few pages from a much larger work. My family has guarded it for generations. It describes events that will happen – events that, according to the manuscript, were seen by its author long before they occurred.”

“I don’t care about manuscripts,” Arjun said. “My son-“

“Your son is in the manuscript.”

Silence.

Govind pointed to a section of the palm-leaf text. The Telugu script was archaic, the letter forms different from modern writing, but Arjun could make out some words. A boy. The oldest tree. The gold around his neck. The age of five.

“This was written centuries ago,” Govind said. “By a man who, according to our records, could see through time. My grandfather believed it. My father thought it was folklore. I wasn’t sure what to think – until today.”

Arjun’s mouth was dry. “What does it say happens to him?”

“It says he goes away. And it says he comes back.”

“When?”

Govind looked at the manuscript again.

“Three days.”

—

They were the longest three days of Arjun’s life.

Priya arrived within hours, Anika with her, the drone hovering behind them like an anxious metal bird. The authorities were contacted. Search teams came – human teams with scanning equipment, aerial drones sweeping the forest in grid patterns, ground-penetrating sensors that could detect a heartbeat through ten meters of soil. They found nothing. No trace, no trail, no signal. The nanobots in Veera’s body, which should have been broadcasting a continuous health telemetry signal, had gone silent. As if they, too, had ceased to exist.

Govind showed them the manuscript. Priya refused to look at it. Arjun looked at it repeatedly, reading and rereading the archaic Telugu, trying to find something he had missed – a clue, a detail, a reason.

On the second day, a team of linguists and historians arrived to examine the palm-leaf document. They confirmed its age – carbon dating placed it at several centuries old. The script was consistent with early Telugu literary conventions. The content, they said carefully, was “anomalous.”

On the third day, at late afternoon, they gathered beneath the banyan tree. Arjun, Priya, Anika, Govind, and a handful of others – the search team leader, two historians, a few locals who had heard the story and come to see for themselves. Nobody spoke much. The drone hovered.

Priya held Arjun’s hand. Her grip was so tight his fingers ached.

The forest was quiet. The light was golden, slanting through the canopy in long amber shafts. The hanging roots swayed gently in a breeze that seemed to come from nowhere.

Then – a change. The same change Veera had felt, though they experienced it differently. A thickening of the air. A deepening of the silence. The hanging roots seemed to shiver, and the light took on a strange, liquid quality, as if the clearing were filling with something invisible and warm.

A figure appeared.

Not suddenly – gradually, like a photograph developing. A shape, forming among the hanging roots, solidifying, gaining detail and substance. A human shape. Tall. Thin. Old.

The old man collapsed at the base of the banyan tree, as if the act of arriving had cost him everything he had. His body crumpled against the aerial roots, his face contorted in a pain so deep it seemed to reach beyond the physical – the kind of pain that accumulates across decades and discharges all at once.

He was barefoot. His hair was white and long, falling past his shoulders. His skin was dark and deeply lined, weathered by decades of sun and wind. He wore a simple white dhoti, draped over one shoulder. Around his neck, dull with age but unmistakable, hung a gold chain with a pendant shaped like a lotus bud.

Priya made a sound. It was not a word. It was the sound a person makes when the world breaks in half and rearranges itself into a shape they cannot understand.

Arjun did not move. Could not move.

The old man lay still beneath the ancient tree, his chest rising and falling with shallow, ragged breaths. The gold pendant glinted faintly against his weathered skin – the same pendant Arjun had clasped around his son’s neck that morning, a lifetime ago.

The drone recorded everything. The forest held its breath.

---

(Next : Chapter Two, The Boy in monastery )