The following days blurred into a fever dream.
Aarav began seeing them everywhere shadows that didn't belong, eyes that vanished when he turned too quickly. Faces just out of reach, watching without presence.
The pressure built like a storm behind his ribs.
Even breathing felt like a betrayal.
The Order sent no more notes.
They didn't have to.
The message was clear:
Decide. Or be decided upon.
He made his move three nights later.
It was Maya's idea to meet on the abandoned rooftop, the one students whispered about -where people came to drink, to kiss, to scream into the endless sky when life grew too loud.
Aarav waited for her there, the city stretched beneath him like a fractured mirror. The wind tugged at his coat. The moon hung low and watchful.
Maya arrived, smiling-hair tousled, face open, as if she trusted him completely.
He hated that smile.
Loved it.
Feared it.
Because it made him human.
And the Order didn't deal in humanity.
"I have something to show you," Aarav said, voice steady despite the war raging inside his chest.
She leaned against the railing, the wind in her hair, her expression curious and calm a girl at ease on the edge of the world.
Aarav reached into his coat and pulled out the card the one marked with the silver serpent. He held it out to her.
Maya's smile faltered, Just slightly.
"You know about them," she said softly. It wasn't a question.
It was a truth.
Aarav nodded. "They chose me."
A beat passed.
"And now... they want me to choose you."
Maya didn't flinch.
She didn't ask how. Or why.
Instead, her smile returned-not warm, but sharp, cold, surgical.
"Good," she whispered.
Then without hesitation she reached into her jacket and pulled out a mask.
A crimson mask.
The same as the leader's in Room 309.
The world tilted.
Before he could speak, before he could even breathe, Maya slid the mask over her face. Her voice, when she spoke again, was no longer the voice of the girl he'd laughed with in sunlit corners.
It was older.
Wider.
Inevitable.
"You passed your second test ", Aarav Mishra.
" Welcome to the real beginning."
He stumbled back, horror unraveling inside him.
"You're one of them?!" he choked Maya pulled the mask off slowly, her eyes shining with something between pride and grief.
"No," she said. "I'm not one of them,"
She stepped forward.
"I am them."
Her presence grew - not physically, but in weight, in gravity, in something he couldn't name.
"The Order isn't a club," she said.
'It's not a group you join."
'It's a part of you. It always has been."
Aarav shook his head. "I don't believe you."
Maya smiled-soft, almost tender.
"Then explain this."
She pressed two fingers to his forehead.
And memory detonated.
Not new memory.
Old.
Buried.
Or erased.
The basement of his childhood home.
Candles in a circle. Whispered chants in a language he never learned.
Cold hands guiding him down dark hallways when he was barely five years old.
The serpent symbol - carved in the dirt, flickering under flame.
His parents. His teachers. All standing in the shadows.
Watching.
Waiting.
He had been marked long before Varsha. Long before he ever thought he had a choice.
Aarav collapsed to his knees.
The city spun. The sky cracked.
His breath came in shudders.
Maya knelt beside him, her voice a lullaby made of knives:
"You didn't come here to escape, Aarav.
You came here to become."
And somewhere inside him - past the fear, past the lies, past the boy who once dreamed of rising above --
a dark, coiled thing opened its eyes.
And smiled.
(The boy Aarav was—driven by dreams—is gone. What remains is a darker, sharper version of himself, or something else entirely, awakened by trauma, power, or hidden truths. And it's not going back.)