But power comes with a price.
And Aarav was paying it in pieces.
As autumn folded into winter, his dreams grew darker.
He saw Maya again and again — wearing the crimson mask, whispering truths twisted into lies.
He saw the leaders of the Order — faces obscured by fog, eyes like mirrors — laughing as they pulled his strings like a marionette on fire.
And sometimes…
He didn't see himself at all.
Just a shape filled with smoke.
A hollow boy carved to look like a man.
He tried to silence the dreams by wandering — through the old corridors, the forgotten stairwells, the underground library Maya had once shown him.
It was there, among decaying tomes and dust-choked ledgers, that he found it.
A forbidden file.
Not labeled. Not sealed. Just waiting.
Curiosity was instinct now.
Aarav opened it with fingers trembling before reason could stop him.
A ledger of names.
Experiments.
Tests.
Subjects.
And there, on the third page — almost lost in the folds of the brittle paper:
"Anika Mishra"
Subject 37. Phase: Induction via Induced Collapse. Status: Terminated (Collateral)."
His mother.
His throat closed.
He read it again. Then again.
The Order hadn't saved his family from ruin.
They had orchestrated it.
They crushed his father's business.
Sabotaged their livelihood.
Isolated them in Varsha.
All to raise a boy in desperation.
A blank slate to mold.
He wasn't chosen.
He was engineered.
A project.
A prototype.
Something inside him cracked — not like a twig, but like a faultline awakening.
This wasn't loyalty.
This wasn't ascension.
This was slavery.
And Aarav Mishra had never been born to be anyone's puppet.
The Mission ;
The next evening, an envelope appeared under his door. Black wax seal. No signature.
Inside: a target file.
A location.
A time.
And one word, scrawled in red across the top:
"Cleanse."
The name of the target made him freeze.
Professor Elira Voss — an ethics lecturer, long-tenured, now rumored to be teaching ideas forbidden by the Helix.
Aarav remembered her.
She once told him after class, "The truth isn't dangerous. But what people do with it is."
Now the Order wanted her gone.
No trial. No warning.
Just a cleansing.
Aarav crushed the envelope in his fist.
The mask they had given him for this mission lay in a velvet box near his bed.
He didn't touch it.
That night, he stood outside Voss's office, hand on the doorknob.
Inside, he heard her pacing. Humming to herself.
She didn't know.
Didn't suspect.
Didn't deserve this.
His fingers tightened.
His other hand slipped into his coat, touching the knife the Order had given him.
The blackened one.
But he didn't open the door.
Instead, he turned away — heart hammering — and disappeared into the night.
Back in his room, he stared at his reflection.
Not at his face.
At the thing behind his eyes.
And for the first time, it blinked.
He knew what this meant.
The Order would come for him now.
He had defied them.
He had stepped outside the spiral.
And they would never forgive that.
But Aarav no longer cared.
He wasn't here to rise.
He was here to burn the machine.
Break the system.