Ashwatthama Today - Chapter 1: The Wound That Would Not Heal

Part 1: Rainfall in the Temple of Dust

The rain had stopped just before dawn, but the smell of it still clung to the stone like rot.

A gust of humid wind rolled through the crumbling archways of the temple, lifting dust and blackened flower petals from the floor. A stream of brown water trickled across a cracked slab of Vishnu’s feet, pooling briefly before slipping into a drain that no longer drained.

Ashwatthama lay motionless on the damp flagstone, half-covered by a torn jute shawl. His eyes were open. They had never truly closed.

His breath came shallow, as if rising through centuries.

Above him, a rat scampered over the shattered remnants of a stone peacock, pausing briefly to sniff his forehead. The gem embedded there—a dull, bruised violet now—throbbed faintly, pulsing in rhythm with something ancient and unspeakable. A vein in his temple flickered like lightning under the skin.

He reached up slowly, almost casually, and touched the wound. His fingers came away dark with blood, tinged black. He studied it without expression, then wiped it on the wall beside him. The streak it left mingled with an older stain, one he could not remember making.

A tinny, cracked voice buzzed from a transistor radio tucked beneath a fallen altar. Ashwatthama tilted his head toward the sound, though he had no memory of placing the radio there.

“...at least seventy-eight confirmed dead in last night’s coordinated bombing in Pahalgam. Security forces say the target was likely—”

He turned his face to the wall.

“—a Hindu pilgrims’ convoy, returning from Amarnath Yatra. Unconfirmed sources claim responsibility has been taken by—”

The voice cut out in a burst of static.

He reached for a pebble—no, a piece of a shattered Shivling—and threw it. The stone hit the radio with a sharp clack, and the voice stopped completely. Not out of spite. He had heard enough.

Ashwatthama sat up slowly. A chorus of bones cracked in his neck and shoulders. His movements were slow, unhurried, as if he had nowhere to go and eternity to get there.

He looked around.

The temple had no roof. Trees had grown through it—roots snaking across floor mosaics that once told stories. A faint patch of blue sky peeked through broken beams overhead. Crows perched along the edges, preening their wet feathers.

Ashwatthama stood. The wind pulled at the hem of his shawl. He gathered it around himself, tying it in the old way, the Kshatriya way. No one remembered it now.

He walked barefoot to the edge of the sanctum and stood where a statue of Krishna had once been. Only the feet remained—blue stone worn smooth by generations of prayer.

His own blood dripped from his forehead onto those feet.

He didn’t flinch.

For a long moment, he stared out toward the city. A faint haze of smog and monsoon steam curled across the skyline. Delhi was waking.

But the wound in his forehead said something else.

It pulsed.

It always knew before he did.

War was waking too.

Part 2: "News, Blood, Memory"

The blood stopped flowing the moment he stepped outside the temple.

It always did.

Like the wound didn’t want to draw too much attention in public. As if it respected the privacy of horror.

Ashwatthama walked the mud path down the slope, his bare feet silent on wet gravel. A thin mist hung just above the ground, the last breath of the storm. The broken clay tiles of the outer gate shifted underfoot as he passed. He didn’t look back.

On the highway below, Delhi was already moving. Cars slushed through shallow puddles. Horns bleated in the distance, impatient even in mourning. Billboards flickered with glitchy ads—insurance slogans, mosquito repellents, holy men offering digital salvation. The smell of wet plastic and burning diesel filled the air.

He crossed the road slowly. No one honked. They never did. The world knew to ignore him.

Halfway across, a memory struck.

It was the sound. A high-pitched mechanical whine—from a motorbike accelerating on wet asphalt. For a split-second, it was the scream of a dying child.

He stopped in the middle of the road. Cars curved around him like water around a rock.

He was standing again in the Pandava camp, centuries ago.

The tents were in flames. The smell was the same—ash and iron and wet linen. The screams were real. Not imagined. Children's feet running on grass. A blade in his hand. A boy whispering “Amma” before the sword fell.

He blinked.

A cycle-rickshaw almost clipped him. The driver shouted something crude in Hindi and sped off.

Ashwatthama resumed walking.

On the roadside, a chai-walla under a blue tarpaulin was pouring tea from an aluminum kettle into small plastic cups. He had an old radio playing the same station as before—someone was interviewing a retired general about “retaliatory options.” The kettle hissed.

Ashwatthama stepped into the stall’s shadow and stood there.

The chai-walla looked up. Mid-forties. Patchy beard. Thick accent from the hills. He stared at Ashwatthama’s face—not with fear, but a strange confusion, like a man seeing something in a dream he couldn’t place.

Ashwatthama said nothing.

He reached into the folds of his shawl and pulled out a copper coin. Ancient. Etched with a lion and a bow. He placed it gently on the counter.

The chai-walla didn’t move. Didn’t reach for the coin.

Ashwatthama met his gaze and said, softly, “One without milk.”

The man blinked, looked away, and began pouring.

Behind the stall, the radio buzzed again:

“...investigation continues. Security services say the level of coordination in the Pahalgam attack suggests cross-border involvement, though no official statement has been—”

“Same song,” Ashwatthama muttered. His voice was hoarse, as though his throat was made of rope.

He looked down at the tea. Steam rose. The liquid was dark, bitter.

He took the first sip.

Memory unspooled.

He was on the battlefield again. Kurukshetra. Not during war—after it. The sun had risen. The carrion birds were gone. He had wandered among the corpses, calling out for Karna. Not crying. Just calling. Like he might answer.

He had found Karna half-buried under a broken chariot wheel.

Face calm. Eyes closed.

He remembered falling to his knees.

The tea scalded his lip. He didn’t flinch.

He whispered Karna’s name under his breath.

The chai-walla looked up again.

Ashwatthama placed the empty cup on the counter and walked on, leaving the copper coin behind.

A crow landed on the radio and pecked at the volume dial.

The voice stuttered:

“...Brahmastra—classified relic—myth or prototype?—”

Static.

Part 3: Conversations with the Dead

The city thickened as he walked—tighter streets, concrete high-rises, and the endless buzz of electrical wires overhead.

Ashwatthama stayed to the side of the road, where the sidewalk was uneven and broken, where old men played cards on plastic stools and dogs lay twitching in their sleep. His shawl dragged in the dust.

Somewhere behind him, a horn blared. A cart overturned. Two vendors screamed at each other in furious Hindi.

He didn’t turn. He was talking to Karna.

“You would’ve laughed at all this,” Ashwatthama said softly. “These people. Their wars. Everyone with a phone, no one with a spine.”

There was silence beside him.

He continued walking.

“I remember the way you lit a cigarette just before battle,” he murmured. “Like it was the most sacred rite. Everyone else was chanting mantras. And you—” He gave a bitter smile. “You just took a long drag and said, ‘Let’s get it over with.’”

Still, no answer.

Ashwatthama looked sideways.

In the space beside him—empty to the world—he saw the shimmer of Karna. Bare-chested, dusky, gold armor glinting faintly in the polluted light. Leaning against a closed hardware shop. Holding a cigarette between two fingers that had once held a bow no man could draw.

Karna didn’t speak.

Ashwatthama sighed.

“I thought maybe you’d say something today. After Pahalgam.”

He stepped over a coil of wire lying half-dead on the ground. Sparks clicked faintly in the wet air.

“You know how many of them died while they slept?” he asked, his voice quieter now. “Forty-three. In one of the buses. Sleeping pilgrims. Like the children.”

The silence after that was long.

A CCTV drone buzzed overhead, its red eye swiveling slowly. Another followed a few seconds later. They hovered, dipped, blinked, moved on.

“They’re watching,” Ashwatthama said. “They’re always watching now. Even the gods didn’t watch this much.”

He raised a hand to his temple, not in salute, but in irritation. The gem under his skin gave a single, sudden throb—sharp, like a nail being driven in deeper.

He gritted his teeth and walked faster.

The world passed him like a blurred painting. A butcher sharpening blades outside a meat shop. A woman rocking a baby wrapped in yellow plastic. A teenager with a VR headset bumping into a wall.

Ashwatthama turned into a narrow alley, one he hadn’t known he was looking for.

It was dark. Walls on either side bore hand-painted ads for miracle cough syrup and tantric healing. The air smelled of incense and piss.

He sat on a low step and stretched out his legs. For a while, he said nothing.

Then, very quietly, “I thought about using it again.”

The gem pulsed. Once.

He exhaled slowly.

“Just once,” he said. “Not on them. Just… just to see if it still obeys me.”

Karna, or the thought of him, stood across the alley, arms crossed, smoke curling from his nostrils.

Finally, a voice.

“You’ve always lied to yourself,” Karna said. “That’s your worst habit. Worse than the killing.”

Ashwatthama closed his eyes.

“Say that again.”

“You heard me,” Karna said, and dropped the cigarette to the dirt. “You're not angry at them. You're angry because they keep proving Krishna right.”

Ashwatthama’s fist clenched.

The gem pulsed again.

And then the voice was gone.

He opened his eyes.

There was only smoke. No man. No shadow. No sound.

Only a single drone, pausing at the mouth of the alley, silently watching.

Part 4: Children Playing with Ashes

The drone at the alley’s mouth blinked once—red to green—then drifted away with a soft electronic whir, vanishing into the low clouds above Delhi’s roofs.

Ashwatthama stood.

His limbs moved slowly, but his feet carried him forward as if compelled. Not by hunger, not by shelter, but by a sense… like the tug of a bowstring pulled from some deeper part of him. The same feeling he used to have before ambushes. Before betrayals.

He emerged onto a muddy lane lined with sagging apartment blocks—buildings wounded long ago by fire or time or politics. Bullet scars marked the concrete. One tower’s top two floors had been blackened by an explosion. An old sign dangled from the rebar: “Prarthna Heights – Luxurious Living”.

A small, fenced-in lot beside the building had once been a playground. The fence was mostly gone now—torn away or melted. Only one bright red swing remained, rusting and still.

But the children were there.

Four of them.

Three boys and a girl, no older than ten. Dirty clothes, bare feet, bright eyes. One boy kicked a half-deflated plastic ball at another, who caught it between his knees like a trained street footballer. They laughed—wildly, shamelessly. The girl barked instructions at them like a sergeant. The third boy pretended to be shot and fell dramatically into the mud, face-first, squealing.

Ashwatthama froze.

The scene struck him not as innocent, but as staged—familiar, in a way that was neither memory nor dream.

One boy—skinny, sharp-chinned, hair falling in his eyes—stood apart, clutching the ball. His expression had changed. No laughter now. Only focus.

Ashwatthama’s breath caught.

Abhimanyu.

It wasn’t him, of course. But the tilt of the boy’s head, the ferocity behind his brows, the way he pivoted just before throwing—it was the boy-warrior all over again. The one they surrounded. The one they speared.

Ashwatthama stepped back.

His heel caught on a twisted metal rod jutting from the mud. He stumbled and sat down hard on a stone bench at the edge of the lot.

The laughter continued.

His hands trembled.

He looked down and saw that his fingertips were coated in dirt, blood, and some pale, fibrous residue from the ropes that had once bound his wrists. He flexed them slowly, trying to ground himself in the now.

But the laughter…

That laughter pierced through time.

He remembered a tent. A child’s voice. One of Draupadi’s sons giggling, just before he slit the throat. He hadn’t meant to hear it. It had followed him.

Followed him here.

Ashwatthama leaned forward, elbows on his knees, palms pressed to his forehead. The gem burned hot against his skin. His jaw clenched.

And then—

A shadow passed over him.

He looked up, expecting Karna again.

It was the girl. The one from the game. Standing there, looking at him curiously.

Her eyes were too old.

“You bleeding, uncle?” she asked.

Ashwatthama blinked. Touched his forehead. No blood. Not right now.

He shook his head.

She squinted. “Why you crying then?”

He hadn’t noticed. But his face was wet. Not with rain.

“I’m not,” he said quietly.

She looked unconvinced.

Then: “Wanna play?”

The boy with the Abhimanyu eyes called her back.

She ran off without waiting for an answer.

Ashwatthama sat there as the game resumed, the ball now a grenade, the rules entirely made up, the stakes higher than they realized.

His shoulders shook.

But the tears that came were not fresh. They had been waiting.

They had been waiting for centuries.

Part 5: A Whisper That Knows His Name

The children’s voices faded behind him as Ashwatthama walked away, down a crumbling stretch of street lined with shuttered clinics and political graffiti. His steps were slower now, heavier.

The weight of memory always did that to him—made his bones ache, as if even his marrow remembered every name, every scream.

He passed a collapsed phone booth, its glass shattered and filled with rainwater. A faded sticker on its side bore a peeling image of Hanuman carrying the mountain, but someone had spray-painted over the face with black ink.
No gods here anymore.

Ashwatthama didn’t argue.

The sky was a dull bruise, half-lit by smog-throttled sunlight. A dog barked in the distance, then went silent too quickly.

He turned a corner—and stopped.

A building had collapsed in on itself sometime during the night. Maybe a gas leak. Maybe something else. A mangled steel frame jutted from the wreckage like a ribcage. A crowd had gathered. People were shouting. Some filming. Others pulling debris aside with their bare hands.

Then, behind them, it came.

A muffled, percussive boom.

Farther away. Northward.

Ashwatthama turned toward the sound. Not a full detonation. Something… else. Maybe controlled. Maybe not.

The people around him didn’t scatter. They barely paused.

Too used to it.

A siren began to wail in the distance. Then it cut short—almost embarrassed by its own familiarity.

Ashwatthama stepped around the crowd, back toward the main road. A line of auto-rickshaws buzzed past in quick succession, their drivers hurling curses at one another through rain-fogged windshields.

Then he heard it.

A public broadcast tone, high and mechanical.

Then the voice—flat, synthetic, and genderless—crackled through the loudspeaker mounted atop the third rickshaw.

“Warning. Elevated threat level. Please avoid central metro stations until further notice. Repeat. Avoid—”

The rickshaw passed.

And the next one came, its loudspeaker cutting in.

Same tone. Same voice.

But this time it said something else.

“Ashwatthama. The Brahmastra sleeps, but remembers.”

He froze.

The traffic surged around him.

He turned toward the rickshaw, but it was already halfway down the road.

Another one passed. Silent.

Another.

Then, a small electric cart rolled by—a government emergency vehicle. The same voice spoke again over its external system:

“Ashwatthama. You are not forgotten. The algorithm sees.”

He stepped off the curb without realizing it. A passing scooter swerved to avoid him, skidding slightly.

His breath had gone shallow again.

Not from fear.

From recognition.

The voice wasn’t a glitch.

It knew his name.

Or something did.

He stepped backward, into the shadow of a shuttered bookstore. Its windows were dusted over with yellow tape and cobwebs.

Inside, he could see the outlines of shelves. Books that hadn’t been touched in years. History, philosophy, epics. A copy of the Mahabharata in Hindi lay tilted against the glass, spine cracked.

He pressed one hand to the door.

The gem in his forehead pulsed.

Once.

And this time, it wasn’t in pain.

It was… awareness.

Something somewhere was calling to him.

Something ancient.

Something artificial.

Something that remembered more than it should.

Continuing now with Part 5, we follow Ashwatthama as he leaves the playground and heads deeper into the broken city. The normal world flickers around him, unaware that something ancient is waking. Then, a message reaches him—not from the heavens, but from a machine. And it speaks his name.