The question sitting in both their minds was the same one.
'How does someone shorten decades of hard work into a span of months?'
It was, logically speaking, an impossible task. The kind of thing that sounds reasonable when stated abstractly and collapses under the weight of any serious thought. Eleven years of meditation compressed into six months. Rudra turned it over and kept arriving at the same answer — that it couldn't be done, that something fundamental was being skipped or lied about, that the math simply didn't work.
Then Edward raised his hands and clapped. Twice, slowly, with the deliberate rhythm of someone who has done this before and knows exactly what happens next.
Three servants appeared.
Not from any door Rudra had noticed. One moment the training ground contained three people, and the next it contained six, the servants arriving with the brisk efficiency of people who had been waiting just out of sight for the signal. They were not empty-handed.
Two large speakers. One electric guitar.
Rudra stared at the guitar.
In a world of carved marble and flying carriages and medieval market streets — in all of that, he had managed to develop a working mental model of what belonged here. The guitar did not fit into it. It was too modern, too specific, too unmistakably itself. It had no business being here and appeared entirely unbothered by that fact.
'Did he import that from Bhoo Lok?' Rudra thought. 'Is that a thing that happens?'
The servants set everything up quickly, with the focused energy of people concentrating on the task rather than thinking about anything else. When the last cable was connected and the last stand adjusted, all three stepped back, looked at Edward, and left. Not walked — left. At full speed, covering the distance to the far door with the urgency of people who had somewhere extremely important to be and had been waiting for permission to go there.
Rudra watched them disappear.
'Why are they running? What exactly is he about to do?'
A cold feeling settled at the base of his stomach that had nothing to do with the temperature of the morning.
Edward reached out and picked up the guitar. He settled the strap over his shoulder with practiced ease, adjusted his grip on the neck, and looked at both of them with the same composed, faintly amused expression he had worn through the entire journey.
"Now," he said. "Let us begin."
His right hand moved across the strings.
Rock music detonated across the training ground.
Rudra had expected something — had expected, on some level, that whatever Edward was about to do would be unpleasant or unexpected or both. He had not expected this. The sound was enormous, filling every corner of the open space and then apparently continuing past the walls, probably into the street beyond. The speakers did things that speakers were not supposed to be capable of doing.
But it was — it was genuinely good.
Not just acceptable, not merely impressive given the circumstances. It was the best rock music Rudra had ever heard. The kind that bypassed the part of the brain that makes decisions about what it wants to listen to and went directly to the part that responds without asking permission. If Edward Voss had put down the Deva title and taken this to Bhoo Lok, he would not have needed the title. He would have been fine.
Rudra's head began to move with the rhythm before he noticed it was moving.
He noticed. He stopped. His head moved again.
He looked at Arjun. Arjun was maintaining a more dignified response — standing still, jaw set, the expression of a man applying significant personal discipline to the problem of not moving. This lasted approximately forty seconds. Then Arjun's right foot began tapping. Then his shoulders. By the time the music had been playing for two minutes, Arjun was doing something that could only honestly be described as dancing, with the expression of a man who would like to clarify for the record that he is not doing this voluntarily and finds the situation deeply undignified.
Rudra was doing the same thing. Neither of them had decided to. Their bodies had simply stopped consulting them on the matter.
The music got faster.
The dancing got faster with it, their movements accelerating against any intention to stop, the rhythm pulling them along the way a current pulls something that has stopped swimming. There was something underneath the music now — not a separate sound but a quality of it, a resonance that Rudra couldn't hear exactly but could feel in his chest and behind his eyes and in the back of his teeth.
Then he noticed Arjun's ears.
A thin dark line running from each one, following the jaw, dripping from the chin. Arjun appeared to have noticed his own situation but had decided this was insufficient reason to stop moving, because he couldn't stop moving.
Rudra realised, at approximately the same moment, that his own ears were warm.
The music got louder.
It crossed a threshold somewhere between loud and unbearable without pausing at anything in between, and when it crossed that threshold the dancing stopped — not because they chose to stop but because the part of the brain running the dancing shut down in favour of the part responding to the volume. Both of them grabbed their heads simultaneously.
"WHAT THE HELL IS THIS!!!" Arjun's voice came out at full volume and was completely inaudible against the noise.
"I DON'T KNOW BUT I THINK MY HEAD IS GOING TO EXPLODE!!!!" Rudra shouted back, equally inaudible.
The sound was not just loud anymore. It was pressure — a physical force pushing against the inside of the skull from every direction at once. Rudra's vision was doing things it wasn't supposed to do, the edges of the training ground blurring and shifting. He became aware that his eyes were bleeding the same way his ears were and filed this information in the part of his mind still capable of filing information, which was shrinking rapidly.
Both of them went down.
He didn't decide to collapse — his legs simply stopped holding him up, and the packed earth came up to meet him with complete indifference to the circumstances. He was aware of Arjun somewhere nearby, aware of the sound, aware of the blood on his face. Not much else.
"PLEASE JUST STOP IT!!! PLEASE!!!"
He didn't know if that was him or Arjun or both of them. He was fairly certain it was both. Edward, standing in the centre of the training ground with the guitar still in hand, continued playing. He looked at the two figures on the ground the way someone looks at a process that is proceeding correctly.
He spoke. They didn't hear it. But what he said was:
"I will stop when you either awaken your soul — or die."
This things there are experiencing now is astra of Edward, named [Magic of Music]. With this he can manipulate anyone's action and emotions through music.
It making them belive that they about to die but thats not the case. In reality there body's are completely fine. But human brain is very interesting thing, if it truly belive that it's dead and body will die in real. It's in their hands to stop it.
---
Rudra's consciousness was narrowing. The world reduced itself to simpler and simpler components — the sound, the pain, the ground, and then just the sound and the pain, and then just the pain, and then something that was not quite pain and not quite anything else. His body had started to understand, on a level below thought, that it was not going to survive this unless something changed.
Somewhere in that shrinking space, something that had always been there and never been accessible began to move.
He didn't feel it clearly. He felt it the way you feel a change in air pressure before you understand what it means — a shift, a readjustment, something settling into a configuration it had been waiting for without knowing it was waiting. The part of him that the music had been trying to reach, forcing open through extremity instead of coaxing open through years of quiet practice.
Then everything went dark. And quiet.
---
He opened his eyes.
Shallow water, stretching in every direction as far as he could see. Not deep — barely kee height, perfectly still, perfectly clear. The surface of it reflected a sky that wasn't quite any colour he had a name for. His own reflection looked back at him from below, rippling slightly with each slow breath.
The space had no walls. No horizon. No visible edge in any direction. Just the water, the light, and a silence so complete after everything that had just preceded it that it had a physical quality of its own — something you could lean against.
And in the middle of it — the shape.