The novel opens in Chidambaram, in the hour before dawn. Here is the first page.
Vidyut didn’t wake up because a bell rang or a bird sang. He woke up because the Earth itself felt like it was slipping out of tune.
He lay still on his reed mat, eyes tracing the dust motes that drifted through a thin beam of moonlight. The house was quiet. Somewhere beyond the courtyard wall, a nightjar called out twice and stopped. To anyone else, the morning was silent. But there was a tremor in his sternum. Not pain, but pressure, like a note played just below the range of hearing.
He placed his palm flat against the cool clay floor and closed his eyes. There it was: a jagged vibration threading through the earth from thousands of kilometres to the northwest. The mountain passes of the Hindukush, the Iron Gate, were being rattled. Something was pushing against the borders, and the ground itself was carrying the news south through rock and root and river.
He reached for Savithri’s mat. Empty. The cotton was cool. She’d been up for at least an hour.
The Resonance of Aryavartha: Book 1 — The Awakening is available now on Amazon.