1 CHAPTER 1: Awakening

The first thing he felt when he woke up was the light of the sun hitting his face. It felt oddly comforting. He couldn't remember the last time he felt the sun's warm embrace. He couldn't remember anything. 

That realization jolted him awake.

The young man jumped to his feet with the agility of a cat and immediately tripped on something heavy, scattering a few crows as he fell forward. He stood up carefully this time and started to observe his surroundings.

His survival instinct was screaming at him that something was wrong. He trusted his instincts greatly. After all, this is the instinct that saved him from certain death during…, during what? He couldn't remember.

'Where am I?'

Looking around, he concluded that he was in a ruin of a structure he couldn't recognize. One thing he did recognize was the smell—the smell of death. It was obvious where the smell was coming from. The thing that tripped him was not just any heavy object. It was a man—a very dead man.

'What the hell?'

It was not the only body lying on the ground. He could count at least seven, no, eight dead bodies spread across the courtyard. The bodies looked like they were killed with cold weapons from the type of visible to wounds visible on some of them.

'Why am I not panicking? Those people are dead!' he wondered as he examined the bodies closest to him.

'The bodies are starting to smell. The weather is sunny and the air feels humid, the bodies are dead for at least a day, possibly two. Looks like noon is approaching, so, maybe they are dead from the morning of the previous day?' A cold voice in his head analyzed.

The courtyard he's in looks like a ruin—broken walls along the perimeter, destroyed structures, small shrubs, and grass growing from the cracks in the stone flooring. Two tents and a put-out campfire were in the middle of the strewn-out bodies. 

He then started to look at himself. A finely decorated, light blue shirt stretched to his knees, a kurta. A cloth wrapped around his legs like a pant, a dhoti. There were a few bloodied cuts on his dress from what looked like sword wounds. But as he checked his bodies for injuries, he found none. However, the skin was strangely pale, and oily where the wounds were supposed to be. The rest of his skin was a light bronze color.

'Why is my shirt bloody? Where are the wounds from the cuts? 'He thought to himself as he checked his body for any injuries.

Apart from a few shirtless bodies, others are also wearing similar attire. No. Not similar—cotton on them, muslin on him. These people made camp in these old ruins. Most of the bodies also have bloodied clothes— signs of struggle.

The young man, wanting to investigate the bloodied bodies, started walking towards them. There was something strange happening with his thoughts, and he was hearing whispers of a cold voice in the back of his mind.

Unaware of what was happening, the young man standing in the middle of the destroyed camp continued walking towards the bodies. As he got closer, a pain in the back of his head that started as a gradual trickle when he woke up, had steadily intensified, and by now turned into a flowing river of discomfort.

'W..what is this pain?' he thought to himself as he clutched his head to dampen the pain.

As he kneeled and then fell to the ground, curled up into a fetal position, flashes of pain, accompanied by fleeting glimpses of memory, began to surface in his mind. A bomb shelter. A small palace inside a fort. Learning how to repair things . Training with a sword. Assaulting a school stronghold. Learning from a priest. The memories appeared disorganized with no relationship to each other. Each fragment a piece of a fractured identity. 

Then, in the mind of the young man, who looked no more than 16, the pain started to decrease and he was bombarded with memory after memory. These memories didn't seem to have any relationship with each other. Then the jumbled memories began to arrange themselves into a coherent order. But before that could happen, the pain hit him again with full force, one last time.

As a guttural "AHHH..!!!" escaped his lips, the scream echoing in the air as if carrying not just pain but a raw, primal plea for relief, he passed out.

1538, Nallamalla Forest, Dharanikota kingdom/ India.

The young man gained consciousness slowly. Just as he did when waking up a few hours ago, he stood up, though more cautiously this time, and checked his surroundings for any immediate danger. He was still in the ruins. But there was a key difference from before. He now had his memories back.

But despite the new memories, he was still conflicted about them. The memories were not of just one person but were a jumbled mess of two or more people.

The first set of memories were from the 21st century. These memories appeared more fractured. Fragments of various memories mixed into one. He could neither get the name of whose memories they were nor any other personal details.

What he could easily recall from these memories are the experiences of the person and their knowledge of various other things. 

The next set of memories, the more recent ones, are the easiest to recall. These were the memories of the person called Rudra Deva—a prince of the small kingdom of Dharanikota and the owner of this body.

As the young man organized his memories, he realized what had happened. At first, he thought that his memories were from the 21st century, and Rudra Deva's memories were the memories of the body. But as he gained clarity, he could now see that the first set of memories was in the body of Rudra all along.

The older memories were dormant, struck in the back of the mind, as Rudra's life went along. But the moment of Rudra's death was the trigger. Both sets of memories started merging in his brain.

"All that was needed was a spark to start the process." The young man spoke aloud with his dry throat, as he thought of his death.

Fragmented memories of the 21st century mingled with those of Rudra Deva, prince of Dharanikota, blurring the lines of identity. The catalyst for this convergence was the death's embrace, a final reckoning that forged a new entity from the ashes of the old.

'I should wait before I figure this out.' he thought as he looked around again. Rudra had to do a few important things before he could figure this out fully.

Nightfall draped the landscape in shadow. Standing in the ruins, Rudra looked around the place where he and his hunting party camped a few days ago. The party had found this clearing in the forest, a few days after entering. It had seemed like the perfect spot to set up camp for the night. Little did they know that, for some of them, it would become their final resting place.

He then shifted his attention to the dead bodies around. They were truly starting to smell now. The bodies had been out in the sun for nearly two days now and crows were feasting on the remains of some of his people.

He walked towards them and scattered the crows away. These people deserve a proper funeral. After what happened, he couldn't tolerate their dead bodies being left for scavengers to feast upon. He began the work of collecting each of their bodies. 

The first body he reached out to was that of Narappa. He was his guard ever since Rudra's mother died and was her guard before that. Narappa's family worked for his mother's side of the family for at least three generations. The dead guard remained loyal to him till his last breath.

Rudra and Narappa, along with a few soldiers and some servants, assigned by Rudra's uncle, had left for Nallamalla forest a week ago. There had been some reports of a man-eating tiger in the forest, and the goal of the party was to hunt the tiger down or drive it out of the kingdom's territory.

Normally, Rudra's father would lead such a party, but he was now confined to his palace, indulging himself in alcohol, his mental condition gradually deteriorating ever since Rudra's mother died a few years ago. The king was addled with delusions of grandeur and pushed all his duties onto his corrupt court officials.

Two days after entering the forest, the party had created a camp in an old ruins they had found in the middle of the forest. They made a camp there for the night, and everything was fine until the soldiers led by their captain, attacked them in the middle of the night.

The ambush initially failed because of Narappa, who was alert and was always suspicious of everyone's loyalty. Narappa alerted him and the two hunters guiding the hunt while fighting back two soldiers, killing one of them. He died when a third guard attacked from his back. 

"Rest in peace old friend. May your soul attain Moksha. I will avenge us and will hunt down everyone responsible for this" Rudra declared as he closed the eyes of his loyal guard and carried his body to one of the broken walls on the perimeter of the clearing.

Rudra would not have known why the soldiers had betrayed them if not for the captain boasting about how they planned it and why. The captain and his team were paid off by his uncle to kill him and leave the kingdom.

The next body he carried was the soldier who was killed by Narappa with a stab to the neck, making the area around the body, particularly bloody. It looked like a crow or another scavenger, picked the eyes out of the body. 

The soldiers who betrayed them were very systematic in their approach. The field chef they bought along was also part of the group but the plan to poison them failed because Rudra had killed a small deer that day and the hunting party had that on the night of the betrayal. While both Narappa and Rudra fought back and killed a soldier each, they were still overwhelmed and murdered.

Although the cunningness of the plan did remind him of his uncle, Rudra wondered how that spineless coward gave the go-ahead. He strongly suspected that he was backed by at least a few powerful people in their kingdom and from outside.

Thinking back to the night, Rudra crossed the camp to approach the body that had tripped him when he woke up earlier that day. He didn't recognize who it was because of the fugue state he was in when he woke up. However, as his memories came back, he now recognized the dead man as Vereswaran, the deputy captain of the group of soldiers, his uncle sent along with him.

"Don't worry. You won't be alone for long, the rest of your group will accompany you very soon" the young prince whispered to the dead body of the first man he killed, as he carried it to the broken wall.

Rudra didn't feel all that conflicted at the fact that he murdered somebody in cold blood. Even before gaining his old memories back, he knew that this day would come. He was taught the art of warfare since he was a child. "Royal blood can never rest easy", was a saying his mother was fond of, and never failed to remind Rudra.

Rudra then carried the remaining five bodies, belonging to the three porters enlisted to carry the party's supplies for the hunt, one of the huntmasters guiding the hunt, and a dead soldier killed by the hunters. The lifeless forms of the three porters, bore the marks of an unexpected demise, having passed away in their sleep. The soldiers had killed them first before the fight had started, and in doing so, alerted Narappa.

Still, one of the huntmasters escaped, which means the soldiers are either searching for him or they had escaped over the border. That narrows down their location and makes Rudra Deva's upcoming plans easy.

Rudra spent the next few hours collecting wood from the forest outside the ruin, building a pyre for the dead. Even the soldiers who had tried to kill them were put on the pyre. Rudra strongly believed, that there are no enemies in death. He then lit the fire with the help of some oil the porters carried.

As the flames of the pyre burned in front of him,and as embers danced against the night sky, Rudra swore an oath, to not only hunt down all those responsible for his murder but to burn the corrupt kingdom of his inept father and forge an empire from its ashes.